WWDC Keynote Thoughts
Mac Pro
Apple announced the Intel-based PowerMac replacement today, the Mac Pro. The case is the same as the old PowerMacs, so the entrance banner I posted a few days ago was actually displaying the Mac Pro. Now that the space-heater G5s are gone there's a lot more room inside the case for expansion. The Mac Pro features four SATA drive bays, 8 RAM slots, 4 PCI-Express slots (one being double-wide), room for two optical drives and even two Gigabit Ethernet ports.
Something different for Apple is the fact that all the machines are Built-to-Order. You start out with the pretty hefty base config of Dual 2.66GHz dual-core Woodcrest Xeons, 1GB RAM, a 256 MB GeFore 7300GT, a 250GB hard drive, and "only" one SuperDrive. From there, the only downgrades available are Dual 2GHz Xeons and a 160GB hard drive for $2,124 ($2,029 edu). A fully loaded Mac Pro, with Dual 3GHz Xeons, 16GB RAM, 4×500GB hard drives, Quadro FX4500 512MB, 2×30" displays, and 2xSuperDrives goes for $17,134 ($15,246 edu). The max config (with OS X Server licenses, Apple Modem, etc) is $18,481 ($16,137 edu). New XServes based with similar configs were also announced.
Whereas the PowerMacs were a reasonable option for any "prosumer" (ugh, hate that word) Mac user wanting a decent, upgradable Mac, these Mac Pros are just overkill. There's an $800 difference between the high-end iMac and the low-end Mac Pro, and a $1,700 difference between the high-end Mac mini and the low-end Mac Pro (not to mention the HUGE performance gap). So will we be seeing a headless mid-range Conroe-based Mac anytime soon? I would surely hope so.
Leopard
I found the "guarded" Leopard preview very curious. Compared to the Tiger preview we saw a few years back, Apple just didn't show much this time around. The intro to the preview and all the banners hanging around point to one culprit: Microsoft. Already noting how much Vista has ripped off of Tiger, Apple is refusing to let Microsoft steal Leopard's spotlight by building its features into Vista as well. So instead we got a few token features to whet our appetites.
Time Machine looks very cool, and as someone who has a very reactive backup policy (i.e., let hell break lose and then try to recover), it is a very welcome addition.
Mail's new Notes and To-Do features are intriguing and to have them built-in to an app I actually like (unlike iCal) will make me more likely to use them as well. For what it's worth, Mail still keeps it's unorthodox Unified + Bubbles theme from the Tiger version.
iChat has dropped it's brushed metal skin in favor of the Unified theme. The screen sharing abilities look great for troubleshooting and replace any need to have Apple Remote Desktop for most people. I can see a whole slew of new instructional video podcasts being produced with iChat's ability to share presentations if you can get even a presentation preview without connecting to another buddy. iChat also introduces tabbed chats in the form of a shelf that holds all your conversations.
Spaces is going to be the most touted feature by productivity gurus (Merlin Mann, et al) who have been resorting to apps that dim all but the top most app and full-screen modes in order to remove distractions. Instead of creating a new user or using these interface hacks to get away from it all, you can simply use another Space.
I'm not a big fan of Dashboard in its present state, but Web Clips (and fixing the ridiculous memory usage) might make me reconsider. Web Clips let you stick any website into a Dashboard widget via a button in Safari. For more intricate widgets, Apple is releasing Dashcode, an app for both novices and developers alike, to create widgets.
Not much is shown about Spotlight on the Leopard Preview site, which means there may be big changes coming that Apple doesn't want to reveal too soon. They did say that the new Spotlight will be able to search other Macs over a network and that you can use Boolean operators in searches. Also, the new Quick Look feature offers built-in previews of files so you don't have to launch, um, Preview.
New collaborative features were added to iCal, but again, not much is shown on the site so there's probably more coming down the line than what Apple has mentioned. A new button was added to the bottom-left corner, but the app has maintained the Brushed Metal theme and not much else looks to have changed.
Core Animation is a new framework for developers to do all the cool UI effects performed by Spaces and Time Machine. I think of Core Animation as Core Video for UI elements.
A few new Accessibility features and 64-bitness all over the place round out the 10 features outlined in the keynote. We'll surely get plenty of screen shots as soon as the developers install these on their machines.
Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Leopard, preview, Mac OS X, Mac, Mac Pro, PowerMac, Intel, Xeon, keynote, Steve Jobs
