Apple shows Leopard's spots

SAN FRANCISCO--Apple Computer on Monday introduced the Mac Pro, the company's first Intel-based professional desktop, and also gave developers a preview of Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.

CEO Steve Jobs showed off the shiny metal desktop, which will start shipping immediately, as he kicked off the Worldwide Developer Conference here. The Mac Pro offers a similar casing to the Power Mac G5 that preceded it, but replaces the older PowerPC processors with two dual-core Intel Xeon chips as well as space for two optical disc drives and up to four hard drives. The standard $2,499 configuration includes 1GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card, a 250GB hard drive and a SuperDrive that can burn CDs and DVDs.

"Today the Power Mac is going to fade into history," said Jobs, wearing his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans. At several points, Jobs handed off keynote duties to several lieutenants, including Senior Vice President Philip Schiller, who showed of the Mac Pro.

Apple didn't offer a full look at Leopard, but instead showed off a top 10 of new features that the operating system will sport when it debuts next spring. Among the features Jobs showed off was a Time Machine option that automatically backs up a Mac. Other features include new video conferencing options, improved Mail and the inclusion of the Front Row media software and PhotoBooth picture- taking programs that previously have only been available on new Macs.

Jobs led the attendees back through the major enhancements to the Mac OS X operating system, including the most recent version code-named Tiger, or Mac OS X 10.4.

Apple previews Mac OS X Leopard featuring Time Machine, Spaces, enhanced Mail & iChat, and more

Monday, August 07, 2006 - 02:52 PM EDT

Apple today previewed Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, the sixth major version of Mac OS X, to its third party developers. Leopard, scheduled to ship in spring 2007, extends Apple’s leadership in software innovation with groundbreaking new features, including Time Machine, a revolutionary new way to automatically back up and restore everything on your Mac, and Spaces, an entirely new way to instantly switch between groups of applications required for various tasks. Leopard also includes industry-first advancements in Mail and iChat, including Stationery, Notes and To Dos in Mail; and Photo Booth-style effects, the ability to “place” yourself in any photo or video as the backdrop for your chat, and live presentations of iPhoto slideshows, Keynote presentations and videos in iChat.

“Breakthrough features like Time Machine and Spaces are good examples of how Mac OS X leads the industry in operating system innovation,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, in the press release. “While Microsoft tries to copy the version of OS X we shipped a few years ago, we’re leaping ahead again with Leopard.”

With its unique ability to let users travel back in time to find deleted files, applications, photos or other digital media, Time Machine is a revolutionary way to protect a consumer’s digital life. Time Machine automatically backs up everything on the Mac to an external hard drive or Mac OS X Server. In the event a file is lost, users can search back through time using an intuitive time-based visual display to find and then instantly restore the file. With one click, Time Machine can restore anything from a single file or photo to everything on a Mac.

Spaces is an intuitive new way to group applications required for a given task into a “space,” then instantly switch between different spaces to bring up the specific applications required for that given task. Users can get a bird’s eye view of all their Spaces and choose where they want to go next with just one keystroke or click of a mouse.

With Leopard’s iChat, Apple takes communicating with friends, family and colleagues to an entirely new level. iChat now makes video chats more fun with the ability to use Photo Booth effects and put images and videos in the background. iChat Screen Sharing enables users to share their desktops with others to work together in real time on an activity, such as editing an iPhoto book, or helping a buddy get the most out of their Mac. With iChat Theater, users can share an iPhoto slide show, a QuickTime movie or a Keynote presentation within an iChat window.

Leopard’s Mail includes breakthrough new features that have never been seen before in a Mail application. Mail Stationery includes more than 30 customizable stationery designs to create email messages enriched with beautiful photos and graphics. Templates include photo collections, invitations, birthday cards and other greetings that look great when received on either a Mac or a PC. With Mail Notes, users can quickly jot down thoughts and ideas, add graphics and attachments and use the familiar Mail application to manage them like an email message. In addition, To Dos can be created from any email message or note and viewed in iCal or sent to friends and colleagues. RSS news feeds now appear in Mail, allowing users to receive news in their inboxes, receive notifications when new stories appear and use Smart Mailboxes to organize news about the same topic in one place.

Additional features in Leopard include:

full native 64-bit support that allows applications to take complete advantage of 64-bit processing while maintaining full performance and compatibility for existing 32-bit Mac OS X applications and drivers
enhancements to Boot Camp, Apple’s innovative technology that was previewed as a public beta in April 2006, making it possible to run Windows natively on Intel-based Macs
Front Row: now available with all new Macs to play back digital content, including video Podcasts using the simple Apple remote
Photo Booth: Apple’s fun-to-use application that lets users take quick snapshots with an iSight video camera, add entertaining visual effects with the touch of a button, and share them via email
iCal 3 with group calendaring capabilities, event drop box, and standards-based CalDAV support
improved Spotlight searching that’s even faster, provides richer previews, and lets users search across network mounted folders on other machines
a new Movies Dashboard widget for movie times and Web Clip for clipping any part of a web page as a live widget
new parental controls including curfews, time limits and remote administration
Core Animation, a new graphics technology that makes it easy to create stunning visual effects and animations
major enhancements in Universal Access, including improvements in VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader
security enhancements including anti-phishing protection in Mail and Safari, and an automatic firewall that limits network resources available to an application
new development tools, including Xcode 3 with full 64-bit support, DashCode, an easy way to create new Dashboard widgets without writing a line of code, and Xray, for optimizing application performance.

I posted this earlier on a now-dead thread:

Yossarian reporting live from WWDC.

1. "Time Machine", upon first inspection, ROCKS! This is exactly what I've been looking for, both for myself and for the people I (unofficially) support. Just get them to buy an external drive or two, and let it rip - don't sweat any details.

2. Steve Jobs was only up on stage half the time. Many of the demos were given by other Apple employees. I wonder if he's starting to wind down things and let others take the reigns. He seemed otherwise healthy.

3. Lots of ripping on Vista and how it cribbed its look, feel, and features from Mac OS X. Presenter (some French guy, not Jobs): 'When we put up banners at WWDC04 saying "Redmond, start your photocopiers", were were just joking!!!' (Huge applause).

4. New Quad Xeon ($2500) looks good. You get ~1.8x faster performance than previous quad G5, but since power is lower, more space in case for dual optical, quad drive bays, more space for big PCI-express graphics cards. Lots of emphasis on how Apple is considerably cheaper than Dell.

5. With "Web clippings", any section of a website now becomes a Widget. No mention of Widgets on the Desktop, though!

6. Enhancements to iChat range from useful (tabbed chats, and "iChat Theater", where one can show a presentation while you're still on-screen), to silly (Photobooth effects, automatic still or video backdrops.)

7. 64-bit all the way around, side by side with 32 bit apps. No special OS, no special mode, and now apps with a GUI can be 64 bit as well. 8. Some things were MIA, like a new Finder. But on the other hand, Steve started off saying, "MS copied us so completely with Vista that we're keeping a lot of things secret until later".

One other thing: I just took a close-up look at the 'Mac Pro'. The memory's a bit funky: the dimms sit in two riser cards, it's a lot easier to change RAM. But Apple's added little finned heat-sinks to their DIMMs, and reccomend 3rd party suppies do same.

For those that say Apple computers are just to expensive....

New Mac Pro a bargain?

The base price of the new Apple Mac Pro Quad Desktop ($2,499) might have some people reeling from sticker shock. But during the keynote speech today at WWDC, Apple compared the Mac Pro to an equivalent Dell workstation and found the Mac to be much cheaper. We figured we’d check their math, and sure enough, when compared to a similarly-equipped Dell system, the Mac Pro comes out looking like an absolute bargain.

Take the Dell Precision Workstation 690, for instance. When kitted out with two Intel Xeon 5150 2.66GHz dual-core processors, 250GB hard drive, 2GB of 667MHz RAM, and 16x DVD burner, you’ll end up paying $3,637. That’s over $1,100 more than the base Mac Pro, which has a similar configuration. And unlike the Mac Pro, which can run Windows XP via Boot Camp, I wouldn’t expect to see Mac OS X supported on this Dell any time in the near future.

Jeff C., Editor
August 7th, 2006 | Jeff

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