Apple's good reasons to cheer are abundant at Macworld

"She comes in colors everywhere."

-- Mick Jagger, "She's a Rainbow"

SAN FRANCISCO -- So Steve Jobs is Mick Jagger and I'm just a 14-year Apple aficionado.

It's just weeks since the 1999 iteration of Macworld Expo, which was held here Jan. 6-8, and my overall assessment is not much different than the wildly enthusiastic ones you saw in all the media.

Sometimes, it's easier to be a contrarian in a hurricane of negativity than find a few bad spots in an unbroken expanse of wonderfulness. The 1999 Macworld was a colorful triumph for Apple Computer Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., and a marketing triumph for Apple, for which 1998 was a very good year.

For the 69,000 attendees and the 467 exhibitors (statistics that often-reticent IDG Expo Management was only too happy to present this year), there was plenty to be excited about.

For Apple is back -- without a doubt -- and seemingly determined to keep the momentum generated by the introduction of the wildly successful iMac in August with the show announcements of the new line of G3 PowerPC minitowers, whose design is unlike that of any previous computer, and Mac OS X Server software. Plus the iMac has five new colors (grape, lime, tangerine, blueberry and strawberry), and a new design for Mac monitors was shown.

Most significant to newspapers, however, is the potential of the new servers and the forthcoming Macintosh OS X, which at last will bring true multitasking to the Macintosh, which the UNIX and Windows NT operating systems currently have.

Here's a quick look at the specs of new Apple products, followed by a few words about OS X, then glimpses of the most notable hardware and software I saw in my four days on the convention floor.

Riding on a fast new bus
The new Power Macintosh G3s are revolutionary on the outside and evolutionary on the inside.

The G3 processor speed has been jacked up to 400-megahertz on the most expensive model; other speeds are 300- and 350-megahertz. The real speed increase is the internal bus, which is a blazing 100-megahertz, compared to 66-megahertz on the older, discontinued models. This means that system instructions get moved around much faster, so combining the speedier processor with such a fast bus means speed and power that's light years ahead of the first PowerPCs.

Naturally, these Macs come with a load of random access memory (RAM) -- a minimum of 64 megabytes. (You can stick in as much as a gigabyte, if you want.) The only drawback is that there are just four memory chip slots, and memory from older Macs is not compatible. It's iMac-style memory for these G3s.

Hard disks, either SCSI or ATA, depending on model, just keep getting bigger. These G3s come well-equipped with five internal drive bays; four Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus slots; dedicated internal modem slot; built-in Ethernet; FireWire, the faster external device connector Apple initially developed in 1995 that replaces the Small Computer Serial Interface (SCSI, or "scuzzy") bus; Universal Serial Bus (USB), the replacement for the serial port, and even an Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) connector for attaching old keyboards and mice.

For harried systems personnel, perhaps the best feature of these machines is their technician-friendly design. The case flops open and out to lie flat, providing easy access to all memory slots and expansion features.

And the price -- $1599 to $2999 -- is certainly competitive.

Well, there must be a downside, and there is. Or are. First, with no SCSI support built in, you will need to buy an inexpensive SCSI card for one of the PCI slots. These cards, from either Apple or third-party suppliers, are in short supply.

Second, one PCI slot ships with a high-speed graphics card already installed, so this classy chassis effectively has only two slots for expansion.

Third, if you want to get more mileage out of those old serial peripherals, you need to purchase a USB-serial converter (also in short supply) or put a serial port card in another PCI slot, leaving a lone expansion slot.

Fourth, all applications need to be able to run System 8.5. Fifth, and last, there is no internal floppy drive, although an external one can be added (as it can be on the iMac).

According to Apple publicity, a test of these new G3s at the RR Donnelley & Sons pre-press center in Elgin, Ill., found that Adobe Photoshop 5.0 ran 37 percent faster than on an "old" Power Macintosh 9600, and large graphics files in Quark XPress and Photoshop were rendered 224 percent faster than on the 9600.

Of course, your results will vary, but these computers will work much faster. The question remains whether this will translate into more work from users in a newsroom environment; at the very least, in the final 10 minutes before deadline more computer instructions will be processed with the new G3s than ever before.

For newsroom reporters, an iMac would be more than sufficient. Those four-gigabyte hard disks will hold a lifetime of work inside that colorful case. But the real reason a newsroom might have an interest in iMacs, aside from the pretty colors, is the machine's built-in ability to boot from a network server, making centralized administration easier.

As the swing dance craze of the 1940s is being revived in the late 1990s, so is the concept of the server acting more like an old mainframe computer, with more control over the computers connected to it.

How "dumb" can these modern individual terminals be? Certainly the iMac is not a dumb terminal. Questions like these will be answered better when Mac OS X Server makes its appearance on the new G3 hardware. Already some exhibitors at Macworld were touting their software's ability to run under OS X.

Without heading into a long historical digress, OS X is the modern operating system for the Mac, based on the NextStep technology Apple bought when it bought Next Computers Inc. (Jobs, stock and barrel). Once code-named Rhapsody, this is the OS with the mostest, since it's built on the Mach microkernel, BSD UNIX 4.4, which means true multitasking and industrial strength.

Jobs' keynote, which I avoided intentionally because of my aversion to the Jrdf (Jobs Reality Distortion Field), featured 50 iMacs simultaneously downloading and playing the same streaming video from an OS X-equipped server.

With NetBoot, it would appear Apple has some server software that can handle newspaper deadlines. But because of changes in the start-up read-only memory, NetBoot would work only in production facilities equipped with just iMacs and new G3s. Unless there's a paper starting up from scratch, don't expect a melding of Macintosh ease-of-use and server ease-of-administration any time soon.

Quick pre-press products
Talking about software, highlights from the show floor include the return of an old favorite; some training software that makes learning keyboard shortcuts a game; AppleScript for Photoshop; some new Quark XTensions, and software in the pre-press field.

Here's a quick tour: