Apple Computer said on Tuesday that it would begin selling the fifth version of its Macintosh OS X operating system later this month.
The program, which is named Macintosh OS X 10.4 Tiger and will sell for US$129, has a variety of new features and some new internal technologies, as well as improved compatibility with Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Steven Jobs, the company's chief executive, has at earlier events given brief demonstrations of some of the new features. On Tuesday, the company described the software's new capabilities, including a file-search feature called Spotlight; four-way videoconferencing and 10-way audio conferences; and a system called Dashboard that will display on the screen small functions like calculators, currency converters and airline flight-schedule trackers.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, plans to make the Tiger software available at retail stores on April 29. The company first announced Tiger last June and said on Tuesday that it had met its self-imposed deadline of making the software commercially available in the first half of this year.
The new software is expected to have an immediate impact on Apple's revenue, according to Wall Street analysts.
"I think Tiger is going to be a far more important upgrade than previous versions," said Charles Wolf, a financial analyst with Needham & Co in New York, who holds shares of Apple. He estimated that there were about 20 million Macintosh computer users and that as many as 2 million to 3 million might be expected to upgrade their operating systems to Tiger within the next two quarters.
That would generate more than US$200 million in revenue for Apple and would easily cover the software's development costs, he said.
The unveiling of Tiger adds pressure on Microsoft, which is developing a new version of its Windows operating system, called Longhorn. The Microsoft software is reported to have many of the same features as Tiger, but it will not be available until next year.
Apple executives said on Tuesday that they believed the new program gave them a significant technical lead on Microsoft, the world's dominant software publisher.
"This has created even more distance between us and Microsoft," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide product marketing.
"We're becoming a tiny, dim red light in their headlights," he said.
David Caulton, group product manager in for Microsoft's Windows client division, said, "Apple is obviously doing interesting stuff within a closed solution."
By contrast, Microsoft, he said, prefers "to take on the problem of platform solutions with a lot of different partners."
Both Apple and Microsoft have focused on adding file retrieval and graphics technologies to their operating systems. Analysts have said that this is in part a response to the growth of Google-style searching.
Apple's new Spotlight retrieval feature automatically indexes information without regard to whether the information is in a word-processing document, spreadsheet, digital image or any other file type. Microsoft has a similar feature available with its MSN service and has said it plans to integrate it into Longhorn.
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