Jobs unveils colourful iMac family

"Never mind 'mumbo-jumbo' such as gigabytes and hard drives, what customers want when they buy a new PC is a choice of colour". Those were the words of Steve Jobs, Apple's interim CEO, during his keynote speech at San Francisco's MacWorld Expo on Tuesday,

Jobs was relaunching Apple's top-selling iMac in five new "flavours": strawberry, blueberry, grape, lime and tangerine. In addition, business users with an eye for design will be offered new versions of the G3 Power Macintosh sporting the iMac's original translucent blue design.

Jobs told an enthralled audience: "We think one of the most important questions now is 'what is your favourite colour?'" He claimed this is more important than the "mumbo-jumbo", such as gigabytes and hard drives, usually associated with buying a computer. "People don't care about that stuff. What they care about is: 'I want to express myself.'"

Jobs also rolled out a new line of Macintosh computers, based on the G3 processor. They will use FireWire, a high-speed technology for connecting everything from storage devices to video cameras, and a 400MHz processor which Apple hopes will entice power gamers as well as professionals. More importantly, perhaps, they will come in a translucent blue case with a large 'G3' logo on one side.

Jobs also announced that Apple will license the OpenGL development environment from Silicon Graphics (SGI).

Rick Belluzzo, SGI chief executive, joined Jobs on stage and highlighted how the partnership with Apple will help his company move into the mainstream. "This is an essential part of our new strategy," he said. "We think the Mac is significant and we want to work with Apple to help SGI change from the high end to the mainstream market."

Jobs said OpenGL will help give Apple the "best 3D graphics platform in the industry".

On the operating systems front, Jobs said more than one million users have upgraded to MacOS 8.5, with another million new systems shipping. Jobs also announced the immediate availability of the Mac OS X Server, which can be booted over a network.