CUPERTINO, CA—March 7, 2001—Apple today announced that Mac OS X, the next generation Macintosh operating system, is complete and the “gold master” has been released to manufacturing for production. Mac OS X will ship on March 24, 2001, for a suggested retail price of $129 (US). Mac OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system, combining the power and openness of UNIX with the legendary ease of use and broad applications base of Macintosh. Mac OS X is built upon an incredibly stable, open source, UNIX based foundation called Darwin and features true memory protection, preemptive multi-tasking and symmetric multiprocessing when running on the dual processor Power Mac™ G4. Mac OS X includes Apple’s new Quartz™ 2D graphics engine (based on the Internet-standard Portable Document Format) for stunning graphics and broad font support; OpenGL for spectacular 3D graphics and gaming; and QuickTime™ for streaming audio and video. Mac OS X also features an entirely new user interface called Aqua™. Aqua combines superior ease of use with amazing new functionality such as the Dock, a breakthrough for organizing applications, documents and document windows. Mac OS X will be available through The Apple Store® (www.apple.com) and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129 (US) beginning March 24, 2001. Mac OS X will be preinstalled as the standard operating system on Macintosh computers beginning this summer. Mac OS X requires a minimum of 128MB of memory and is designed to run on the following Apple products: iMac™, iBook™, Power Macintosh® G3, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube and PowerBook® introduced after September 1998.