SAN FRANCISCO -- As his Tuesday morning Macworld keynote drew to a close, Apple CEO Steve Jobs brought Intel CEO Paul Otellini on the stage. Last week, Mr. Otellini delivered a keynote address at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that introduced his companyis new processors but said nothing about Appleis plans for them. Now the two CEOs revealed that the iMac will be the first Mac to receive an Intel processor.

Mr. Jobs said that the new iMac will be available today in the same 17- and 20-inch configurations as the previous model, which was refreshed only last October. Pricing will be the same, but the new computers are two to three times as fast as their predecessors, according to the Apple CEO, thanks to their Intel Core Duo processors. Their overall design is also still the same, despite rumors that Apple would differentiate the Intel Macs from the PowerPC ones with new cases.

The new computers are loaded with iLife i06, a built-in iSight video camera, Front Row with an Apple Remote, an 8X Dual-Layer SuperDrive, 512MB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 2GB, PCI Express-based ATI Radeon X1600 video cards with 128MB of Video RAM, 10/100/1000 BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet networking, built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, three USB 2.0 and two USB 1.1 ports and two FireWire 400 ports.

In addition, the new iMac offers a mini-DVI video output for connecting an Apple Cinema Display up to 23 inches in size. The operating system is Mac OS X v10.4.4, which was also released during Macworld, and Rosetta is included for running most applications that were originally developed for use with PowerPC processors.

The 17-inch US$1,299 iMac features a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor and a 160GB hard drive. The 20-inch version sells for $1,699 and includes a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor and a 250GB hard drive.