Garry Barker, for The Age, writes, “If a single sign points to the transformation of Apple, it is the speed with which it innovates and develops industry-changing products. Thus we have the flat-panel iMac, still by far the most remarkable personal computer to go into volume production, the iPod, Airport, FireWire, iMovie and much else, not forgetting the operating system, Mac OS X.”

Barker continues, “Name me a computer maker in the Wintel world that does a tenth of that, or any of it. The biggest recent “innovation” by Dell, biggest of the PC makers, has been to begin marketing printers; not their own, but rebadged Lexmark machines. The speed with which Apple rolls out its products is impressive, not least the development of its BSD Unix-based operating system, Mac OS X, now enjoying its second birthday and about to re-emerge in its third full incarnation, OS X 10.3, otherwise known as Panther,”

Barker close with a quick look at PowerPC 970 (G5) rumors (“running at close to 3GHz”), Apple Java 1.4.1 Update, and Safari browser. Full article here.