On Tuesday, January 9, Steve Jobs welcomed Macworld attendees to a new era in the evolving history of the personal computer—the era of the Digital Lifestyle.

With so much digital content readily available (on the Internet and on CDs and DVDs) and with a growing number of devices that can capture even more digital content (scanners, MIDI, digital still cameras, and digital video cameras), you’ll be able to use your Mac as a “Digital Hub,” not only to enjoy all of this digital content but also to create your own.

Macworld SF 2001 allowed us to showcase some of the new Apple products and technologies that will help define this new era for the personal computer.

Take, for example, the new PowerBook G4 computer.

Made of titanium—a space-age metal that has the tensile strength of steel but half the weight—the PowerBook G4 weighs just 5.3 pounds* and is a remarkable one inch thin: vital statistics that beg comparison to the sexiest subnotebook computers around.

But there’s more remarkable news to come, for the PowerBook G4 is a true supercomputer to go, featuring:

  PowerPC G4 processors with Velocity Engine running at speeds up to 500MHz with a 1MB L2 cache to speed up performance even more
  A slot-loading DVD-ROM drive
  One of the hottest graphics chips available for portable computers: the AGP 2x RAGE Mobility 128 with 8MB SDRAM
  Two integrated antennas, making the PowerBook G4 AirPort ready
  A full complement of ports, including FireWire, USB, VGA and S-video output, stereo sound output, 10/100BASE-T Ethernet, and modem ports

Perhaps most impressive of all, the Titanium PowerBook G4 offers a 15.2-inch (diagonal) mega-wide screen that has to be seen to be believed.

Think the PowerBook G4 is hot? The Power Mac G4 sizzles, too

First let’s talk performance. Not only does the new Power Mac G4 offer faster processors—PowerPC G4 processors running at speeds up to 733MHz—but a totally re-engineered system architecture (including a new 133MHz system bus that moves data at speeds in excess of 1 gigabyte per second) allows the new models to provide up to a 38% performance improvement over previous Power Mac G4 systems.

And because we’ve made CD-RW (rewritable) drives standard on all models of the Power Mac G4 (except one—that offers even more capabilities and that we’ll tell you about shortly), you can now satisfy your burning desire to create data and audio CDs with remarkable ease.

If the complexity of existing software has kept you from joining the digital music revolution called MP3, this will be music to your ears.

It’s called iTunes and it’s free for the downloading.** Digital music the Macintosh way, iTunes lets you easily:

  Play audio CDs on your Mac
  Convert the files on your CDs to the MP3 format (usually called “ripping”)
  Manage all of the songs you collect
  Create “playlists” (or collections) of your favorite tunes
  Download your favorites to an MP3 player
  Tune in to any of the hundreds of Internet radio stations currently plying the webwaves

Here’s the real biggie: iTunes, teaming up with the CD-RW drives in the new Power Mac G4 models, lets you create music CDs you can play in your car, your stereo system, or your portable CD player—more easily than any software currently available on any platform.

One final note, because we don’t want to limit your enjoyment in any way, iTunes offers two features many similar products do not: unlimited encoding at the maximum quality MP3 allows (other players limit the quality or number of the encodes or charge a fee for higher quality encoding) and unlimited burning at maximum speed (most other products limit the number of CDs you can burn or the speed at which you can burn them unless you pay a fee).

If you like listening to music or love to crank up the volume while playing your favorite games, you’ll be pleased to hear that the new Power Mac G4 is wired for sound.

It boasts its own internal speaker, a standard headphone jack for headphones or externally powered speakers, and USB and FireWire ports you can use to connect third-party speakers and MIDI devices. In addition, the new Power Mac G4 computer features a special speaker minijack and a built-in amplifier you can use to send 20 watts of scintillating sound to the new Apple Pro Speakers (available separately).

Remember those “other capabilities” we mentioned earlier? We have an optical drive that’s so special we’re calling it a SuperDrive, a drive that combines the best of two powerful technologies: CD-RW and DVD-R.

Like a CD-RW, the SuperDrive lets you burn data and music CDs. The DVD-R technology adds other capabilities, letting you not only watch DVD movies but also burn your own DVD-Video discs, titles you can then play in most standard DVD players. (Want more info on DVD-Video?)

Power Mac G4 systems that include the new SuperDrive also come bundled with new iDVD software that makes burning DVD-Video discs as simple as dragging and dropping files in a folder. Now those of you making Desktop Movies with iMovie 2 or collecting folders filled with digital still images have an easy way to share your creative work with friends and family. Just send them a DVD.

We haven’t forgotten you professional videographers. In addition to iDVD, we’re also now offering DVD Studio Pro. The perfect complement to Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro is a professional DVD authoring tool with even more advanced capabilities.

If you enjoyed reading about the unveiling of DVD Studio Pro, iDVD, the new SuperDrive, Apple Pro Speakers, iTunes, the new Power Mac G4 with CD-RW, and the incredible Titanium PowerBook G4, we’d like to leave you with one final piece of good news.

We’ll begin to ship Mac OS X—the world’s most advanced operating system—on Saturday, March 24. It will sell for a suggested retail price of $129.

You can already hear early rumblings of the avalanche of applications expected to roar onto the scene this summer. In fact, over 100 developers are expected to announce products built for Mac OS X during the week of Macworld alone, and to date over 400 leading hardware and software developers—including Adobe, Alias|Wavefront, Deneba, Farallon, GODGAMES, LaCie, Macromedia, Microsoft, The Learning Company, and too many others to mention—have committed to developing over 1,200 exciting Mac OS X products.