Power Mac G5 Gets a Speed Boost

Apple made updates to its Power Mac product line and dropped the prices of its Cinema Displays Wednesday ahead of the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on Friday. The computers will ship with the new operating system and include dual G5 processors. The high-end machine, running at 2.7 GHz, is Apple's fastest computer ever.

"The Power Mac G5 continues to deliver the ultimate performance for our most advanced customers running bandwidth- and compute-intensive applications," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

The top-of-the-line Power Mac G5 system now comes standard with a graphics card capable of driving Apple's 30" Cinema HD Display out of the box. Previously, a new graphics card had to be installed in order to use the display. All machines feature a 16x Superdrive, 512MB of RAM that can be upgraded to 8GB, and up to 800GB of internal storage.

Apple lowered the prices on its smaller Cinema Displays, reducing the 20" display by $200 to $799 and the 23" by $300 to $1,499. The flagship 30" model will remain at $2,999.

Apple says the changes will make the displays more affordable to consumers than even before. While the 30" model is not changing in price, the company pointed out that the high-end Power Mac and PowerBooks now natively support it.

Specs for the displays did not change, and they will still include the option for two FireWire and two USB ports, as well as Windows compatibility.