Well, it happened just like I thought...
"The Steve Jobs show... he is demoing Panther, the new version of OSX, and at the last minute he turns to the audience and says "oh yeah, one more thing" and everyone starts buzzing and the curtain lifts and there it is the PowerMac G5 and Steve says "this is the fastest computer on Earth" and everyone believes him for just that minute and he shows Photoshop on a G5 killing a Pentium in a head-to-head test."
I guess it wasn't hard to predict :) But it happened, and it was cool. Steve Jobs remains the ultimate technical showman. And today he had a lot to show! If you're at all interested, please watch the movie!
Introducing Mac OSX 10.4 aka "Panther"
Steve iChats with Al Gore
The patented "One more thing..."
All new G5 system architecture
PowerMac G5
The Photoshop face off: G5 vs. Xeon
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Here's my summary:
Updates:
- Apple Stores - 48 opened, 15M visitors
- iPods - 1M sold (!)
- Apple Music Store - 5M songs in 8 weeks
New Mac OSX 10.4 aka "Panther"
- Now #1 Unix worldwide
- Safari 1.0 released
- New Finder! (Nice looking GUI)
- iDisk syncs automatically to .mac
- New Mail!
- Pixlet - new "studio quality" QT codec
- Fast user switching
- FontBook - app for managing fonts
- developer release available now
- $129 - by year-end
iChat audio / video conferencing
- "Video conferencing for the rest of us"
- integrates with AIM, .mac, and Rendezvous
- iSight camera / microphone - $149
Xcode - new development environment
- 5X faster
- GCC 3.3 compiler
- distributed builds
- incremental links, precompiler, "fix and continue"
- new GUI - looks Visual-Studio-like
PowerMac G5!
- 64-bit CPU from IBM
- up to 2 x 2GHz (SMP)
- 1GHz frontside bus
- Apple custom ASIC for bus management
- up to 8GB of 400MHz 128-bit DDR RAM
- AGP 8X graphics
- up to 500GB serial ATA disk drives
- firewire 400 / 800
- USB 2.0
- GB ethernet
- airport 802.11g
- bluetooth
- optical digital audio
- available in August
There were two highlights in my opinion. First and foremost, Apple is no longer dependent upon Motorola to remain competitive with Intel; they now have IBM in their camp. Second, the new development environment is going to make it easier for people to port stuff from Windows. Developers are the key to a successful platform, and Apple seems to be realizing this. It is no coincidence that these announcements were made at their developer's conference, not MacWorld.
Overall it was a very impressive performance, with some great new products. A new OS, a new development environment, a new hardware platform, and a cool video conferencing app thrown in for good measure.
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