Apple Reportedly Halts Orders on Some G5 iMacs

by Anton Shilov
01/30/2006 | 09:11 AM

Apple Computer may be planning to rather rapidly halt production of its computers based on IBM PowerPC 970FX (G5) processors and ramp up manufacturing of Intel-based computers instead. Already now, only a few weeks after the company unveiled its first Macintosh products with Intel processors, it began to inform its customers that it would not accept new orders to iMac G5 17” model.

AppleInsider web-site that covers the latest news in the Apple space claims that according to its sources the PowerPC-based 17” iMac G5 had been shifted to “end-of-life” status. The company had also begun informing resellers in the U.S. that it would accept no new orders for the model, it is claimed, suggesting that Apple’s inventory of the 17-inch iMac G5 model is nearly depleted.

At press time Apple still supplied both 17” and 20” iMac computers running 1.90GHz and 2.10GHz G5 processors respectively via its web-site, but it is unclear how much time this situation will last. Some other online stores, including Amazon.com, as well as retail shops, can also supply the iMac G5 17” while they have enough units in stock.

Apple unveiled its first iMac computers powered by Intel’s dual-core processors at the Macworld conference on the 10^th of January, 2006 and immediately started selling 17” and 20” iMac computers based on the Intel Core Duo processors up to 2GHz equipped with 512MB of DDR2 memory, and ATI Radeon X1600 128MB graphics card. The new computers run Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.4 and are equipped with Rosetta software that allows applications developed for PowerPC chips to operate on x86 central processing units.

While the new iMac computers offer better technical specifications compared to the previous-generation iMac products, they are sold for the same price: $1299 – $1699.