Apple puts upgraded iMac at heart of 'digital hub'

Apple CEO Steve Jobs debuted the latest incarnation of the iMac to a raucous San Francisco MacWorld crowd last night.

The iMac has a 15-inch flat panel screen attached to a dome-shaped base by a pivoting arm that resembles an angle poise lamp.

The iMac will ship in three models, with the first, most powerful version available before the end of January.

The iMac features 700MHz or 800MHz G4 processors and a 32MB NvidiaGeForce2 MX graphics card.

The entry level model has 128MB RAM, with 256MB RAM on the other two computers.

The iMac has five USB ports, two FireWire ports and Ethernet on all models. The top two configurations also boast DVD-recording "super-drives".

The base, which holds the CPU and the optical drive, measures just 10.5 inches in diameter. At one point, a highly excited Jobs said: "This is the most beautiful bottom of a computer I've ever seen."

The Apple CEO said the iMac will sit at the centre of a digital hub. He said this would be the third incarnation of personal computing.

The main software release of Jobs' keynote was a program called iPhoto, which transfers images from digital cameras and other sources, and lets the user edit, manipulate and print.

Jobs also announced an upgrade to the consumer laptop iBook with the top configuration sporting a 14-inch screen.

In other news at the show, Apple said its Mac OSX operating system was now the default OS on all Macs. Jobs announced that the platform now has more than 2,500 native applications.