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You Can Read an iBook Today

Apple meets its deadline by shipping the portable iMac on Wednesday.

By Terho Uimonen, IDG News   

The iBook is now available in the United States and will reach European shores within the next few weeks, said Steve Jobs, Apple's interim chief executive officer, in his keynote speech at the annual Apple Expo trade show in Paris.

"We announced that we would ship the iBook in mid-September, and guess what--that's today," quipped Jobs, addressing a jubilant crowd of Macintosh devotees.

The iBook, which is powered by a 300-MHz PowerPC G3 processor and features a 12.1-inch active-matrix screen, will carry a retail price $1599, Jobs says. Apple has already received more than 160,000 pre-orders for the iBook, according to Jobs.

"It's a great product," Jobs says. He refers to the iBook as the world's second-fastest portable computer, surpassed only by Apple's own PowerBook line of corporate notebooks.

The company's iMac consumer desktop PC, which was launched in August 1998, has now sold more than 2 million units in just over a year, according to Jobs. He claims that as many as 33 percent of iMac buyers were first-time computer buyers, enlarging Apple's customer base.

Jobs did not, however, take advantage of the Apple Expo event today to unveil the long-expected follow-up to the first-generation iMac.

And in Other News...

In addition to the iBook announcement, Jobs demonstrated the "voiceprint" password function and some 50 other new features, such as Sherlock 2, that will be part of the forthcoming MacOS 9 operating system.

Scheduled to ship in October, MacOS 9 will carry a retail price of $114, according to Jobs.

Sherlock 2, Apple's Internet search software, is redesigned to help users buy goods and devices from Net retailers and auction houses, Jobs says. "Sherlock can find the best deals out there for you," he adds.

In another software demo, Jobs got a little help from an IBM official. They demonstrated a French-language version of IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition software running on a Mac.