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MacOS Keynote Coverage
11223 writes: "MacJunkie has HTML coverage of the keynote." Cease and desist notes are being passed out like party favors ;) Actually they've officially announced the wacked out touchy mouse. The Cube is for real too: read more at
Apple's Site
Hmm... sort of like the NeXT monitor, that had power, video, sound, etc. all over the same cable.
Don't make it sound like it's innovative. Apple's just taking all the NeXT stuff and putting it in translucent smurf-puke blue containers. :-)
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
apple.com has pictures, too.
"Honey, I shrunk the supercomputer."
Cute.
later
Dan
The last time Joe Overclocker fried one.
The CPUs don't know what speed they've been run at.
If you fry your CPU overclocking (Which I've never seen, only heard of, and I've been overclocking for quite a while now) you can just take it back and tell them it failed suddenly.
Incidentally, the iMac (At least Rev.A) didn't have jumpers, but you could desolder the resistors pulling the lines on the PLL up/down and solder in new ones to overclock. Kind of amusing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Same goes for Linux - if your app isn't threaded... expect your other processer to have nothing to do with it. That's why I use BeOS with my dual machine...
Problem is that objectivity and technical know-how seem to be pretty hard to come by.
e m-to-be-an-example-of-their-innovation new mice either, right?
In other words you have Mac magazines that tell part of the story (running a very limited set of Photoshop filters as benchmarks) but basically know how to setup the Mac so it performs well (and since there are few tweaks to be done on 9x/NT/2K the PC should be setup like 99% of the systems out there). So a limited but fair comparison is done, though a more complete comparison is justified.
And on the other hand you have PC magazines who know how to tweak the PC for performance, but don't know jack about the Mac (ie simply assigning more memory to Photoshop increases performance by about 200% on many filters). As a result those results can't be trusted, nor is it acceptable to think that the average Mac user doesn't know how to assign more memory to his applications.
As for a mouse? So, uh, what are you using to click on buttons anyway? I assume you didn't get excited about Microsoft's HP-technology-licensed-to-MS-and-proclaimed-by-th
Moof!
Apple has released a new, buttonless, optical mouse. A new keyboard also. Full sized keyboard! Multiproc systems (2 G4s, 7 Gigaflops). PowerMac G4s are going to have 2 procs. Gigabit Ethernet on the motherboard. Halo will come out on Mac, as will many other Microsoft games (AOE2, etc.) 4 new iMacs. iMovie 2. I love MacWorld --It's more than a link. It's a way of life.
Thank you.
Now, out of curiosity (And I'm feeling a little defensive since my favorite chip (Athlon) has performed so poorly) is there any optimization of Seti@Home for Athlon? Is it mostly integer, or floating point?
I do know that K6 performs int math better than P54c or P55c, but that P3 performs int better than Athlon, or at least, that's the prevailing rumor. According to other rumors, 3dsmax renders something like twice as fast on ghz Athlon as it does on ghz P3.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But Apple trying to converge with other OS's? That'll be the day. I think that Apple, as a corporation, is probably equally as evil as Microsoft, it's just that they haven't been in a position to do too much evil. Apple's not evil you say?
- Get other vendors to come up with clones, then refuse to license the OS after they finally get up and running.
- Support QuickTime under windows, but do it in such a way as to make the software as annoying as possible. Put your big logo up at the front every time it's launched. Make your own wierd control panel. Add yourself to the desktop. Claim to want to play everything, but not work on half the stuff. And the only reason they do it at all is because if they didn't support windows nobody would use QT at all.
- Don't support QT on anything but Windows
- Ship horrible mice and keyboards with your products, and then go with the line ``you can replace them with something else if you want!'' instead of shipping a reasonable product.
And, perhaps most importantly,- All the FUD and lies they spread. Steve Jobs claiming that you can't buy a faster computer than a mac with the G4 -- besides the fact that you could get an UltraSparc or Alpha, many PII's at the time beat it out in most things. Telling people that MacOS was technologically superior to everything. Telling them that it was compatable and flexible. You can't even change the MTU without third-party software.
Don't get me wrong. MacOS is very easy-to-learn. They put some interesting stuff in their boxes. But I wouldn't trust the company. I especially wouldn't trust the company to converge with anything. I'll be watching Apple try to stay as much in ultra-proprietary-land as they can.-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
You mean they're finally catching up with everyone else?
Well, with the exception of the attached dialogs, mostly yes. The new open/save dialogs are really interesting. The pop-up menu has some preset locations like the Desktop and your Favorites folder (which are all contained under your user folder, like in Windows NT) as well as an extension of the old "Most Recently Used Items" features of the Classic OS's Apple Menu.
The multi-lever, New Finder-like mini-browser is new to the Mac, though, and I haven't seen it in any other mainstream OS. Chances are, though, that you still won't be able to rename & delete items like in the Windows dialog because Apple actually hold to the idea of KISS.
Also, attached dialogs are brand new. (Well, except for the fact that early Apple Lisa prototypes had a similar feature.) This means that a modal dialog for an application is firmly attached to that application's window, instead of floating off in it's own world like in Windows or, worse, taking control of input for all apps in older Mac applications.
All of this is done by Windows today and most probably by KDE and GNOME both in the not-so-far future (I'm betting on KDE, as much as I dislike it.)
Wrong. Windows will not let you drag and drop an icon of the harddrive to the desktop to peruse directly like volumes are mounted on the Classic Mac OS. While GNOME does let you have such icons on the desktop, their creation is not that straightforward. (I don't really know KDE, though.)
Also, the controls to switch views are single-click buttons, not menus like in everything else, including the Mac OS, which had iconic and list views before Windows 95 ever came out and long before GNOME and KDE set out to clone it.
The reason I posted all that info was because Mac-heads are all interesting in what shape the new GUI will take. Usability is the primary reason we own Macs, and it's important to us to see how things turn out.
I'm a little disappointed in some things. The Dock is a usability nightmare. Also, the introduction of live dragging and resizing removes one of the better UI cues in the Mac OS by not leaving an indication of how the window looked before you made changes to its size and position. A good UI should always give the user that chance to undo what they've done.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
One small machine for web, e-mail, DVD, CD, TV, games, and Office apps. When I was in school, my old 8086 PC was huge. Throw in a TV set, stereo, VCR, etc... We barely had room to sleep. (and we liked it that way, dag nabbit! You kids got it too easy!)
The under-rated G3 chip is damn fast, IBM still plans on using them for a lot of their heavy-duty servers. So far, photoshop is one of the few programs that takes full advantage of the G4 anyway, so unless you are doing a lot of graphics work, the iMac has plenty of power.
Linux zealots will of course want to know that the iMac runs their favorite free OS. Go to LinuxPPC.org for more info.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No expandable entry model? What about ::gasp:: the G4 tower!
Yes, that's right folks, they're still selling the regular tower! If you want one, GET ONE! Some people like cool-looking small packages and have lots of money; let them get what they want.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Or has Jobs taken the rejected NeXT cube and NEXTSTEP of yesteryear and reincarnated it under the brand name Apple. It looks like NeXT, it smells like NeXT (Mach, Dock, cube....), but they're not calling it NeXT. The system he said would change the world (it will probably be 10 years old when OS X gets released) is now back. Have people gotten smart, or is Jobs the best marketer on the planet?
Not that I know of. Sounds like those were just rumors.
Oh well, I'm on BeOS anyway, so all I have to do is click-and-hold for a right button click. I might just get one...
Mac OS uses a control-click, just about every Web browser lets you do a click-and-hold, and there's a freeware add-on to let you use a click-and-hold in the Finder as well.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Live Keynote Coverage from MWNY 2000
Ok, Steve is now on stage and introing the keynote. He's thanking the audience and saying that they have a ton of stuff to show. He's speaking that over 4 gigabits a second are going through akamai to quicktime viewers.
Ok, now Steve is talking about the mouse. Making a joke that "some people don't like it." So they are introducing a new mouse that looks shaped like a gel cap,"Making the worst mouse in the industry into the best." It is the highest precision optical mouse available. There is no obvious button on it. The whole continuous surface of the mouse is the button. It is designed to fit left or right hands of any size. Steve is saying they've been developing this for awhile. The new optical mouse will be standard across the whole desktop line. Steve is now showing the new keyboard to go to the new mouse. It has the same layout as the Apple Extended keyboard. It has volume keys and an eject disc button. This will also be standard across the whole desktop line. These upgrades will cost $50 each exclusively at the Apple Store and will ship in September. They are now going to show the TV commercials for the new mouse. The new mouse has Black Dog, the Zepplen song, in the background and shows the mouse zooming around on the typical Apple white set.
Jobs is now showing the product matrix and is starting with the PowerMac G4. He's spouting the usual spiel about the G4 and Velocity Engine and 3.5 gigaflops. In the amount of time it takes for the G4 to execute one instruction light has only moved 4 inches. "How does a 500 Mhz G4 stack up against a 1000 Mhz PIII?" Steve is inviting Phil Schiller on stage to find out. Phil is using a movie poster in photoshop to compare a Win2000 Ghz machine and 500 Mhz G4. Phil is saying how PS is optimized for the PIII and G4 so it makes for a good match up. The artist gave Apple the actions they used to make the poster and is running the list of actions on both machines. The G4 spanked the PIII severely. This set of actions is quite comprehensive and uses gradients, transforms, and several other different things. So the Mac finished ahead of the PIII by a considerable amount. "Ghz Pentium, ladies and gentlemen!" The PIII took 120 seconds, the G4 took 100 seconds. If you do the math, a 500 MHz G4 is as fast as a 1.2 Ghz Pentium. Steve is giving the usual "Mhz isn't the most important thing." Now Steve is talking about using 2 G4s at the same time. He's now showing a dual processor G4 compared to a 1 Ghz PIII running the previous movie poster test. The dual machine is running 2 500 Mhz G4s. The G4 is yet again soundly destroying the PIII. "Now we could wait for the Ghz Pentium or not, how about we move on." The dual processor machine took 61 seconds in this case. Doing the math, that is the equivalent of a 2 Ghz PIII. The dual processor machines will be available starting today, running at over 7 gigaflops. The 400 Mhz model will stay the same, the 450 model will now come with 2 450 Mhz G4s, and the high end model will come standard with dual 500 Mhz G4s. Every PowerMac model will now have gigabit ethernet on the motherboard. This is quite expensive and will save a lot of people a PCI slot. Phil is now going to demo this ethernet. This will save a lot of people a $1000 add-on. They're going to use video to demonstrate the speed, by showing the video over the network. Now Phil is editing video using FCP from one machine while the actual video is actually on the server. So Phil is playing this very large movie that takes 16MB/sec. The first model comes with 20 GB, the second 30, the third 40GB, and has space for more drives, this is quite a bit larger. The new models will fall into the same price as their predecessors. All of these models are available today. "We think this is going to be the best PowerMac ever."
Now Jobs is going to talk about Mac OS X (!!!!!!!!!). "It has great new plumbing." Mac OS X supports SMP (symmetric multi-processing. Jobs said that they are on track to release the public beta of OS X in early September and the final in early 2001. He says they don't have time for a full blown demo so he is just going to show Aqua for a bit. This is pretty standard stuff, saving windows and stuff. He's demonstarting the save dialog. He's talking about exposing the power of the interface when you want it, but keeping a simple. He is saying there have been some misconception of the finder and that it is still very Mac-like. He's demonstrating navigating the hard drive and viewing files. He's showing the browser mode of finding files and how you can preview mp3s, video, and just about anything else in the finder. Now he's showing the dock, talking about using it to hold miniaturized windows, applications, and documents. He's demonstrating his love for the dock by showing the slow motion movement of the window to the dock. He's just going to show one last thing, showing the MI:2 trailer in QT on Mac OS X. Actually, now he's going to show the bomb.app, an application that works its hardest to crash Mac OS X, he's also showing it while playing the movie trailer. The bomb applications just simply was quitted when it crashed, but the trailer kept going. Now he's talking about his great relationship with Adobe and invited the president up. "We have hundreds of engineers working on getting our applications over to Mac OS X." He is talking about making sure that the key apps are on Mac OS X. "Now we have the ultimate system," the president is saying, in reference to the MP G4 machines,"I can't wait to get my hands on one." Jobs said mock seriously,"Get him one." Now Jobs is talking about their improving relationship with Microsoft and working with them on the new version of Office. He invited the Mac business unit manager up. "It is the most Mac-like product we've released in a long time." It is supposed to increase compatibility with Windows and other Apple applications. The new application in the suite, Entourage (?) seems to be a calendar, adress book, etc. It seems a lot of these features are only available on the Mac, but the audience doesn't seem very pleased and didn't say "Only on the Mac", along with the MS rep even though he asked them too. Now they're looking at Excel. My stream briefly died, but all I seemed to miss were more Office demos, I'm sure every site will cover the new features a ton. You can now save PowerPoint as QuickTimes. Now they're showing an ad for Office 2001. Jobs said,"Best version of Office: on the Mac." Now Jobs is talking about Bungie and invited the VP of games for MS to come out and speak. Apple, Bungie, and Microsoft are getting together to form a games company, it sounds like every game made by Bungie and MS will also come out for Mac OS, but I'm not totally sure of that. So it seems Halo will still come out for Windows and Mac OS, which pleases me greatly.
Now he's talking about the iMacs, and their second birthday. In 2 years 7 million iMacs have been sold. Over 200 an hour are sold. Now he's giving the usual stats about new buyers, converts from Wintel, and how many use the internet, and how many edit movies. 89% are online. There are now 4 models, with the same award winning design. He's talking about all the current features, Harmon Kardon sound, fan-less. The first model is the entry level one, 350 Mhz G3, 7.5 gigabytes, comes in Indigo, and with 64MB of RAM. It of course comes with the new keyboard and mouse, and only costs $799(!!!!!). Model number 2 is the iMac DV. He's talking about FireWire and iMovie allowing people to make movies. 30% of iMac DV makers have made an iMovie. The second model comes in the colro Ruby, which is a deep red, as expected. The iMac DV is $999. The iMac DVSE is 500 Mhz G3, 128MB of RAM, 30GB HD, and DVD. You can also now get the DVSE in Snow, a white color, it appears, and costs $1499. So the new colors are Graphite, Snow, Indigo, Ruby, and Sage, no yellow or tangerine, it appears. The $799 model is the only one not available immediately, it will show up in September. I missed some of the iMac specs/prices, so check out the details later. Jobs is also talking about having Circuit City sell iMacs. Jobs is showing the new iMac ads, one has Elvis music, I don't know the second song, but it has Ruby in the lyrics. The third ad is for the green Sage iMacs, which is a very hip color. "It is not easy being green."
Now Jobs is talking about iMovie and how close it is to Apple. He's talking about how amazingly easy it is and how great the technology is. Now they're announcing iMovie 2. He said iMovie is the most popular video editing tool in the world. It has a new interface and a host of other new features and improvements. It has an Aqua instead of brushed steel interface. It has enhanced audio editing and new effects. The video is rather funny and is a video letter from Mr.Jobs to his parents apologizing for his absence. So, he's just demoing more features of iMovie, such as audio mixing.
Was the comment about Cease and desist orders suppose to be a joke? or serious? Because this story on themacjunkie mentions receiving one early this morning. The article it refers to has a picture (which they presume if fake) of the G4 Cube. If you check out this story it says the picture was removed because of the Apple Legal department.
Are these are serious, or is this one big joke because of what happened a week or so ago?
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If you had read the article, or any of several out on the web today, you would know that 1) It does not work like a touchpad. 2) It does not use a trackball for movement. 3) The picture at Insider is not what it looks like.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Do you remember that first post back in the first Slashdot report about the iMac? The one that said nothing but "yikes, how ugly"?
Well, that was me. I really thought that the iMac looked cheesy, stupid, childish. And above all, it looked like *cheap* plastic. It really seemed like a very very bad idea to me.
Then there was one machine for real at the local Apple shop. Hmm, not bad. Those photographs weren't just to the real thing, this machine actually looks quite nice. Still a bit childish, but those Apple designers do have a point, somehow. This really is a new idea.
Then, suddenly, the new iMac translucent coloured plastic design appeared everywhere. There were iMac lookalikes, iMac-styled mice, CD boxes, whatever. And most of them sucked, while Apple's original design still looked superiour compared to the copycats.
And good, affordable USB devices started popping up everywhere. Designed for the Mac, working on a Wintel-PC, as well (not the other way round, for a change). My x86-machine's current trackball was made for the iMac. Apple left a mark, technology wise, by fully embracing a technology that hadn't been supported seriously in the x86 world until then.
Started to think about buying an iMac for my parents, who still run their company billing on an old 486. They are smart, but they don't care for technology. And mum is crazy for good design. Perfect examples of the target consumer group. Didn't buy one, since no affordable financial software for Macs was available that supports our local German billing rules.
Then, the iMacs without a fan started to appear. That really sparked my interest. The loud machine currently standing on my desktop, I really hate it, just for its noise. I want a silent workstation computer above all, I use a server for performance-critical applications.
Now that Linux runs on it, I am thinking about buying an iMac, too. And the most frightning reason: One of the main reasons for wanting to buy an iMac is that they now feature my favourite colour!
Yes, Apple's design strategy has convinced me now.
I wish that an x86 company would come up with a box that is as good and as complete as the iMac. There are possible competitors by Fujitsu, by HP and by IBM among others, but still, none of those machines seems to be as well thought out as the iMac.
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You may like my a cappella music
Spoken like a person who doesn't have a 5 year-old using the computer. :-) Seriously, I did have some concerns about the slot-loading CD/DVD on the iMac DV, but it actually does seem to work just fine. And it does have the benefit that even a 5-year-old knows how it works.
Now, what I *do* fear is a vertically mounted slot like this one is the high probability of a toddler "mailing" things. That's also possible, I suppose, with a horizontal slot, but that could only get worse.
Well, the inability to read or use any of those business card disk things is a positive feature, in my opinion. :-)
Babar
You mean they're finally catching up with everyone else?
I know this looks like flamebait, but it is actually nice to see them join the team and come in for the big win. Mind you, Windows still screws things up badly when a window is bigger than the screen, especially if it's a lot bigger. But the Amiga with MUI-GUI apps did this right, well, years and years ago. Everything else here windows already does and has done for aeons, so I don't know what the big deal is.
All of this is done by Windows today and most probably by KDE and GNOME both in the not-so-far future (I'm betting on KDE, as much as I dislike it.)
The best piece of news to come out of this conference from a non-mac-head standpoint is that the SMP G4s will be reasonably priced. This makes me happy(tm). As we all know, the PC/x86 architecture is deficient, and I'd like a nice fast PPC arch to run unix on without having to wait for ia64/itanium.
And really, I wish Apple would just get it over with and put up a big fat webpage about their new mouse. I'm tired of all the speculation, I want to know what's going on here.
One last parting shot at Apple: You should be ashamed of yourself for threatening legal action against the rumor sites. You are doing a disservice to the very people that keep other people caring about your locked-in proprietary platforms. Only an idiot points a gun at his own foot, intentionally turns off the safety, and pulls the trigger. You're bad people. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Let the negative moderation begin.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And of course, the show the SMP mac doing the ultamate benchmark... Seti@HOME!!! Pic here, reload a couple times if you geta 403 forbidden.
Apple issues threats over revealing Apple "secrets"
Heres a clue for Apple... When the photos are bogus (As AppleInsiders are) you can't sue...
Thies photos are clearly AppleInsiders property not Apples...
Now Apple can be sued for legal harrasment...
This is why people don't run around suing for this stuff... You can only conferm rummers this way as you CAN NOT send threatoning letters unless the rummor is REAL.
Apple however has taken to threatoning anyone reporting to have pictures of rummored hardware even if the pictures are totall bogus.
This is bad legalisticly...
MacJunkie may wish to sue (As they said the box Mac was fake...) AppleInsider would probably want to crawl under a rock and die first
I don't actually exist.
OSx public beta in September! This is actually a disappointment; they had planned to release it today.
Ummmm, no they didn't. Maybe the rumor sites planned on it being released today, but Apple never said anything about it. I suspect it will be available to the public at Seybold SF (August 28).
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
In answer to your question, the entire sound system was designed and built at HK's lab. The speakers, the amp, and the optional iSub USB subwoofer, are all Apple-branded components made by Harmon Kardon.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Please to be trying this in english. I understand if your first language is not english, but if you have trouble with it, go for simpler language. I doubt you'll insult anyone and your meaning will come across much clearer.
A less overall average hour per work unit? Are you trying to say that it spends less hours generating a work unit? If so, how long goes it take a PC in the same price range to complete a work unit?First of all, PIII/Athlon is not appropriate, as the two have differing speeds. If you are doing a lot of FP and you're not afraid to throw down more instructions than a P3 can handle, you will see a large speed increase when the code is executed on the Athlon. Second of all, you said "compared to a 1 Ghz PII/Athlon not on command line..." but still have not said how long it takes such a machine (Or, such machines) to complete a work unit. Isn't that an important datum?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://www.apple.com/powermaccube/
'nuff said
Absit Invidia
I wouldn't trade my tower for anything, but then I'm not part of the demographic that the iMac is for.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Oh my fucking God, that's just nuts.
It's only 8 inches on a side, and the entire internal pops out of the plastic case.
If you are doing work that requires G4 power, you probably want the expandablity of a tower anyway.
On the bright side, the iMac is the ultimate dorm room machine. A fast computer, a DVD player, Harmon Kardon sound... pick up a USB TV tuner and you have a complete home entertainment system that fits on the desk underneath your lofted bed. Were I an 18 year old kid again, I would be all about this thing.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No buttons might be interesting, don't know how gamers will react to the no-button thing,
It's amazing that they still haven't offered a 2-button mouse, or even a two no-button mouse, but what amazes me most is the absence of the greatest addition to input in the past 15 years:
THE SCROLL WHEEL*
I could never be without one again.
*unfortunate proof that Microsoft does occasionally come up with a good idea or two.
There's another macjunkie page here, which reveals that there will be an 8"-on-a-side cube. Their product grid is now six-squared.
Whoo-hoo!
New Input Devices
New optical mouse. Still one-button only, but the entire surface is the button. Will be standard on all Macs. This is not the touchy, squeezing, twiddling mouse that everyone has rumors about, and it looks radically different from previously posted pictures.
New 108 key keyboard based on the old Mac Extended Keyboard design. Includes volume and eject keys along with the standard arrow. Both keyboard and mouse will be sold on the Apple Store as seperate components for $59 each.
Pentium vs. G4 Showdown
Used a 500 MHz G4 vs. a 1 GHz Pentium III with Altivec and SSE enhanced filters, respectively. Did the standard Photoshop test, this time rendering the "Inspector Gadget" movie poster. G4 = 100 sec, P3 = 124 sec.
They did the same showdown again with a dual-G4 machine vs. a single P3 machine. Note that Photoshop is one of the few Mac apps designed to take advantage of Apple's asymmetric multiprocessing API. Until Mac OS X, not all apps will be able to take advantage of this boost. This is a bit of a stacked comparison, but not bad for an OS without SMP. 61 seconds on dual G4.
New machines
Yes, they are formally announcing dual-G4 machines today. The 400 MHz model is going to still be single processor machines, but the 450 MHz and 500 MHz models will only be able to be bought with dual-G4s.
They are also including Gigabit Ethernet as a standard option on the motherboard for all G4 machines. To show off Gigabit Ethernet, they played a Final Cut Pro movie with the uncompressed video source being streamed from the server. They also showed scrubbing through it from the server. The showed smooth playback at over 16 Mb/sec, and showed good recovery after the cable was pulled mid-playback and replugged.
New machines will include 20 GB, 30 GB, and 40 GB drives respectively. All of these new features will be sold at the same price as the old machines.
Mac OS X
Public Beta is on track for September. Also on track to release in 2001. No time for a full-blown demo, but do show off a the new UI. They showed off the following:
3rd Parties
Bruce Chizen from Adobe came and raved about the PowerMac G4 SMP. Nothing of consequence was said, though.
Kevin Browne of MS comes to talk about the new Office 2001 for Mac. Added a new application to Office called Entourage, which is apparently an Outlook replacement.
Brought up MS's VP of Games to talk about Bungie. MS and Apple are teaming up with Bungie to being bringing their entire line to the Mac, including older MS games. They transitioned to talking about the X-Box and brought up the CEO of Bungie. He mentioned their origins as a Mac company and confirmed that, yes, Halo WILL still be coming out for the Mac. Wow, this game is going to be sweet. Very cinematic.
iMac
Talked a little about the 2 year history of the iMac. 3.7 million iMacs sold in 2 years. That's about 5000+ per day, 200+ per hour, or 1 every 18 seconds. Did the demographic breakdown.
4 New iMac models:
Yesterday, it was announced that Circuit City will be selling iMacs. Furthermore, the digital cameras and iMacs will be sold side-by-side now. Showed off the new commercials for the new iMacs. (I love the choice of "It's Not Easy Being Green" for the Sage machines. "White Room" was also pretty funny for Snow.)
iMovie 2
New user interface, intended to be easier to use. Enhanced audio editing and special effects. They adopted some Aqua GUI elements. (Why, oh why, can't they use their own Appearance Manager?) They showed the drag and drop functionality in iMac's timeline and clip manager panel. They also showed off some new audio functionality. Unfortunately, after Jobs actually got started working, the audio for the webcast got cut, so I can't really tell all of what he was doing. They did show off how you could now have clips transition into sepia tones.
iMovie 2 is free with all desktop Macs -- but what about the entry-leve iMac? For people who aren't buying a new machine, there will be a $49 download available in August.
iTools
Talked some about iDisk and using iMovie to create movies and uploading them to iDisk along with pictures. You can use Apple's homepage templates to create personal photo and movie galleries. Did a demo of doing this.
The Cube
They are expanding their product line to create a new area between consumer and pro. The new 8" cube Mac is for real. The PowerMac G4 Cube has:
I'll be damned. The Apple Insider picture is pretty close to what it looks like. It's almost identical to the picture with the two dark screws. The slot-loading DVD drive is in the top, and the connectors are on the bottom. To open, you turn it upside down, push on a pop-up handle, and slide it all out by the handle. The handle locks it in place (and comes with a Kensington lock). Access was a key issue. (Side note: It seems to have an internal grill, so it seems that pencils aren't a case, but don't you dare put a coffee cup on it.) Comes with two little spherical Harmann speakers.
Apparently, the new 17" monitor was also dead on. The front screen is flat, and the graphite enclosing is clear. It has 2 USB ports, costs $499, and has a single cable carrying power, video, and USB. Also, they debuted new Studio Display models - 15" & 22", both with 1 cable for all needs. They say that it is compatible with the older models and not just the cube.
The wrapped up the keynote with a commercial filled with interviews about the new cube. Steve then gave free optical mice to all the keynote attendees! Sweet!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I think you mean Logitech, not Microsoft.
Apple is in the process of changing their site now... here is the (as-yet incomplete) link to the cube's website.
Did anyone else immediately think of Star Trek when he grabbed that handle and pulled?
All that's needed now is a twist first. Oh and memory of little slivers of clear plastic.
The cube doesn't have a fan, so even if there weren't the little matter with the "toaster"-loading DVD, it would be a Very Bad Thing(tm) to stack them.
About that DVD... Has anyone ever seen a vertically-mounted disc drive that didn't suck? I thought that was an issue with the 20th Century Mac that the drive couldn't be faster than 4x because of stability.
And then there's the whole matter of slot-loading drives to begin with. They suck, they're stupid, and they don't work. Has Apple never heard of card-discs? Anything other than standard 5" completely circular discs are useless on these things. I wonder if DVD-RAM is available on the Cube? Last I checked, the DVD-RAM drive Apple offered was tray-loading. Otherwise I'd be apt to cut into the faceplate just to get a "real" drive installed. And put a fan in for good measure.
Damn, everyone there got one of those new mice. Why am I not attending these conferences?
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
AFAIK, Apple's been boasting all along about the G4 (Amusing since they didn't make it or anything; Their part in PowerPC is that they use the chips) runs teraflop speeds. The implication is that the G4 is actually better at FP (largely due to the Altivec vector processing system, IIRC) than the x86 chips. Unfortunately, even if I could find SPECfp2000 scores for the G4, I can't get them for the Athlon, because AMD doesn't have them on their site.
BTW, a 686 is a PPro. Calling a Pentium II a 686 is probably not unreasonable, but the new core in the P3 (With SIMD, mind you) kind of takes it out of that world. The Athlon is even further.
Maybe one of these days I'll run around the office and put SETI@Home on everything one weekend, and report the statistics. We don't have any G4s that I'm aware of but we do have a bunch of P2, P3, Celeron, a couple Athlons, and some iMacs. However, the G4 is the real chip to watch because of the Altivec hardware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(1) How much more performance would you get out of dual-500mhz processors than dual 450s? Enough to justify the $1,000 leap in price on the packaged machine (which admittedly has a lot of other cool goodies)?
(2) Why would you buy the cube when the dual processor G4 is only $200-odd more?
D
----
That said, Apple has put a lot of work into the color on their LCD's - I'm not a graphics expert, but when they first came out PEI, CGW, et. al. all talked about their color software. And they all mentioned how good the viewing angle is on this one.
The cube is another cute computer with a bit more power than the iMac. Personally, what I'm wowed with is the MP G4's because I as a programmer know what BSD goodness will do for MacOS in terms of multithreading.
Sad to say, they're all too expensive for me. I'm no longer a Macintosh user (I run BeOS now on a Dual Pentium II 400) but am still following closely, because MacOS X has me excited.
Personally, I think that Intel should be screaming at Adobe for not porting Photoshop to BeOS... Photoshop was definitely crippled in the benchmarks by Windows. (That dual OptiPlex number on the website should have been much lower, if it weren't sabatoged by Windows NT's piss-poor SMP).
Frankly, though, I do wonder if you're legit - the Apple displays, with a proper color kit (there are USB ones out now) should do great color for you. Apple caters to the photo-and-publishing people, and their displays show it.
Can anyone confirm or deny this? It would be interesting to know if it's true.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
more from: http://www.macmedianetwork.com/mwny/index.shtml
Now Jobs is talking about iTools and how easy it is to make a homepage. The new iTools has more templates and features. He whipped out a website in iTools real quick to show how easy it is. He's demoing the photo album in iTools. It now allows drag and drop reordering of pictures. Now he is making a page to show an iMovie. He's talking about being able to build a very extensive website after dinner in just a few minutes.
He's gone back to the product matrix and is reviewing what they've gone over. "But there's even one more thing..." He's talking about their product strategy and how successul they've been for the past 2.5 years, but now they are expanding their product strategy with a new desktop. The new desktop will be a G4, up to 1.5 gigs of RAM, up to 40 gigs of storage inside the machine, ethernet, USB, firewire, Airport. This machine is much smaller than a G4, being an 8" cube, 1/4 the size of a G4. It doesn't have a fan. It looks totally chic and would look most excellent to an Apple LCD. It has slot-loading DVD on top, toaster style, apparently they've gotten around the 8x barrier that vertical CD players used to have. It is very easy to access the insides for upgrades, so those who worried about that, don't. It has ball speakers, which are very hip. It costs a cool $1800, so not really very cheap. The models are available in early August.
Now he is showing the new displays. The new 17" CRT display with Diamondtron and is totally flat. It has a brilliant clear enclosure. It has 2 USB ports built into it. The display is powered by the computer, just one cable carries video, USB, and power. One cable replaces 3. It costs $499. The next display is the 15" LCD. 2 USB ports again, and powered from the computer just like the CRT, and only costs $999. The last is the new Cinema Display, which uses the video/USB/power over one cable. Now they are talking to Apple employees about how great the new stuff is.
Apple's entire site is 403 at this point, too. They started to upload the PowerMac Cube site, then killed the permissions so nobody could view it before it was done.
More to the point, apple supports a windows-ripoff context menu with the second button, or (I believe) control-click... or was it option? In any case, you can get the functionality without having a two button mouse, or with it. That much is fairly keen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Simple. Set up your mom with a 386 and spend all your evenings on the phone helping her figure out how to dial out ("hey son, what does Kernel Panic mean?"), or get her to buy an iMac, and wait for her to send you an e-mail telling you about the spiffy web page she built. Your call.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Entire site is now 403 forbidden.
Everybody in the auditorium was given one of the new mice...they were stashed under the seats!
:-]
Bastards.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Now if I can just get my new work to shell out 10 or 15 grand for a really kick-ass mac for me:)
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Not all that strange. Apple did a similar thing with the "AV" monitors a while back; one cable for video/ADB. It was a stupid idea then and I still think it was a stupid idea. Especially combining power -- isn't there a thing in UL about not combining high-voltage with low-voltage in a single assembly?
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
I just realized how cool the new mouse is.
Not necessarily how useful, just how cool. Absolutely no moving parts. Nothing at all. No buttons, no triggers, no ball.
Wow
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
The world is converging in a non-Microsoft way. It's good to see the simple and common sense architecture of unix get so much gravity (BeOS, Mac OS X, *nix). The only thing I wish, and perhaps I say this out of ignorance, is the *nix catch up with the threading and media capabilities of "modern" operating systems.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The cube is real. I'll be jiggered.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I don't know how many caught it, but they gave out *free* mice to those in the convention hall. Under each chair was a special 'apple' card, that entitled you to one free mouse as you left the hall.
:/ ]
- just another cosmic ray -
[ who watched on the satellite feed
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