ping
Mac Pro goes right to the top of my "must buy" list. Time to retire all of the PC hardware. ;)
The Mac Pro, with a suggested retail price of $2,499 (US), includes:
• two 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors
• 1GB of 667 MHz DDR2 fully-buffered ECC memory expandable up to 16GB
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM
• 250GB Serial ATA (3Gb/s) hard drive running at 7200 rpm
• 16x SuperDrive(TM) with double-layer support (DVD+R DL/DVD+/-RW/CD-RW)
• four PCI Express slots: one double-wide graphics slot and three full-length expansion slots
• ships with Mighty Mouse and Apple Keyboard
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.
I was hoping to buy a new Xserve today but sadly I must wait until October when they are available. I hate waiting.