Apple Stakes Desktop Claim

Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs unveiled last week what he called "the fastest desktop computer in the world," and promised to make the Mac OS X operating system easier to work with, at the opening of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. Jobs said Apple would henceforth compete with top-of-the-line Intel/Windows machines on both performance and price. He showed three new G5 Power Mac models based on IBM's 64-bit PowerPC chip and priced at $1,999, $2,399, and $2,999. The chips powering them will run at 1.6 GHz, 1.8 GHz, and 2 GHz, respectively.