Apple Store offline ahead of special event in NYC

Apple's online store is down ahead of the planned special event taking place in New York at 12 noon EST. The store displays the traditional "We'll be back soon" message. The event, which takes place at the same venue as PhotoPlus Expo 2005, brought a new generation of high-resolution PowerBooks, faster-quad processor Power Mac G5, and new software for professionals called Aperture for working with RAW format.

Apple today introduced updated PowerBook models, including 15-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks. The 15-inch PowerBook offers a higher-resolution screen with 1440 x 900 resolution, which is the same as the previous generation 17-inch model, while the 17-inch model includes a 1680 x 1050 pixel display, the same resolution as Apple's 20-inch Cinema Display. The new PowerBooks deliver 22 percent more battery life, new DVD-RW "SuperDrives" and built-in support for Apple's 30-inch Cinema HD Display. Prices start at $1,499 for the 12-inch model, $1,999 for the 15-inch model and $2,499 for the 17-inch model. They are available today.



Apple also updated its Power Mac G5 line, adding 1MB L2 cache per core along with dual-core G5 processors, featuring two AltiVec division. The Power Mac G5 quad will support 16GB of DDR2 SDRAM, and can support up to 1TB of storage. The board includes PCI-Express support in each of the expansion slots (much like the iMac G5) and are available with four different nVidia cards, including the Quadro FX 4500. All four cards support the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display. The Power Mac G5 Quad will offer 76.6 gigaflops, or billion floating-point operations per second, leveraging eight FPUs, four velocity engines, four 1MB L2 caches and is capable of processing 76.6 gigaflops. They are expected to ship early next month. Apple also lowered the Cinema Display pricing on the 23-inch model to $1,300 ($200 drop), and the 30-inch display to $2,499 ($500 drop).

Filed under: Apple