When you look at the Braun products by Dieter Rams—many of them at New York's MoMA—and compare them to Ive's work at Apple, you can clearly see the similarities in their philosophies way beyond the sparse use of color, the selection of materials and how the products are shaped around the function with no artificial design, keeping the design "honest."

This passion for "simplicity" and "honest design" that is always declared by Ive whenever he's interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams' 10 principles for good design:

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

Ive's inspiration on Rams' design principles goes beyond the philosophy and gets straight into a direct homage to real products created decades ago. Amazing pieces of industrial design that still today remain fresh, true classics that have survived the test of time.

The similarities between products from Braun and Apple are sometimes uncanny, others more subtle, but there's always a common root that provides the new Apple objects not only with a beautiful simplicity but also with a close familiarity.

Braun Atelier TV and latest iMac 24

Braun T1000 radio and PowerMac G5/Mac Pro

Detail of the radio perforated aluminum surface

Braun T3 pocket radio and Apple iPod

Braun L60 sound system and Apple iPod Hi-Fi

Braun LE1 speaker and Apple iMac

Some people will probably call these examples a "rip-off" but, in a world where industrial design and art is constantly being recycled into new work, I just see Apple's products as a great evolution to classic concepts. Now, as I look at Rams' work I can't help but to wonder: which of these old Braun designs will Apple revive next? Is there a MacBook Air—the rumored ultra-slim wire-free portable that seems to be the favorite bet for tomorrow's keynote—in there?

Hopefully, we'll discover at least some answers tomorrow. See you at Macworld! [Design Museum, Dieter Rams and O Globo Online]

Jump to see the list of Macs and prices (with links to buy, of course).

• Apple iMac G3 333MHz 32MB 6GB CD w/15-inch CRT and OS 8 (Aqua) $58
• Apple iMac 333MHz G3 32MB 6GB CD w/15-inch CRT and OS 9.1 (Grape) $58
• Apple PowerMac G3 300MHz 32MB 6GB CD w/OS 9 (Aqua) $60
• Apple PowerMac G3 300MHz 32MB 6GB CD w/OS 9 (Aqua) $64
• Apple iMac G3 350MHz 64MB 6GB CD 15-inch CRT w/OS 9 (Aqua) $69
• Apple iMac G3 400MHz 128MB 10GB CD w/15-inch CRT and 9.1 (Blue) $90
• Apple iMac 500MHz G3 256MB 20GB CD w/15-inch CRT and 9.1 (Blue) $120
• Apple iMac G3 700MHz 256MB 60GB CDRW w/15-inch CRT and OS 9 (Gray) $180

[Via Dealhack]

On the inside, assembly-wise, the Mac Pro has many advantages over the PowerMac. There are four very easily accessible SATA hard drive sliders to add more storage. The RAM and PCI-E cards are both also very easy to get to when you have to make upgrades. Definitely an improvement over the PowerMac. There's also plenty more USB 2.0 and Firewire ports on the outside for external connectivity—again, one of the complaints about the PowerMac.

So how does it perform?

Well, as long as the application was running natively with Intel universal binary code, everything was fine. As soon as you get to Photoshop or the Microsoft Office applications, things start to go slow. Keep this in mind as you make your purchase. If these are part of your daily must-use apps, you may want to stay with a PowerMac for now.

Overall, the Quad-Core (two processors, each dual core) made most applications faster than on the Powermac. Occasionally, when some applications are single threaded, the four cores didn't help much, because you can't split up the threads (tasks) among the cores. Think of it as four guys trying to drink out of one gallon of milk out of the container. If the application were multi-threaded, it'd be like four guys drinking the same gallon of milk that's poured out into four glasses.

One thing Anandtech did find was that the FB-DIMM memory had a pretty steep performance cost. It's a bit technical and dry, so you should head over there if you want to get the nitty gritty.

All in all, this is a pretty powerful machine that's actually the same price as a home-built config of the same specs, and cheaper than a comparable Dell machine. Really! – Jason Chen

Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor [Anandtech]

One of the sources gave us good reason to believe this information is true by pointing out that on Saturday 9 (yes, Saturday), Apple had a meeting related to the October 12th announcements, with staff involved in Apple s retail division. Attendees have also been informed that there is another meeting planed for Saturday the 15th.

The source also explained that a few days before a major product announcement, a certain number of Apple Store staff members usually have a meeting with a briefing on forthcoming products although few details on the new products are given to them.

Internal meeting schedule hints at further product releases [MacOSXRumors]