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Anonymous: Anyway, back to this article, I agree with Eugenia Loli-Queru regarding the pricing of $1999 for the workstation, IMHO, if they priced their low end at around $1800 then they would really grab a market. To make it even more tempting, why not offer a monitor/PowerMac bundle. Who on earth DOESN'T buy a computer without a monitor?

Most OEMs do that for workstations. Sony, Dell, HP, IBM, AlienWare, Gateway, etc. does that for higher end machines. And personally, I prefer it that way. For professionals, monitor preferences would differ from person to person. For example, I prefer CRTs in general. Most of my family prefer LCD, of varrying types - and they aren't even professionals! (neither am i either :-P).

Brian F.: Considering that Apple is competing against an illegal monopoly, their products probably have to be 60% better to gain market share.

The courts proved that Microsoft illegally maintained their OS monopoly by extending it to other markets, not optain their monopoly. In other words, Windows is a completely legal monopoly, IE isn't. And... oh wait, I promised not to enter the antitrust is evil debate again. Frankly, Microsoft is a rather easy target for the really low end market, and there is so little people actually realizing that.

Besides, you misunderstand marketing altogether. It is not how much better your are in real terms against your competitors, it is how much better consumers think you are better against your competitors. In other words, engineering plays little part in it.

Brian F.: Are you kidding me, the advancements in Panther alone were incredibly innovative and ground breaking.

Like fast user switching? Oh wait, dozens of OS's done that. Or live queries in Finder? Oh wait, BeOS. Like video conferencing? Oh wait, been there done that. Using UFS... wait, wasn't that lifted from another OS? Heck, probably the only think truly innovative is the desktop-wide "wallet" system - but that's not even a new idea, KDE have been working on it for months without any cue from Apple.

As I mentioned in my above post, we need to give credit where credit is due.

And credit is not due. Innovation doesn't determine the success of the product. So what if the product isn't innovative? As if that matters through out capitalism's history. Innovation is only useful if you have present it via marketing to your target audience. Otherwise, it is just plain useless. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with Apple being not innovative in this release.

Roland: With these new machines, Apple surpassed Wintels by a mile.

You mean prior to the machines, Wintels had been thousands of miles ahead of Apple? Man. :-P Even Apple's benchmarks don't show much of a performance gain Intel can't beat within months.

Jeremy Friesner: OS/X's screen renderer is an order of magnitude more ambitious regarding the features it supports, so of course it's going to take more CPU power than BeOS.

Consumers, if they are searching for those kind of responsiveness, couldn't care less how Apple's system is far more complex with that of BeOS and it's close relative Windows XP. But then again, how many consumers you know go into a Apple store and complain about it having slow scrolling speeds? Heck, if I was using a Mac, that would be the least of my problems :-P.