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Mac Pro, Mac OS X Virtual Desktops Announced at WWDC
haym37 writes "Of the many announcements yet to come at WWDC, the first is the announcement of the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro contains two Intel Xeons, up to 3 GHz, and is supposed to be 1.6x to 2.1x the speed of the PowerMac G5 quad. It can hold up to 2 TB of internal storage and up to 16 GB of memory. The graphics card can be up to a Radeon x1900 or an FX4500. The case will be the same as the PowerMac." MacRumors.com is providing running coverage from the floor (Note: "[U]pdates will be automatically inserted at the top of the updates section. Do not reload manually."), including another announcement that OS X will include virtual desktops. What a great idea!
I'd just like to see more OSX capability in GNUSTEP, so that we can have a free and open OSX as we're getting a free and open Windoze in ReactOS.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
I'm loving Boot Camp and the ability to use my Macbook Pro at home (OS X) and work (Windows XP). I had to use Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit to remap the right-hand Command key into a "delete" button so I could log into our domain...and I don't have the ability to use home/end/pgup/pgdown by depressing the fn key...which is OK since I use a bluetooth keyboard at work anyway. However, if I get some indication from Apple that they're going to provide full keyboard support for their notebooks under Windows XP, I'm definitely going to upgrade to Leopard.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
...I am a bit surprised at the stagnancy that seems to be pervading Apple's style choices. Now that we've entered the Kubrick-esque world of white (or black!) plastic and brushed aluminum, it doesn't seem like the Apple line has anywhere to "evolve" to. The MacPro's case, for example, is simply the G5 tower case with another whole in it. The user experience seems to be a bit stagnant too; while I do believe that Tiger outshines Vista, and Leopard will as well, I've yet to see anything that says that Leopard will be a major leap for the end-user. Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong...
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
"Don't want Redmond's photocopiers started too early"
Seriously. Steve is smart NOT to show off every little detail of 10.5. Look at Microsoft, they promised so much in Longhorn/Vista, then take things out.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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I was hoping he's say the high-end will not be available until October (since I'm planning my Mac as a late-Oct birthday present to myself) and will sport a double-dose of the quad-core chips Intel is releasing in Q4.
But hey, dual 5150s for $2500? I think I might just buy that baby and an extra flat panel instead.
Start a happiness pandemic
I'm very very pleased with finally getting virtual desktops. I've been using Desktop Manager and will continue to until I get a computer with Leopard on it (probably a few more years), but it annoys me that I *need* a third-party app for that. (And window shading, for that matter.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Does anybody know if Apple made their own technology to do backups, or did they actually implement ZFS? (there were rumors that they were going to put ZFS in 10.5)
As for the case design, I think Apple is sticking with a good thing until people get comfortable with Intel being in a Mac. To many crazy changes all at once can really scare users, and stock holders. Having the new Intel Macs look a lot like the old ones will make sure the person feels like they are using a Mac, not a fancy PC running OS X. Bright White, Shiny Black and brushed metal, (Black, Gray, White) are newtral colors that go well with most colors and look good in most homes, offices, and dorms, to match our cultures more consertive nature, in the 90's the "Hippy" styles and colors were popular and so Apple made their computers to work with that culture. It is like from going from college to work. (For me since I graduated 2001 it makes most sience) In college you wore very libral clothings and in the Corprate enviroment you are more town down, you may still look good either way but you are more formal. The same with Apples. The early iMac (G3) were attened mostly for college students, iMac G4 was a transistion still fun but a little more formal, to the G5/Intel Mac (which I personally dont care for) while interesting and different is more of a formal design. The same with the iBook/Mac Books, Now Black was added because they sold some black iPods and they were popular so they added black to the list, and I am sure using a Black Mac Book seemed more Manly then using the white ones. Brushed Metal Systems (for their Pro Line) are attened to look somewhat intimadating, They are ment to look more powerful and used for real computing. If you were an IT Consultant and you used a Mac Book Pro that were coled like the Toilet Seat iBooks you wouldn't be taken as seriosly as if you had a Brushed metal, or having a server room that looks like candy store. Perhaps color Macs will be in the future but right now Dull/Clean colors are in.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
[re: spotlight] Imagine that... quick access to your applications, including recently used ones... Sounds an awful lot like a "Start Button" to me.
Obviously you have no idea what Spotlight does. It's a search feature, and they intend to make it more convenient to search for applications. It is NOTHING like the start menu, which basically just presents you with a list of files (and thus boils down to just another take on the Mac OS 7-9 Apple menu, speaking of photocopying OS features).
I'd guess the "recent items" feature they were referring to pushes more recently used items to the top of the list when you search.
If you downgrade the Mac Pro to the 2.0GHz configuration (two 2.0GHz dual-core Xeons), you save $300. If you downgrade the 250GB hard drive to 160GB, you save another $50, bringing the cost to $2,149. Still a little more expensive than the base $1,999 Power Mac G5, but the base Power Mac G5 didn't have two dual-core processors (just one dual-core G5). Quite a great deal.
Yes, I would have loved for Apple to release a cheaper tower computer. However, Apple doesn't do product announcements like that during the WWDC. The WWDC is about releasing products intended for professional Mac developers; the operating system and the flagship developer machines. Professional developers such as MS, Apple, Adobe, and the rest of them need the most powerful Mac they can get with their money; the Mac Pro fulfills their dreams. Apple releases other products either during some other conference (such as the Paris event every September and MacWorld), or just out of the blue on a Tuesday morning.
For all of you dreaming about MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo machines, Apple tablets, $1000 Core Duo mini-towers, $700 Core Solo MacBooks, and other announcements, there is still plenty of time for Apple to release those products. Apple doesn't announce nor release those types of products during the WWDC.
IKWYM. I don't mind too much, though, coz Desktop Manager is so good. Fast, simple, can work in several ways (pager shown on desktop, pager shown in menu bar, switch desktops with hotkeys and/or by moving to the edge), has some useful transitions. My only complaint is that it's hard to move windows between desktops.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Hey, my comment was snarky, but I apologize if it came off as critical -- just the opposite! In fact, one of the reasons I ditched OS X on my iBook (which, to be fair, is 6 years old and was a decent laptop with OS X or Ubuntu, until recent hard drive noises) is that I don't like the constrained feel of OS X. I always want to zip over to another desktop ... which isn't there ;)
;)).
However, when I visit the Apple corner of the local CompUSA, I am as usual impressed by the hardware; with virtual desktops, one of my main gripes about OS X is gone. (I still prefer Gnome-on-Linux to OS X for now, for both aesthetic and software-freedom reasons, but in matters of taste, there is no disputing
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I was at first skeptical when Apple said there are "millions of configurations" for the new Mac Pros. So I tested it out...
Based on the options from the Apple Store configuration page, the total combinations possible is given by 3 * 6 * 3 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 6 * 4 * 4 * 2 * 4 * 2 * 2 * 4 * 2 * 3 * 5 * 2
You have the option for either...
Matter of fact, the NVIDIA 7300GT is standard, and you can have upto 4 of them.
All bets are off with this one.
The one thing that worries me about Spaces is that the website implies that you might only be able to have an app running in one window. (Implied by the fact that you can click on something in the doc and go right to that app's "space" - I'll admit, I've wanted to do this.) What if I have one Word doc that goes with this stuff, and one that goes with this other stuff?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
From the Leopard Accessibility page:
QuickTime currently supports closed captioning by including a text track alongside audio and video content. But improved QuickTime support will automatically display the CEA-608 closed captioning text standard in analog broadcasts in the U.S.
In analog broadcasts? Wouldn't that suggest some sort of interoperability with TV equipment? Which would require hardware...hmm...perhaps a hint at things to come?
16GB RAM and 2TB of disk is overkill, but...
Is there anything preventing the MacPros from sporting 8x8GB FB-DIMMs or 4x750GB drives?
Will this box be able to achieve the max 192GB ceiling for FB-DIMMs?
---k--
</stupid>
System Restore in WindowsXP is not the same.
Now Volume Shadow Copies that is found on Windows 2003 Server probably comes close, although it is hardly a robust or reliable solution.
Yes, one day I may actually learn to spell...
More likely it's an extension of the versioning system available in Aperture. It wouldn't be the first time Apple has taken the functionality of an application and extended it throughout the OS.
Given that this is a developers' conference they would have said ZFS if it were ZFS.
At the keynote, they showed entire stacks of iPhoto photos being "undeleted", which means after being "deleted" they were lying around, taking up space. Add videos to that, add huge temporary files that you might copy onto your computer; where does that leave your hard disk space? I'd like to know: at what point does this Time Machine stop? Or is it intended to keep storing backups of *everything* right up to the time it runs out of drive space? Whats the recovery strategy? Who decides which files are more important to keep than others?
I don't want to read
This will be a problem only if Macs make big inroads onto corporate desktops. Considering corporate IT shops are based on whatever Microsoft and Dell have to offer, it will be some time before this becomes an issue. For the home user, it's great for the exact reason you mention.
That's not really meant to be an anti-apple troll, but rather a sad commentary on IT shops.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I guess the more correct term (from Googling) is "tabbed windows." Here's a screenshot of them: http://homepage.mac.com/bgreen5/.Pictures/tabs.jpg
Basically, if you drug a window to the bottom side of the screen, the title bar would turn into a tab. Then clicking the tab would pop-up the entire window, which behaved exactly like a normal Finder window. The tabs persisted across reboots (mostly, it was a bit buggy, especially with resolution changes.)
I kept all my applications in one tab and my documents in another. If I wanted to open a jpeg in Photoshop instead of GraphicConverter (the default), I could pop-open my documents folder, grab the icon, drag the icon away from the tabbed window (which disappears), hover the icon over the tab for the applications window (which opens), then drop it on the Photoshop icon. When you describe it in text, it sounds awkward... but believe me, it's brilliant.
I based my entire computer workflow around tabbed windows, and I miss it a lot. Why Apple would bring back *Labels!* of all things and not tabbed windows, I'll never know. (My guess: Finder coders are lazy, and labels were easier.)
Comment of the year
Desktops and hand helds have very different requirements than mainframes, and thus when someone migrates a mainframe solution to a consumer environment, they often have to redesign. Apple's solution for Time Travel has massive integration with the applications to give a nice user experience; I've never seen such integration offered by versioning file systems before. This is quite a move forward.
The versioning FS is nice, but it's really just a pretty UI on something that VMS had a couple of decades ago.
Cool. Well, let us know how using VMS goes for you. Myself, I like to use Photoshop, and I don't think Adobe's shipping that for VMS yet. I'd use Photoshop on Windows, and that doesn't have a versioning file system yet either. Darn. Guess I'm stuck with a Mac and it's twenty-year-old idea that someone finally brought to the desktop. Shucks.
Spotlight over the network? The pre-Tiger technical docs I read about Spotlight said that it was a Tiger feature; the fact that I didn't even notice that they'd pulled it shows how useful it is.
Your reading comprehension sucks. Spotlight is in Tiger. The new feature is that it now indexes and searches public files over the network.
Core Animation? Maybe nice, I'd have to see. It sounds like they're really going after Adobe with that one though; I hope it doesn't backfire...
Uh, how does this go after Adobe? This is an API developers can use to add features to applications. Does Adobe create APIs for Apple's OS now? Does Adobe write development environments for applications? I can't see how you might compare this to Flash unless...well, given all your other comparisons, maybe you're just that dense.
Mail stationary? I hated that 'feature' in Outlook Express a decade ago, and I can't imagine not hating it today.
Take a moment to surf over to Apple's web site and look at the stationery. Come back here and tell me that it's remotely like Outlook Express ten years ago. Then I'll know you're certifiable - as if your previous comments weren't enough. And you're not forced to use it. Good lord, what a whiny ass titty baby you are.
The most disappointing thing was the lack of Core 2 MacBooks. I was planning on ordering one this evening.
No you weren't.
The Mac Pros look nice, but I can't imagine buying a desktop in 2006.
Yeah, I hate it when people don't ship the things I want. I mean, I I can't believe Apple has the gall not to live up to the rumors sites' promises! I'm really disappointed that GM hasn't shipped that Hybrid H2 with six-wheel drive yet either.
What even harder to believe than your weirdly off base post is that it was modded +4 insightful when I started this reply.
The really interesting thing to me isn't a new iCal Client, it's iCal Server, an open standards-based, open source Calendar Server:r ver.html
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/icalse
The aesthetics, sure - the zooms are all smooth, there are little animations everywhere, there's an arrow in the translucent pager that pops up when you switch desktops that indicates to you where you went and where you came from, etc.
I've played with Xgl and AIGLX and Compiz and the Metacity compositor support and they're all really fun and very neat, but they don't work everywhere and they're not on by default yet. (The alt-tab live previews in Compiz are really sweet, too.)
Sorry, I should have been more specific. So, say you're on Desktop 1, and you launch Safari. Then you shift to Desktop 2, and you launch Mail. If you click on the Safari icon on the Dock, it animates the switch back to Desktop 1 where Safari is running. It's not revolutionary, but it is kind of obvious; most Linux desktops don't have a concept of an 'Application' - they know about windows, specifically, and some WMs will switch properly to another desktop if you select a window on it, but there's no animation, and (at least in Metacity) often the window you clicked on doesn't actually get the focus.
So do I. They're neat, and they're a lot of fun, but it can be kind of difficult to get it set up if you're not very experienced.
Now, I never said that. But I do have Leopard right now, or at least a Developer Preview of it, so it's not exactly vaporware, either. Plus, Apple seems pretty good about shipping things when they say they're going to, unlike certain other OS companies, like, say, Microsoft...
Heh, I should have been more specific - there are *tons* of cards which are capable, of course, even cards that are five or six years old - but on X, most of them don't have drivers that support these capabilities yet. NVidia's cards only work with their binary drivers; some of ATI's cards work with the open drivers, some only work with their binary drivers, and some don't work at all; the Intel driver is notably pretty good but the cards are fairly unimpressive; and the drivers for other cards are in lots of different states of completeness.
Currently Apple has a 12% market share in notebooks, they are still easily the underdogs for now. What gives them the right to bash down Microsoft? Because of similiar features, oh damn.
I wasn't aware that Apple and Microsoft were competing in the laptop market! And Apple's marketshare in laptops is rising. That may not be leading the pack, but rising share isn't usually associated with "underdog" status.
I am sorry but if you company was close to saved due to 150Million in 1998 from the very company you are throwing a fit at, you have issues.
Apple had four billion dollars in cash in 1998. Look up the history of the Microsoft-Apple agreement. Microsoft helped Apple--no doubt--but Microsoft needed that agreement as well. Microsoft makes more money per user from its Macintosh customers than it does from Windows customers. Apple's continued existence is a buffer against Microsoft having any worse antitrust troubles than it already has. Microsoft also got some technology that went into XP from the deal. Microsoft and Apple are competitors. They will always needle each other. It's no big deal.
Secondly, if you are completely playing an ego trip onto a company that has way more customers than you have currently. Boot Camp has 1/2 a million downloads BECAUSE probably 50% of those people want to use XP.
Try ninety percent. But even Apple is suggesting that users get Parallels to run Windows XP rather than Boot Camp. I've tried it and it works very well. The fact is that many crucial applications run only on Windows. I'm suggesting to local realtors that they got an Intel Mac, install Parallels, and use it to access a Windows-only website essential to their business. One machine, two uses. Running Windows on a Mac helps sell more Macs. Again, they're competitors, but they each benefit from the other's existence.
I'm fed up with Apple after seeing/reading about that conference, they are on an ego trip, and i definitely look down on them for that.
Apple is competing with Microsoft and doing a damned good job of it. They're also the leading force in personal computing today. Apple might crow and show off now and then, but I prefer that to a company that would rather make itself look bad than to facilitate adherence to standards in the industry. Microsoft has "embraced and extended" critical standards and doesn't hesitate to make changes that enhance its own operating system and products at the expense of others. The company's antitrust troubles are due to its "take-no-prisoners" method of competing. Being "fed up with Apple" for a little crowing at the developer's conference seems out of proportion to the offense. Especially given those of the competition.