August 07, 2006

WWDC 2006

MacRumors.com offers live coverage of Apple's WWDC 2006 Keynote.

I update as necessary:

Goodbye PowerMac! The introduction of the Mac Pro (ugh!!! hate the name, but given the MacBook moniker, it was expected).

The numbers:

2.6 Ghz dual
256 MB ram
Superdrive
$2499

And ready for shipping today.

more--

old case - two optical drives - woodcrest processors - based on core 2 duo - all dual core, up to 3 Ghz - large 4 MB shared L2 cache - 128 bit vector engine, 64 bit - up to 3x a Xeon - amazing processor, every Mac Pro gets 2 of them - 1.6 to 2.1x faster than the G5 quad - room for 4 hard drives - up to 2 TB of internal storage - second optical drive

( more after the jump )

( Additional news and info from The Mac Observer and ARS Technica)

The completion of the Intel transistion finishes today (210 days totals since the first announcement). The other product news: Xserve. $2999 for standard configuration. More details--

- built on Xeons - quad performance, similar to specs of Mac Pro
- with smaller chip, footprint, easier to get faster chips in
- 5x faster than machine it replaces
- up to 5 terabytes of storage
- amazing performance - new features, more space, adds redundant power supply

Steve Jobs has taken the stage to talk up Mac OS X history. Of course, he's leading up to an announcement of Tiger to come. And poking fun at Redmond. Har!!

- "Time Machine" appears to be a new backup scheme that'll be built into Tiger; most people (present company included) don't perform regular backups. This will make it quite easy.

coolest part - and reason we call it that - whole new way of backing up files; backup to HD, or server; can restore everything, or just one file at a time; and be right where you were when the HD drive

automatically backs up mac
you change a file, it automatically backs up
photos, music, documents, files folder, everything
then you can restore everything

"With time machine, you can get those files back by entering a date or time..."

- Boot Camp, FrontRow and PhotoBooth all to be built-in to Tiger, along with beta software from outside developers
- "Spaces" = Virtual Desktops: create different spaces for different clusters of apps to work together; can drag info from one desktop to the other; spaces allows users to create collections of apps for different tasks that's intuitive
- Improved Spotlight: advanced search features; ability to search on multiple machines at once, including at work, servers, etc.
- "CORE animation" = a core layer in Mac OS X similar to CoreAudio and the other Core elements of OS X that handles animation and 3D animation. Allows you to dramatically increase the production value of your applications; handles everything in between - color, size, opacity, all kinds of things.
- Universal Access = much improved for disabled users. Advanced Brailler support, closed-captioning for QuickTime and greatly improved voices for Voice Over! (ed. no more robotic voices!!!)
- "The BIG One" = .Mail. Stationary, Notes, To-Do added. The latter is system-wide under Tiger! All greatly integrated with iCal, iPhoto, etc.
- Dashboard = Dashcode. It's a development environment for making Widgets. It includes Templates (generic Widgets that can be modified and edited to meet your needs). over 2500 widgets available for download.


You can read more at the above links and from the Apple homepage shortly.

Posted by ronn at August 7, 2006 12:59 PM

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