Apple resellers around Australia are celebrating the arrival of a small supply of 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz Power Mac G5s and the launch of the new 40GB iPod, which is scheduled to hit Australian stores in two weeks.
Billed as the “world’s fastest personal computer”, the G5 is shipping with an updated version of Mac OS X (10.2.7) which takes advantage of technologies in the Power Mac G5. The 2GHz dual processor G5 is expected to be released in Australia by the end of the month.
Managing director of Apple Centre Taylor Square, Ben Morgan said his store was receiving a slow trickle of 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz stock but he expected that supply would free up over the next two months.
“We had about 90 back orders before the G5 sell-through stock arrived and we’ve fulfilled about 20 per cent of those original orders,” he said. “But now our back orders are back up to around 90. We’re selling them as fast as we’re taking orders. Demand in the US has been incredibly high, record-breaking, so the supply shortage is not surprising.
“The market is starting to sizzle. There’s been a hell of a big response to the G5 marketing campaigns. We’ve had many PC users, who’ve never even used a Mac before, coming in to the store and asking about the G5.”
The heart of the new Power Macs is the PowerPC G5 processor, developed by Apple and IBM. The 64-bit microprocessor features full support for 32-bit applications and a parallel architecture that can handle 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions, two double-precision floating point units and an optimized Velocity Engine. The chips are also designed for full support of symmetric multi-processing (SMP).