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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.
Also, pay no mind to the fact that the iBook they'd like you to buy has a graphics card that doesn't take advantage of the finder-level hardware graphics acceleration they built into sytem 10.2. You'll be cooler than a Windows/*nix/whatever user. That's all that matters.
Man, you apple whores are unbelieveable!!
Who else would put up with not being able to scroll smoothly through any pages? If it were a PC app there's be a huge uproar about how shite it was.
But no, when it's Apple it's a "Great job" when they repair a fundamental flaw or improve something that was never working optimally in the first place.
Jeeze.
gadgetophile.com
but tabs are poorly implemented and the whole mozilla render engine sucks, BAD, its SLOOOOOOWW and doesn't cache pages very well, the tabs are also slow, it frustrates me everytime I use it and it take 3 days to load so I end up staring at the splash screen for an eternity so that after the window finnally renders then I wait another 2 eons for the page to load and then 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, also a ctrl-click will load the page in both windows sometime and there is no way to open a tab in the background, in my not very humble opinion, mozilla is a terrible implementation of a web browser and its bretheren are not any better either.
Oh great. Just what the world needs, yet another X server. This will be good if they can keep up with XFree which basically the canonical X server in the world today, but if they can't it'll be worse than useless. Support for XRender is only now filtering down into the commercial X servers for instance, and the new Xr/Xc/R&R/XCursor extensions for instance aren't there yet. Why don't they just use XFree, I don't get this reinventing of the wheel from them. It's not like they're overflowing with resources, and they clearly aren't afraid of leveraging open source code, so why make their own X server?? (if that's indeed what this is).
Is this really "New" stuff? It looks like Apple has once again repackaged the old stuff it has been peddling for the last 5 years. At least "AIRPORT EXTREME" doesn't seem to be as big a Fraud as "QUARTZ EXTREME" since Apple actually tells you how much faster it is (assuming that it's faster on the old macs as well as the "latest" ones). And what's with that BS about 3D quartz? Sorry there aint no such thing...maybe the author of the article was confused by Peter Graffagnino of Apple's super secret, hush hush "ADVANCED QUARTZ EXTREME TECHNOLOGY LABORATORIES" which changed the world of computing forever.
On the PowerBook section of the Apple site, it says that their 17" LCD has the same viewing area as a 19" CRT. Umm, that LCD has a max resolution of 1440x900 (with a bizarre aspect ratio of 16x10- why didn't they try to conform to HDTV with 16x9?), which is about HALF the area of the max resolution of a decent 19" monitor (say, a Viewsonic P95 w/ 1920x1440). And the lighted keyboard- I think most people will recognize this as a gimmick at best. Who needs to see the keyboard to type? Very few I think, the few who also have little need for a super tricked-out laptop that costs $3300.
Of course, if Dell released any laptop like this, every feature cited as "cool" or "unique" would be deemed "frivolous" and "gimmicky".
*waits for the automatic down-modding due to negative Apple comments*
Of course Apple deserves to succeed for creating products the way they ought to be created.
But I'm surprised by the lack of protest at their new-found ambition to provide every bit of software and hardware. Sure, Apple is a benevolent dictator now, but power without competition breeds corruption. And remember, if Microsoft's monopoly had stretched into hardware, Linux might never have existed. If Apple succeeds at becoming a top computing platform, I don't think I'll be so comfortable making mine an iLife(R).
One answer:
.
The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web
browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an
excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also
less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of
development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the
small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup
performance as you can see reflected in the data at
http://www.apple.com/safari/
Quoted from here.
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com