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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.
Check out this clip from their new (Konq-based) web browser... they're using Slashdot as an example website!l
http://www.apple.com/safari/theater/bookmarks.htm
Fascinating.
:)
It's officially the 'year of the notebook' - so that's how Apple is coping with slow processors then!
Very nice new powerbooks though - especially the 17-incher, with glowing keyboards and ambient light detection. It also adjusts the screen brightness, mmmm
Safari, the web browser, is actually based of KHTML - KDE's HTML library. Not bad, especially seeing as they're going to give the 'orders of magnitude' speedups back in the way of the source code.
And digs at Quark. And the rumors sites were practically all wrong. Hah. Best keynote in ages.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
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.
My favorite part of the keynote:
Gigantic screen behind Steve Job reads:
"Open Source
We think it's great"
-Spyky
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.
Put it does block pop-up ads!
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
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!
I think since QT was ported to OS X, it's easier to use native widgets with KHTML rather than gecko. Chimera for instance does not use real aqua text entry and widgets within the web page, but a theme that looks like they are.
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.
In the software section of the website detailing the new, tiny Powerbook, IE is off of OS X's Dock and Safari is on. Keynote is a PowerPoint replacement made by Apple.
What you should be wondering is not just whether Apple is trying to compete with Microsoft (and to end its dependence on MS for such a key piece of its OS as the browser) but if Microsoft has started warning Apple that it's going to leave. IE is still listed on the same software page, which doesn't mention Safari by name. There's some posturing going on here, and I'm not real sure what the motives are.
Fwiw, been testing Safari. Super-fast with a clean interface, but doesn't do nearly as good/mature a job displaying hard core dhtml as Mozilla, and therefore Chimera. Good freshman effort, but Apple better not stop at version 1.0.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
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.
Has it occured to anyone else that the new 12" Powerbook is, for all practical purposes, a G4 iBook? What does this say about the future of the iBook? Will Apple continue having two different laptop form factors in the future? While it certainly helps Apple to have a entry-level $999 iBook, especially for the education market, I wouldn't be suprised if by next year there's only one Apple laptop "style", with all price ranges contained within it.
After poking around in the preferences, I noticed you can turn Rendzevous bookmarks on -- meaning you'll automatically discover web services running on your LAN. And bookmark 'em. Cool enough by itself.
I then clicked on the "About Rendezvous" button underneath, and found the page has been updated with a tantalizing little treat (in addition to pledges of support from game and printer developers):
Yep. You'll be able to serve your iTunes collection to your TiVo. I'm assuming with playlists and all.
Happy speculating...
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.
Quite some while ago, I remember a little amusement about the idea of Apple registering a trademark for the word "Keynote". Interesting to see how that played out. The (I thought) highly credible vPod rumors turned out to be bogus, and the Powerbook line got one of the most surprising revampings imaginable. Not one but two new models, and no displacement of the current line. And not a desktop enhancement to be found. Could this be a transition point for Apple to move into a more portable-based business model in years to come?
What really struck me as interesting, particularly with the quiet reaction to it, is that Apple seems to have declared war on Microsoft. They praised MS Office with one breath, then bitchslapped Gates and his cronies with a double whammy of a new browser and a competitor to Powerpoint. I'm predicting now, a monster update to AppleWorks within the next two Macworlds.
The one thing that really dissappoints me is the incompatibility of Airport Extreme with the current 15" Powerbooks. I hadn't expected they'd deliver a blow like this to Powerbook owners so soon after a revision (867/1Ghz models), and was hopeful for an 802.11g transition that I could replace my standard Airport card with.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Wow, fiber optic lightning?
1.21 giggawatts!!
Here's why.
Quote:
"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."
It is a trick to get slashdot to slashdot itself!!!
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Well, I'd noticed it seemed to be doing okay on most CSS pages I'd tried, so I was *going* to say, "nyah, nyah", but then I figured I go to the ever-useful CSS1 test suite pages.
Oops...on the very first test, it fails to display even the test page correctly and the dialog tells me it's choking on the illegal mimetype text/html. Very ungood.
Well, it's beta, and Apple has never seen a wheel it didn't want to re-invent at some point...
Babar
I really hope there are some happy Mac users out right now. This MacWorld has been a really awesome one and I hope the trend continues with the third party developers going buck wild with some new OSX apps.
Safari is a neat browser and of the stuff released today was one thing that really suprised me. I didn't figure Apple would want to enter the browser "war" so I sort of wrote off them ever making a browser. It made no sense to go after that essentially profitless market when there are so many alternatives already entrenched. After using Safari a bit I realized Apple didn't enter the browser war, they just built a system on the fallout ridden wastes of the browser war. The gadgetry MS has been trying to add to IE in the form of auction watches and whatnot are handled by Sherlock 3, Safari doesn't need them. It also doesn't need some entirely new plugin architecture because Quicktime supports a huge swath of file formats and media types that are readily found on the web. All Apple really had to do was build an interface for a third party's HTML renderer which I think they've done pretty well. As an added bonus it also lets Apple ship consumer systems with entirely first party software and still have it be functional for the typical Mac neophyte. It's also really sweet seeing the GPL is a product like Safari.
I've been waiting for Apple to move to 802.11g for a while now, I figured they would have done so way earlier than now. Had they done this they might have ended up screwed over by a standards committee had anything changed in the spec between when they released it and the still pending ratification date. Keeping that in mind waiting until the spec's finality was imminent makes a lot of sense. It might take me a while to move up to Airport Extreme (as I just bought 802.11.b equipment) but when I end up with a new Powerbook it will be awesome that it is there.
The Powerbooks facinated me, I'm really glad I've held off buying a new laptop. I had figured the Powerbooks would be the next candidates for an upgrade but never did I think the upgrades would look like they do. I think the 12" Powerbook is an excellent idea and I hope to have one ASAP. While the iBook is a nice system it falls short for anyone wanting a good dose of processing power (read gaming performance) in a portable system. Adding Radeons to the iBooks helped a bit but a "scorching" 49fps in Quake 3 is a yawner (though Apple needs to learn if you want better frame rates you can down the resolution or drop the color depth for some pretty decent playability). I think for most things the 12" Powerbook is going to end up making x86 laptops look pretty crappy, especially subnotebooks. Most of the smaller systems you can find run on hobbled Celerons or Crusoes and cost as much if not more as the new PB. Maybe Apple will get more of a leg up in the portable market.
Between an iCal release that works, a new browser, and an official X11 system that works with Quartz, I have a lot to do on my Powerbook. Maybe one of the first things will be to order a new one.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Erm, it does have type ahead -- I just used that feature. And the 'throbbing' is done in the background of the location bar -- watch for the blue progress bar, which you might miss since it's so bloody fast. :)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Abandoning all common sense, I just installed Apple's X11 over the top of fink. Both want to dump stuff in /usr/X11R6, but since fink uses /sw for almost everything else I figured it would be ok, which it is so far. Upon firing up X11.app, it tried to read my .xinitrc file, which I have set up in fink to start Gnome with the sawfish window manager. It came up fine, but I wanted to use Apple's window manager that's integrated with the Dock, so I commented out my .xinitrc and restarted X11. This gave me an xterm window with no WM, oops. Fortunately I found "quartz-wm" installed in /usr/X11R6/bin and running that gave me a window manager with Aqua titlebars and buttons, and it even minimizes to the dock exactly like native OS X apps. I then renamed ~/.xinitrc so it wouldn't be found at all, and now when I start X11.app I get an xterm with quartz-wm already running, which is what I want. I've only tried a couple of X (er, X11) apps from my fink installation, but so far they've all worked flawlessly.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Designers will have no choice but to stick to open standards instead of writing to one specific browser.
Yeah, whatever. Designers have clients. Clients make demands. You see:
Client: I think our front page should have flashing news scroller, a slide show, and dancing girls that follow the mouse!
Me: Trust me, you really don't want that. It will make your page slow to load, and incompatible with numerous browsers. I could do it in Flash, but that would cost a lot.
Client: But the dancing girls are so cute! We'd sell more widgets! Don't use flash; I hate downloading plugins.
Me: I feel a great need to pop a clue in your a**, but I really need the money.
Client: Don't forget to make it play "Achy Breaky Heart"!
Me: Grr!
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
If you use X11 under Fink, you can do this:
dpkg -r --force-depends xfree86-base
dpkg -r --force-depends xfree86-base-shlibs
[install the SDK from apple - http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/ ]
[install the user install from apple - http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/download/ ]
fink install system-xfree86
(courtesy of Ben Hines on the fink-devel list)
You may have to manually edit your $HOME/.xinitrc file to add the "exec quartz-wm" line in place of any other "exec" lines.
Other than that, it works great for me. The new Quartz WM is good.
I'm curious how they're boasting such impressive page load speeds compared to the other browsers
Oh that's easy, considering the amount of code involved. You see, one of the main arguments in favour of KHTML was its small size - like 140.000 lines of code. I'm guessing, but that's probably a fifth of the Gecko codebase. Read it up in this mail to the kfm-devel mailing list.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
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.
---
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
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.
> I actually wonder if Apple is developing a radical
> corporate strategy which involves a sense of
> responsibility to the computer industry as a whole
What an interesting idea. The big advantage software companies have on hardware companies is the incredible margins: the cost of goods sold for software is basically nil (the price of the CDs), while for hardware, you have all the costs of buying the parts to make your hardware. Keep in mind, R&D is handled as a capitalized expense and isn't amortized over the cost of each unit sold.
So software companies could enjoy huge margins, while hardware companies had to be happy with less than 25%.
Microsoft benefited from this, but they also increased the barrier of entry for competitors by illegally abusing their monopoly. So it wasn't enough to build a better Word processor; you had to be able to make it much better and cheaper than Word (since Word was generally bundled in price with the rest of MS Office), and be completely compatible with Word's file format (because of the network effect).
What's interesting is that open file formats (and Open Source in general) lowers these barriers of entries. For example, if all software applications use the same file format, then the software packages have to compete on their own merits since the network effect related to file compatibility is eliminated.
With Apple embracing open source and open file formats, they're essentially leveling the playing field between software vendors and hardware vendors. If they can get software vendors to adopt open formats, the cost of switching between software vendors will reduce for the users, and it will be easier for new entrants to build competing software programs. In that case, Apple will succeed as well, because they're building some of the best hardware (the new 17" PowerBook G4 is Exhibit A). If their plan works, competition will increase in the computer industry, benefiting all.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
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