Events in reverse chronological order
11:24 am Developer preview available today with Leopard to ship in coming Spring — That will be ahead of Vista. Yeah. Oops. My bad. I got overly excited. (although you never know with Vista)
11:14 am Enhanced iChat — multiple logins, visibility, animated icons, video recording, and tabbed chats, keynote presentations, back drops, photobooth effects, etc. Looks like some nice new and fun features. I hope voice recording quality is better than what we currently have in GarageBand. The PhotoBooth effects will be fun. Plus you have green screen so you can now be “anywhere” and have an iChat, too cool. I am sure business users will find being able to present Keynote presentations remotely a nice addition.
11:09 am Webclip — New button in Safari that will allow you to easily create widgets from some of your favorite web content. I like this concept. I am sure WebClip has other benefits in Safari too.
11:06 am Dashboard — Dashcode developer environment, well not a surprise, but it should make it so we have even more great widgets from 3rd party developers. I like Dashboard and find it useful so I will always welcome more productivity to my Mac. Plus, widgets are personal so you can pick the OS enhancements that make sense for you.
10:58 am Mail — Major enhancements. stationary added, notes added, to-do’s added. Stationary basically allows you to build graphically style email.They will have templates, but you could create your own. It must work like iCards and generate a PDF or JPEG as an attachment. Interesting. Notes can be used to send quick email reminders to yourself, good for those of us who are forgetful I guess. To-do lists are self explanatory, but didn’t we have these in iCal already? I guess there will be better integration which will be nice.
10:49 am Core animations — Easier for developers to add eye candy. text, images, video, openGL, almost anything. This is cool, but lets hope not over done. OS X already gives me “see sickness” sometimes.
10:47 am Next generation of Spotlight — Enabling spotlight to search OTHER machines if you have permissions, nice if you need to see if you have a file on another machine on your network or at home when you are at the office. More advanced search and easier way to use it as an Application launcher (can you say QuickSilver?)
10:44 am 4) Virtual Desktops — Finally, what took so long? I think these should have been in OS X from the beginning. You can drag info from one desktop to the other, that is a nice touch.
10:43 am next gen front row & photo booth built into leopard — Again expected, but what are the new features? Top secret?
10:42 am shipping all as part of leopard boot camp will be included — That was to be expected.
10:32 am 2) Time machine — Backup for all of you who don’t backup (even though I tell you to ;) ). Essentially on the fly backing up to backup to HD, or server. Think of it like auto-save with versions. Nice concept. Of course you will need to have a volume to back up to, but with room for 4 drives in your MacPro you have no excuse. Eliminates the accidental “save-over” problem. Nice. Of course Apple adds their eye candy with a cool “time warp” effect to take you back to your lost file. Sweet.
10:30 major things in leopard demo: 1) support for 64 bit applications. in leopard – giant leap forward – extend support all the way through UI framework into applications. have a fully native 64 bit UI carbon app, but completely 32-bit compatible (important) with no emulation, no translation
full support.
10:25 am “Redmond – start your photocopiers” — Apple is going to have fun with Leopard. The marketing is great and Microsoft is a good target at the moment with all the Vista delays.
10:18 am XServes — Entirely new. Based on Xeon processors and similar in performance to new Mac Pros. Now the entire line is Intel, the transition is complete and has happened in just 210 days, not bad.
10:08 am Mac Pros — AMAZING. All QUADS!!! Based on Woodcrest up to 3.0 GHz, 64 bit, 128 bit vector engine (replace Altivec), large 4 MB shared L2 cache, room for 4 hard drives, same case design, 2 optical drives, 1.6 to 2.1x faster than the G5 quad, 2.6 Ghz dual, NVidia GForce 7300GT 256 MB RAM, Superdrive for $2499. Shipping today.
10:06 am other great thing – 3/4 of macs shipped were intel-based — We’ll aren’t 3/4 of the models Intels? This just makes sense.
10:05 am of new purchases, 50% are new to the mac — I sometimes wonder where they get their figures, but this is good news. Lot’s of switchers.
There are reports of as 5.8 ghz wireless at the WWDC that seems to only work on the new Macbook Pro. Maybe this means a new Airport Base station optimized technology in the new models. I know the Intel Macs added support for 802.11a and that can operate in the 5GHz range.
256MB of RAM in the standard config? This is a “Pro” machine! It should have 1GB of RAM standard!
My bad…MacRumors posted bad info…it IS 1GB of ram, 250GB HARD DRIVE… that’s better.
Vista Ships in January…. how is Spring before Fall and Winter??
And UK customers are still getting ripped off!
US customers pay $2750 including a rough 10% sales tax
UK customers pay $3244 (£1699 – including VAT, using today’s exchange rate)
$500 difference!
And as for the fact that Mac Minis are still using Solo processors – don’t even get me started on that one…
why Time machine. it sounds to me it is something with windows users comming to mac. it sounds to much windows that feaure.
I am wandering about the Mac pro it is stil the same cool design but why haven’t there ben made a cool keayboard to it in alumenium or something like the same colour.
I am wandering about the cinema displays I was hoping for a build in camera, like the imac and the notebooks.
everying else super cool.
I really am glad that apple introduced time machine. I know it sounds kind of funky and the galaxy deal doesn’t really impress me but it brings back up to the masses. The on-the-fly restore deal does interest me a lot though. I guess we’ll have to see what it looks like when it ships.
Yeah, it is very interesting times for Apple indeed!
* Intel chips really push the development cycle.
I mean Motorola chips and PPC were really slow out the gate.. it seems they always had incremental upgrades to the processor.. but Intel’s development is in a really sharp upcurve lately!
I recently purchased the new MacBook, yeah I drank the coolaid aka mac-intel machines. After the 2 gig RAM upgrade it is a very “decent” machine. I put that in quotes as it hasn’t been tested over time.
I mean I think it can put my dual G5 to the test… neck and neck in some specs.
REMEMBER THIS:
WWDC was only a preview highlighting 10 features of 10.5 Hopefully there will be more new advancements, not just features for features sake..
iChat is really amazing with cross over Remote desktop functionality.
Time machine is like snapshot technology for recovery solutions. Heck an external 250gig Drive is dirt cheap backup solution. Way smoother implentation than system recovery from MS.
Again, very humorous to try to max out the MacPro at apple.com.. yes you could go broke there!
new ipods etc .. well to early to introduce .. gotta wait ’til the christmas buying season!!
Sure some features remind me of Windoze.. some features remind me of Unix..but it is how Apple OSX chooses to implement them..
v.p.
Worst WWDC announcements ever. New Mac Pros – ok. Not much of a surprise there. Preview of an OS that is almost a year away? Yawn.
Can anyone confirm the rumor that Apple has removed the OPTION key from all new Mac Pro machines?
I guess Options are a sensitive subject in Cupertino these days.
Yes, Steve did look rather gaunt at yesterday’s keynote. But bear two things in mind:
1. He is a recovering pancreatic cancer victim.
2. He is either a vegan or vegetarian.
Steve did seem to rely upon his exec staff more than in the past, but it did give us the opportunity to size them up a bit. A few observations…
1. Phil Schiller looks as though he could hold his own in a Sumo wrestling bout with Steve Ballmer.
2. Bertrand sounded as though he was auditioning for the Inspector Clouseau part in The Pink Panther.
3. Scott Forrestall appeared to be aping Steve Jobs’ gestures, mannerisms and speech patterns. Is he the anointed one? Is he being groomed as Jobs’ successor? If it happens, you read it here first.
Like most of Wall Street and the world, I hope that neither illness nor executive shuffling prevent Steve from helming Apple for many decades to come.
I too thought Steve looked a bit under the weather yesterday and I thought it odd at first when he called upon three others to assist in the Keynote. However, ever since his cancer surgery, he has appeared to tire out by the end of his Keynotes and his appearance belies the otherwise energetic soul within.
I hope he is in good health and will remain at the helm for years to come, but I am glad to see he is willing to let loose the reins, if only for a bit, so that we can see the future of Apple is in capable hands.
I noticed how when Time Machine died Scott Forrestall used the same phrase that Steve did when he was demoing Tiger at Macworld 2005 I think. He said “well thats why we have backup systems” getting no laughs from the audience unlike when Steve said it the room exploded with laughter. WWDCs are not for consumers so it was a bit booring. Remember last year there were no product announcements.