Apple Ships Power Mac G5

Apple Computer Inc. said Monday it had begun shipping its new 64-bit Power Macintosh G5s to customers.

“Were talking about full-fledged shipments,” said Greg Jozwiak, Apples vice president of hardware product marketing, in an interview Monday morning.

Although Apple could have been dealt a blow when foundry partner IBM acknowledged Friday that its fab in East Fishkill, N.Y., had been idled by last weeks widespread power blackout, Jozwiak said the blackout hadnt affected the companys production schedule.

“Were right on schedule, even a little bit early,” Jozwiak said. “IBMs done a great job supplying the processors.”

In June, Apple said that three new 64-bit G5 models would ship in August, ranging in price from $1,999 to $2,999. However, Apple will only ship the version with a single 1.6-GHz PowerPC G5 processor installed; customers who ordered dual 2.0-GHz Macs will be forced to wait until “later this month,” Jozwiak said.

Pricing will remain the same, Jozwiak said, although DRAM prices have slowly edged up. “Everyones hit equally by rising costs,” he said.

Apple received over 100,000 preorders for the new systems, Jozwiak said, who acknowledged he did not know when all of the preorders would be completed. Jozwiak also declined to offer specifics as to which customers would receive their orders first, noting that the sales team had a specific allocation model to divvy up the new Macs between online customers, its retail stores, and third-party retail stores such as CompUSA and Best Buy.