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All-New PowerBooks, Web Browser Featured at Macworld
The 17" model is 1440x900 resolution, 16:10 aspect ratio, G4/1GHz, SuperDrive, GeForce4 440 Go/64MB, and all the same ports, with the addition of line in and FireWire 800 (in addition to FireWire 400). It is less than 1" thin, and 6.8 lbs., and has fiber-optic lightning for the keyboard activated by ambient light sensors. It will be available next month for $3,300.
The 12" version is 4.6 lbs., and is smaller than the iBook in every dimension. It's 1024x768, G4/867, GeForce4 420 Go/32MB, and is AirPort-ready ($99 extra). It is $1,800 for a combo drive model, $2,000 for a SuperDrive model, and will be available in two weeks.
Both models sport the new AirPort Extreme (802.11g), which is 54Mbps, up from the 11Mbps of AirPort (802.11b). The base stations and clients are fully compatible with the old AirPort, handle 50 users, and support both wireless bridging (to extend the range by adding more stations) and can act as a USB printer server.
Jobs also introduced Safari, a new Mac OS X browser based on the KHTML rendering engine from KDE (and Apple will publish changes they've made to it). There's nothing especially great about it -- it's a web browser -- except that, unlike most other browsers, it is expected to be fast and work properly, as well as be fully integrated into Mac OS X. The web is a killer app, but pretty much all web browsers suck; Apple hopes to give us something that doesn't suck in Safari. It is a free download for the beta, starting today. This story was posted using Safari. W00p.
iPhoto 2 has been revamped, with iTunes integration (access to playlists, tracks, even searching) for slide shows; one-click enhance of photos; a retouch brush; archiving to CD/DVD; and more. iMovie 3 has added chapters, the "Ken Burns Effect" (panning through still images), and precise audio editing. iDVD 3 has added a ton of quite cool themes, which will look great the first few times you see them.
They are -- along with iTunes -- bundled with all new Macs beginning January 25 as "iLife". All but iDVD will be freely available online, contrary to previously published reports. The entire bundle of four apps will be available for retail purchase for $50.
For sale today at $99 is another new app, Keynote, which is the presentation software Jobs has been using for over a year for his own presentations. It includes all sorts of flashy features like textures and Quartz-powered 3D transitions, and can import and export PowerPoint, as well as export to PDF and QuickTime. It has an open file format (using XML).
Jobs also introduced Final Cut Express, a stripped-down version of Final Cut Pro, for $300, and noted other prominent third-party software recently released for Mac OS X: QuickBooks, Director, and DigiDesign Pro Tools (later this month). He noted that the number of native apps for Mac OS X jumped from 2,000 to 5,000 in 2002.
Meanwhile, the number of users of the OS went from 1.2 million to 5 million last year, and he expects the number to jump to 9 or 10 million in 2003.
Update: 01/07 19:37 GMT by Jamie (also posted with Safari): And thanks to the several Slashdot readers who pointed out a great but unannounced product: X11 (aka the X Windows System) for Mac OS X. It's in Public Beta right now. Great to see this, an Apple-supported X is greatly needed. I don't know why Jobs didn't at least mention this, it would have gotten quite the round of applause I'm sure.
Did you just say you can't wait to get a life? Heh, the RDF must be stronger than I thought...
Didn't Microsoft get in trouble for this?
Since nobody was talking about Mozilla, I don't know what you're on about, but anyway...
tabs are poorly implemented
In what way?
the whole mozilla render engine sucks
The WHOLE engine? Really?
doesn't cache pages very well
No problems here...
if I want to open a new tab I have to ctrl-click or go use a fscking menu, this is also slow and make me want a keyboard shortcut
Ctrl-t is your friend. You can't have used it much if you don't know that one.
and there is no way to open a tab in the background
Preferences/Navigator/Tab Browsing/Load links in background. My, that was hard, wasn't it?
in my not very humble opinion, mozilla is a terrible implementation of a web browser and its bretheren are not any better either.
You mean "in my uninformed and completely worthless opinion", I think, as it looks like you haven't bothered learning even the most rudimentary features.
Translation: we realised that we had no chance of building our own layout engine or javascript engine, so we had to choose between Gecko/Spidermonkey and KHTML/KJS. The Mozilla technologies were better, but we could understand the KDE ones. In particular, Mozilla is full of cross platform code that makes it harder to adapt and integrate into our OS, and it relies upon its own portable runtime and rendering layers. When we started this project, Chimera didn't exist.
The issue isn't that Apple can choose KHTML, it's more a case of why.
Other people have pointed out the corporate aspects, that Apple might not like the fact that AOL has tight control over the direction that Mozilla is headed simply by sheer weight of numbers of developers. I'd like to bring up a different reason: have you actually had a look at the Gecko source recently? It has turned into a bloated, crufty mess with many peculiar hacks to satisfy Mozilla's cross-platform nature (it seems NSPR/XPCOM is not quite abstracted enough as portability code has crept in elsewhere) and to work around deficiencies in the W3C specifications. For a browser that was started again from scratch because it was felt the previous version (remember the Netscape 5.0 code dump? ugh) was way too bloated and crufty to continue work on it, that's very sad.
In contrast, KHTML has stayed pretty lean, partly because I think Qt is a better GUI platform abstraction than NSPR/XPCOM, and partly because it has had to due to the tiny size of the development team: with only a handful of people contributing code, the code needs to be as clean and obvious as is humanly possible simply for the project to survive. It will be interesting to see whether KHTML can continue to be so lean with the addition of a bunch of full-time Apple developers onto the team.
For all the bitching about KHTML's CSS compliance, I probably ought to point out that whilst it's not necessarily quite as good as Gecko (although I have a nice testcase using floats that Gecko has never got right but KHTML aces) it's (in my tests) better at CSS than any version of IE or Opera so far.
It's been fashionable to diss anything other than Gecko since Mozilla hit 1.0. I think that needs to stop: not everyone likes Gecko, both users and developers, and it certainly is not inherently superior, despite its current marginal lead in standards compliance (and lets not forget how it now trails in performance). Open Source does not need to get behind one browser, in exactly the same way that it doesn't need to get behind one desktop either, or one word processor or one toolkit. Choice is good, and rabid Mozilla fans should be especially conscious of this, because Moz would be toast otherwise thanks to IE.
It's also tragic that I only feel confident enough to say this without getting modded down into oblivion in an article that is so obviously a loss for Gecko/Mozilla, but hey, that's Slashdot for you.
Happy Konqueror user since 2000 - yes, I remember when it could barely render Slashdot correctly - and chuffed to bits that Apple agrees with his choice. Nice to be vindicated sometimes.
Check the system requirements:
Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar"
$129.00
[Buy Now]
Jobs is more sinister than Gates! :) I wonder if there is any way I can go on the iSafari without taking a $69* chunk out of my wallet.
(* $69 is the educational price of Jaguar)