DIGITAL L.A. : APPLE EXPANDS CORE OF PROFITS.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

A year ago, Apple Computers seemed headed to the electronic graveyard, its spark shorting out on staggering market share, gun-shy developers and wavering supporters. But as the old song nearly says, what a difference a year makes.

At this week's MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, interim CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a bunch of new machines and initiatives that capitalize on the remarkable momentum the company built with its original iMac. Oh, and the company is headed to a fifth straight profitable quarter, too.

The iMac already is undergoing a second round of improvements that, just four months after its debut, make it a substantially more powerful machine for less money. This for a computer that already sold 800,000 units in 3-1/2 months.

Apple whacked the price $100 to $1,199; wrapped the swoopy box in five hip new colors; and goosed the insides with a faster processor (266 megahertz G3 chip), better video acceleration (an ATI Rage Pro 128-bit card), more memory expandability (to 256 megabytes) and a bigger hard drive (6 gigabytes).

The changes defuse most of the niggling complaints about the all-in-one machine, making it a better gaming device, less expensive (some observers predicted retailers might slash prices below $1,000), with a terrific amount of power.

For all the iMac changes, however, the biggest news happened further up the product line, as Jobs unveiled Apple's ``Yosemite'' line of four professional-level machines, ranging in price from $1,599 to $2,999, as well as three matching monitors from $499 to $1,499.

The Yosemite design takes cues from the iMac, providing another welcome - if less revolutionary - departure from the Boring Beige Box Borg that has assimilated most computer industrial design the past 20 years.

Far more interesting, however, is what's happening inside these new machines. Apple, after years of going its own way with technology, now is using many common PC standards.

That should mean Mac users will have to spend less - both on the machines and any upgrades - and have far more choices in those upgrades and peripheral devices.

For instance, all the new machines use USB ports to hook up slower peripheral devices such as keyboards, mice, scanners and digital cameras, instead of ADB and serial ports. USBs are increasingly common on PCs as well, thanks to improved support in Windows 98.

The Yosemite machines also will connect directly to any VGA monitor, just as PCs do, rather than using the unique Mac video connectors. And the Yosemites have replaced the SCSI bus with ``Firewire,'' or IEEE 1394, connections.

All the new machines use SDRAM, the same kind of memory chips used by PCs, which will save you money as you try to keep up with bandwidth-hogging applications.

The irony, of course, is that the more these machines look different on the outside, the more their insides are like all their PC competitors. Except, of course, for the super-fast G3 brains at the heart of these machines, and the truly wonderful Mac OS 8.5 they come with.

For Macintosh gamers, there were two other announcements of note. One was that the new Macs finally will support the Open GL graphics standard, which is common on the PC side, but has been neglected on Macs. The support will make it far easier for developers to bring their hot PC titles to the Mac.

Also, peripheral maker Connectix announced a $49 software program that will allow you to play many PlayStation games (about 70 of the 500 or so on the market now) on the iMac. For more information, go to www.virtualgamestation.com.

Sincerest flattery

All that said, even the Windows world is being influenced by the iMac's design revolution and stunning success.

A small Fremont-based company called eMachines plans to come out later this spring with an iMac-like Windows-based PC called the eStation for as little as $499.

And Infoworld, a trade publication aimed at big corporate computer buyers, says numerous companies building Windows-based machines are now thinking about how to make their computers look more interesting, especially the more expensive ones where buyers will pay for style.

Imitation aside, expect other big changes in PC boxes as well, Infoworld said.

The trade journal predicted radically different machines in stores by the end of the year, with flat-panel displays, 25-gigabyte hard drives, rewritable CD drives instead of floppies, a standard 128 megabytes of memory, Firewire connections and a 650-megahertz Intel processor.

And some pundits are predicting even cheaper low-end computers, whose prices dropped to as little as $399 without a monitor for some very low-end, though quite serviceable, configurations.

By year's end, those prices could drop to as little as $299 without a monitor (add another $100 to $170), a boon for people with simple needs such as letter writing, home finance and Web surfing. It's all the computer they'll need for now.

In fact, it led one pundit at the San Jose Mercury-News to propose disposable computers. His thesis: it's cheaper to buy a $399 computer every year than a muscled-up $1,699 box that might last four years. And, he argues, the $399 box you buy in the fourth year probably will be more powerful than that 4-year-old $1,699 model.

No wonder all the computer sellers are complaining that they couldn't get enough cheap computers in stock but are trying to figure out how to clean out their excess high-end inventory from the holidays.

Green light

Disney finally gets into the online portal business this week, with a kickoff announcement for the long-awaited Go Network, at www.go.com, which will tie the Infoseek search engine together with such sites as Disney Online and ABC TV.

The Go Network's most interesting aspect may be Go Guardian, its raft of parental controls that will differentiate it from well-established existing Internet entry points such as AOL/NetCenter, Yahoo! and Excite.

If you register your children through the portal, Go Guardian will keep them from areas you designate off limits and also e-mail you with a rundown on the places they do visit while online.

Many parents will welcome the controls. But others may not want the Big Mouse as their online baby sitter. So, we'll see if that traffic signal is green or red.

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Photo: Apple's new Yosemite line of computers, like the iMac, comes in bold colors.