The most interesting new Macintosh is the top-of-the-line, flat-panel iMac, which sports a 17-inch LCD screen instead of the 15-inch panel on the other iMacs. Thereis nothing special about most 17-inch screens, but the one on the new iMac is mesmerizing. It isnit square like most. Instead, itis much wider than it is high, so itis great for playing DVD movies or for displaying a couple of Web pages side by side. The machine also includes a jumbo, 80-gigabyte hard disk and a souped-up video card. It costs $1,999 and, in my tests, was a pleasure to use.
We found his comments on Jaguar to be much more interesting, however, as he gushes about the many new features included in it. Mr. Mossberg sees the new version of Mac OS X as being so much of an improvement that it should have a much bigger version number increase than .1 (from Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.2). From the article:
Appleis operating-system revision, Jaguar, is much more important. Officially called Mac OS X version 10.2, itis such a major upgrade that it probably ought to have been called Mac OS XI. It costs $129.
I tested Jaguar on two Macs. The new 17-inch iMac Apple came preloaded with it and I installed it myself on a year-old PowerBook laptop. It worked without a single hitch on both machines. Apple claims there are 150 new features and refinements in Jaguar, but Iill focus on only a few major items.
He goes on to talk about features such as Mail, Rendezvous, Windows networking, about which he talks at length, and Sherlock 3. The biggest revelation to Apple watchers is a comment about family pricing for Jaguar:
Oh, and one other thing: In stark contrast to Microsoftis practice with Windows, Apple is introducing family pricing for Jaguar. The company will sell for $199 a family version that can be legally installed on up to five computers.
This is the first indication we have seen that Apple will be offering such an options. He closes with one more very nice comment about Jaguar as a whole:
Jaguar is a big step forward for the Mac, and continues the effort to differentiate Appleis operating system from Windows XP. In my view, itis worth the price.
Read the full article from the Wall Street Journal for more information.