Apple's Cat Fight is ON
Today starts the week-long Apple developer love-fest in San Francisco - the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). This year, Apple's at it again with the ever so well-known arrogance that has become the norm in everything from their advertising to their conference banners. Apple's latest poke at Redmond is the banner shown above (pics from Engadget). But you know that wasn't enough. Last year, Apple had a banner stating "Redmond, Start your Photocopiers." This year they built on that with the following:
You have to admire a company that is so bold as to put it out there like that. But then again, Redmond is sitting back laughing at Apple's market share. So who's the winner? I don't know, it will be interesting to see what Vista has in store. But I can tell you this much, Microsoft has their work cut out for them. OS X "Leopard" is showing some pretty promising and wicked things, and that's just what we know about. There are some secret features that Steve would not discuss during the keynote. Makes you stop and wonder.
The keynote didn't appear to be as exciting as others in previous years. Quite frankly, it was boring. The highlights are that Apple released some MONSTER desktops, now named the MacPro, which should just about be able to pilot you into the next solar system. These Quad Xeon 64-bit machines are INSANE. Aside from the ridiculous speeds, they finally added that 2nd optical drive bay and the ability to have 4 hard drives for a total storage capacity of 2 TERABYTES! That's just insane people.
Ushering in a new era of outstanding performance — and completing the Mac transition to Intel processors at the same time — the new Mac Pro introduces the 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processor to the Mac lineup. Running at up to 3GHz, it’s a state-of-the-art processor that — from day one — makes the Mac Pro one of the fastest desktop computers on the planet.
With the new build-to-order (BTO) options, there are more than 4 MILLION possible ways to configure your system. Talk about an IT administration nightmare! But hey - don't let it be said Apple doesn't give you choices. Just remember, if you BTO a system - there are NO RETURNS! Nice little gotcha that they don't make too obvious when you buy the system online.
Not to be outdone on the server side, there's a whole new breed of Xserves to play with. A Quad Xeon 64-bit nasty one at that.
The Xserve packs phenomenal power and industry-leading capabilities into a high-density, 1U rackmount server that fits easily into any network environment. And this award-winning UNIX-based server just got a 5x (1) performance boost over the Xserve G5, thanks to quad-core 64-bit Intel Xeon processing. Additional features include up to 2.25TB storage, two eight-lane PCI Express slots, dual onboard Gigabit Ethernet, and a combo drive. With all this, the Xserve provides the stability you need and the performance you want, starting at just $2999.
The "Leopard" preview is not too shabby. There are some much needed enhancements and upgrades made to Apple Mail, iChat and Spotlight. One of the newest features that will make a lot of people yell "Hot Damn!" is the Time Machine feature. This takes automated backup to a whole new level. You will now have the ability to literally roll-back files to previous states and even recover lost or deleted files from your system. This will be a life saver for many people and especially IT departments everywhere. Just as a little kick in Redmond's rear, Apple decided to make the Time Machine interface a little bit like the way Vista navigates through open windows. Just remember, Time Machine is worthless if the drive fails. You still need to think about backing up to external media or running an internal RAID 5 configuration with those extra drives you can put into the MacPro.
All-in-all, there's still quite a bit of work left to be done on Leopard. It will be Spring '07 before we really see the final product, and with any luck, Microsoft might just be able to pump out Vista by then. It will be really interesting to compare the 2 systems side-by-side. For now, we'll just have to be content with Tiger and some fast machines. Not too shabby.
