Review: Apple's Hardware Line Updates and Hints

Apple made a few changes to their hardware lineup this past week, which drew the attention of the Mac faithful.

Apple quietly dropped their original (CRT) iMac from their linueup. The CRT iMac remained on the low-end of their consumer line for price-conscious consumers ever since the LCD iMac was introduced. The item, however, still appears in Apple's educational offerings.

As noted here, Apple also introduced a new Xserve configuration designed for clustering.

The new Xserve configuration also sports a slightly different design from the original Xserve.

The revised Xserves will be first demoed at Bio-IT World Conference which starts on March 25th 2003.

Meanwhile, Apple's delay of WWDC with specific mention of Panther (next OS X revision) raises a few eyebrows. This delay could also be related to the striking rumor that Apple may debut their PowerPC 970 strategy at this WWDC. Further hints (here and here) indicate that Apple PowerPC 970 motherboards are in the final design phase, approaching production.

In terms of shipping news -- Apple's Powerbook 17" finally appears to be shipping... but according to sources, it may simply be a small symbolic supply, as reports indicate that Apple is still having significant production problems with these machines.