WWDC Product Announcements

The XServe and Mac Pro news don't really impact me, but I'm excited about Leopard. It's looking really nice, and I want to know when it comes out!

Hopefully they'll get Core 2 into the rest of the product line over the course of the week.

They didn't mention, but obviously the new xservs will ship with the new Universal OS X Server.

OS X Server Leopard sneak peaks too.

I am very unimpressed with leopard. This isnt inovation Apple is doing in leopard. They are only bloating the currently-very-nice OS with pointless crap. Like everybodies email is going to recognize the stationaries feature? I seriously doubt it. Who spends that much time in DashBoard that they need a website in there? To me, this is extremely useless.

The virtual desktops look excellent. They're the only thing I missed after switching from Linux over to OS X. Sure, you can get third party ones, but I have a tendency to reformat and not reinstall software, so if it's built in, so much the better.

XCode 3 doesn't seem to be on ADC yet. Modern garbage collection!

Boot Camp blows... that's just ridiculous. I understand the need for it, for switchers that don't care for OS X (I guess?), but there is simply no need to BOOT a mac to Windows IMHO (anyone whose tried Parallels will probably agree... and VMWare, if its as good as its Windows couterpart, will fill the bill too.) I was hoping for a built-in compatibility layer, either like the way Classic worked, but for Windows, so a VM, OR just the ability to run Win apps w/o Windows.

And now the PPC to Intel transition is final. PPC is now a fully "discontinued" arch for Apple. Now that it's complete, hell will either freeze over or the Newton will make a come back.

I'll go get my skates sharpened.

I completely agree. The PDA is dead, people. An Apple smartphone won't be anything like the Newton, either.

Steve Jobs. . . my man. . . it can't be a super modern video editting bay machine without an Apple supported built in Blue-Ray HD DVD player (at the least) or burner (as expected). Guess I'll buy a machine in Spring of 2007 or later, whenever you include the burner. Without it, what's the point of iMovie HD?

Mutant_Pie

Apple's in the Blu-Ray camp, just so you know.

I'm hoping this was said BEFORE you saw the actual Keynote. Did everybody miss the part where Apple specifically said they're not going to list all the new features? That some will be kept secret? Come on people, this is all a side show compared to what's coming. Apple is playing with its cards very close to their chest, so that later they can take Vista head on. The possibilities are endless.

That being said, what we know is going to be released IS revolutionary. Frankly, you'd have to be shortsighted not to see that. Just because you expected Steve to do backflips, release native virtualization with full 3D support [immediately] and walk to the moon and back, doesn't mean what was demoed is “crap”.

The first question that hit me when I heard the name of the machine is when they'll complete the name game they started with the MacBook Pro and MacBook.

To me, the Mac Pro machines are way over-powered and way too expensive, yet the iMac and mini don't have the expandability options that I'd like to see. So when is Apple going to complete the lineup and give us the consumer-level Mac? No "Pro" (with it's $2,000 plus pricetag), no 'i', no 'e', no 'mini'. Just a Mac. A desktop box with nothing particularly fancy on the outside, but room inside for a few PCI cards, a couple of drives, four or more RAM slots, and a video-out port on back. That's all I've wanted since the G3 desktop was phased out. Is that too much to ask?

I dunno. I think I've reached that point where this stuff isn't so cool or neat to me anymore. When I saw the stuff demoed, my reaction was the same as the one I had when being shown betas of AOL 9.0 before it was released to the public - "when you can't innovate ... animate!". At this point of the game, eye candy is all that's really going to be coming from Apple with the useful thing here and there. Do any of these features make me want to upgrade from 10.4? Nope. Will I upgrade? Almost certainly as I really don't have a choice - I'll have to support it after all.

As for the Mac Pro - yawn. A powerful machine, but with a starting price of $2500 despite using intel chips. Yeah, I know that a comparably equipped Dell is in the same price point, maybe more (despite having more ram capacity and faster cpu's available), but that's NOT going to help kill the age old perception of "macs are expensive".

Then again, I wasn't too keen on the G5. Though, that goes back to my who rule of never spend more than $1500 on the computer itself. As davintosh brought up, a non pro machine with expandability would be just the ticket. A lower cost tower running a Core Duo chip would be an easy machine to put together and sell at a profit at a low price point.

I'm honestly not sure whether to be impressed or annoyed with the Mac Pro.

On one hand its pricing is actually amazing good considering what it is. The $2499 base price includes two Xeon 5150 CPUs which ala carte sell for about $750 each, and a similarly equipped Dell Precision 490 Workstation prices out to about $3,300. It's not an exact comparison, as Dell *only* bundles "Workstation" Quadro graphics cards, while Apple's starting card is a much cheaper consumer GeForce unit, but it's still pretty amazing bang-for-the-buck.

(So much for any doubts about Intel offering Apple *seriously* warped volume prices for CPUs to win out over AMD when switching time rolled around.)

On the other hand, well, geeze is that every overkill for any mere mortal. The perpetual annoyance that Apple refuses to offer a reasonably priced system that allows for video card upgrades shall continue to perpetuity, clearly. It's a really nice system for $2500, but that's a *lot* of money.

(Admittedly I'm warped by the fact I haven't spent any real money on a computer for five years, but none the less...)

--Peace

All I have to say about the Mac pro is: 2 optical bays. Took them long enough? 10.5 does look like its going to have a little bit more bloat, but not as much as tiger added with dashboard etc.

You complain about it, but I actually have tried it, and for those of us who have work to do in Windows, (even if that work is WOW sometimes). Its a good solution. You hold down option, choose mac or windows, and get a lightning fast boot into either OS. Brilliant! The speed of starting up and shutting down is so quick you dont mind booting, which means you dont have to pay the $80 dollars for parallels.

It was exactly like buying both a Mac and a PC. the Graphics rocked, the speed was great.

No idea what you think "blows".

>Without it, what's the point of iMovie HD?

getting things done NOW instead of waiting for the next big blue laser thing is the mantra of sanity in the gimme gimme gimme of WWDC and MW. My old G4 works great, I use it all the time. Do I want a new Mac Pro? Sure! Cant wait to start using it to make things. Dinking around leads to video work, and now we have kickass production machines that not only handle anything you throw at them non linear editing wise, they play windows games! haaaaaapppppyyyy!

Help me understand why 2 optical bays is important.

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and, btw

Darwin LIVES!

when Bluray comes out for Mac, one drive will be for CD/DVD and one for Bluray.

Why would that be useful? All the Blu-Ray drives that are out right now are combo blu-ray/dvd/cd drives.