Apple unveils photo software and Power Mac Quad

Apple on Wednesday introduced new high-end photo-processing software and upgraded its Power Mac desktop and PowerBook laptops.

The new Power Mac G5 Quad has two 2.5GHz dual-core PowerPC G5 processors. Apple said all Power Macs will now feature dual-core chips and improved graphics cards.

"With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture and the fastest workstation card from Nvidia, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said in a statement.

Apple's PowerBook laptops are getting higher-resolution displays and improved batteries on the 15-inch and 17-inch models. All PowerBooks will also include a DVD-burning SuperDrive.

With the high-resolution displays, a new 17-inch PowerBook with 1680x1050-pixel resolution will be able to display 36 per cent more information than the previous models. A 15-inch PowerBook with a 1440x960-pixel resolution will display 26 more per cent real estate. Also, the display on the 17-inch model is up to 46 per cent brighter.

Meanwhile, Apple described the photo software, called Aperture, as being built for professional photographers. Its features include speedy manipulation of higher-quality RAW files. These are much larger than JPEG images, which can lose details as a result of being compressed. Apple said Aperture also includes "nondestructive image processing, colour-managed printing and custom Web and book publishing".