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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.
I just wanted to mention that after using Safari for a few minutes now, it appears to be amazing. The browser is so much faster it is like a hardware upgrade. On my 500mhz iBook I have never been able to scroll smoothly through pages on any browser. Now scrolling is almost perfectly smooth! Great job with the browser Apple!
(Remember that laptop CPUs typically don't run as fast as desktop equivalents - especially when on battery. Most OSX laptops are as fast as PC equivalents. So the CPU gap doesn't apply)
I can't wait to download the new iApps (sorry, iLife) as well.
If it didn't register itself as Netscape 5 or something with a modicum of site compatibility site scripts would redirect it to the retard text only version of a site.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I watched the Quicktime keynote with great interst, hoping that Jobs would finally introduce a 4-pound notebook. I've been waiting for one for a while, so I'm really excited that Apple finally introduced one!
Unfortunately, however, the notebook doesn't include DVI-out support, so my monitor would fall back to VGA mode if I tried to use the notebook with it. Does anyone know if Apple or a third party plans to offer a PC Card with DVI support? Margi had one, but it's only 4MB... not quite enough for this particular monitor.
Also, one thing Apple keeps failing to address is the #1 reason I haven't switched to a Mac. Steve, where are the software trade-in incentives? I own Photoshop 6 and 7, Dreamweaver MX, and Microsoft Office XP for the PC. What on Earth is keeping Apple and/or other vendors from offering trade-in incentives? Why can I not trade in my two boxed Photoshop-for-PC copies and receive Photoshop 7 for Mac OS X? The same goes for Dreamweaver MX. The cost to move to a Mac is almost doubled by the $1500 worth of software that I already have for my PC.
Here's hoping Apple will start to address this issue, especially since the platform is geared toward video developers and graphic designers -- two markets whose people invest heavily in expensive software.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Use the "Bug" button! Go to the Safari page, and submit a bug, saying you want tabs. Make it known to Apple that this is something people REALLY want.
What the hell were they thinking? Perhaps it's a little faster or smaller, but that sounds like a small payoff when you end up with a browser that is broken and doesn't work properly on a large number of sites. Chimera shows that Gecko can make an amazing browser on OS X so why they've jumped over is mind boggling.
I consider this a pretty Good Thing overall though, especially if AOL adopts Gecko. With decently large groups of people using a range of different rendering engines, designers will have no choice but to stick to open standards instead of writing to one specific browser.
And assuming the world domination thing happens, IE dies off, we would have the same thing, but called Mozilla
Uh.... the same thing being a popular web browser? :)
I think those projects are great, but choice is what the entire Free Software movement is about.
Actually it's about freedom. The fact that choice/duplication of effort is often a side effect of freedom isn't really what it's about, it's just a sometimes pleasant consequence of the way the free software movement works.
Why not let Apple choose KHTML? If we wake up one day and find that only Gecko is out there, IE died and Konqueror is "that other browser" (Like Opera and Mozilla are considered today, in the mainstream, although both are gaining considerable acceptance), where would we have gotten? Except for the fact it's open source, it'll be no different than IE.
Well, uh, yeah, except that it's open source! That's the big difference. Nobody controls Mozilla, yes Netscape/AOL have a big influence on the project but you can always fork it. You can't fork IE. The fact that it's open source IS the big deal. A monopoly of Mozilla wouldn't be bad at all - there's nothing wrong with huge market shares if it happens to be the best product and the makers of said product are not trying to prevent competition.
I think you need to think about that one a bit harder. Choice is fine, but it's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and sometimes restricting it (ie technical standards) is a good thing.
With the release of Safari and Keynote, apple has fired a salvo across MS's bow. These two apps help to decrease Apple's dependence on MS for the Browser (a key component) and to a lesser extent, on powerpoint. This is, imo, a goo thing. However, every mac user still has to pay a tribute to MS in the form of Office.
OpenOffice isnt seen as a viable replacement among mac users because it uses X11, and looks decidedly un-maclike. With this new release of X11, thats fixed. Apple can now bundle open office with OS X, and they won't need to spend hundreds of man hours porting it to run under Aqua.
The combination of OpenOffice running under apples X11 implementation, Safari, and Keynote could be just the thing that apple uses to decrease (and perhaps ultimatley do away with altogether) its dependence on MS. And that, I think, is a Good Thing.
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Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
The presentation software was not the "least" of Jobs' annoucnements. Keynote is a clear shot across Microsoft's bow. A direct Powerpoint competitor. That's not a small thing.
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.
Why not use existing tools if they are good enough?
The Mozilla technologies were better, but we could understand the KDE ones.
Who wants to work with software you can't understand? 140,000 lines of code vs. bigger? I'd take 140,000 if I could, too.
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.
Who's fault is that? Certainly not Apple's.
When we started this project, Chimera didn't exist.
Who cares? Safari rocks. A big, bad commercial softwarre developer uses an open-source project and gives back to that community and there are still people who whine. It boggles the mind.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
... because it can help extend battery life, big time. Those of you with power-hungry x86 laptop CPUs may scoff at this, but my experience with my 500 MHz iBook has been that I can run it for a little over three hours with the display at full brightness, and a little over four hours with the display at its dimmest (and if you're on an airplane at night, that's actually a practical way to hack). This means the display accounts for about 25-30% of the power consumption. Anything that automatically makes the display draw an appropriate amount of power might extend my battery life half an hour or more.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
So when I found that Apple had come out with X11 for OS X, the first thing I thought was "So what? That's already been done. Somewhere along the way (probably while waiting for the new X11's "Optimizing" process to finish), I went over to the OroborOSX site to see if they had mentioned Apple's new X11, and that was when I remembered what's so cool about (most of) the open source community.
They didn't bash it. They didn't knock it. They didn't even complain about it. They said something like, "How does this affect our project? We don't know. Download it. Check it out. Don't forget to back up the X11 directories beforehand, just in case." And they linked to a message forum thread on their site that had been created to talk about this new product from Apple. Even in the forum, there was very little criticism of Apple's X11 product, and everything critical they had to say was constructive.
Even though this product could completely obliterate the need for their software, they were open to an alternative. They didn't go into FUD mode and immediately issue press releases bashing the "competition".
One could argue that they have no reason to get upset or concerned, because they were giving their software away anyway. No money to be made or lost, right? So take your ball and go home. Not so. You can't tell me there's no pride in Open Source. These people found a void and filled it, and the void could very well be filled AGAIN by the very people who caused the void in the first place. It would be very understandable for the OroborOSX team to get a little miffed.
Hats off to these guys for representing the best of the Open Source Community, which most often really DOES seem to be about ensuring that we all have the very best software that we can get, no matter who makes it.
Now I'll check to see if my "optimization" is done yet, and I'll begin my little evaluation of Apple's new effort. But I will be very careful to REMEMBER who has already been here and to not forget the work that they have done. Now that they have been here, the bar has been RAISED for Apple and they will have to produce quality software. This is a great role for Open Source software, if nothing else.
Cheers,
RP