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Apple Shows Off New iOS 7, Mac OS X At WWDC
Nerval's Lobster writes "Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off his company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco with a short video emphasizing the importance of design, particularly that which evokes some sort of emotional connection such as love or delight. But that sentimental bit aside, this WWDC was all business: huge numbers of developers attend this annual event, packing sessions designed to help give their apps an edge in Apple's crowded online marketplace (some 50 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store, Cook told the audience during his keynote). Apple also uses its WWDC to unveil new products or services, attracting sizable interest from the tech press.
This time around, the company introduced Mac OS X 'Mavericks,' which includes 'Finder Tabs' (which allow the user to deploy multiple tabs within a Finder window—great for organization, in theory) and document tags (for easier searching). Macs will now support multiple displays, including HDTVs, with the ability to tweak elements between screens; Apple claims the operating system will also interact with the CPU in a more efficient manner.
On top of that, Apple rolled out some new hardware: an upgraded MacBook Air with faster graphics, better battery life (9 hours for the 11-inch edition, while the 13-inch version can draw 12 hours' worth of power). Apple has decided to jump into the cloud-productivity space with iWork for iCloud, which makes the company's iWork portfolio (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) browser-based; this is a clear response to Office 365 and Google Docs.
And finally, the executives onstage turned back to iOS, which (according to Apple) powers some 600 million devices around the world. This version involves more than a few tweaks: from a redesigned 'Slide to Unlock' at the bottom of the screen, to the bottom-up control panel that slides over the home-screen, to the 'flat' (as predicted) icons and an interface that adjusts as the phone is tilted, this is a total redesign. As a software designer, Ive is clearly a huge fan of basic shapes—circles and squares— and layering translucent elements atop one another."
This time around, the company introduced Mac OS X 'Mavericks,' which includes 'Finder Tabs' (which allow the user to deploy multiple tabs within a Finder window—great for organization, in theory) and document tags (for easier searching). Macs will now support multiple displays, including HDTVs, with the ability to tweak elements between screens; Apple claims the operating system will also interact with the CPU in a more efficient manner.
On top of that, Apple rolled out some new hardware: an upgraded MacBook Air with faster graphics, better battery life (9 hours for the 11-inch edition, while the 13-inch version can draw 12 hours' worth of power). Apple has decided to jump into the cloud-productivity space with iWork for iCloud, which makes the company's iWork portfolio (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) browser-based; this is a clear response to Office 365 and Google Docs.
And finally, the executives onstage turned back to iOS, which (according to Apple) powers some 600 million devices around the world. This version involves more than a few tweaks: from a redesigned 'Slide to Unlock' at the bottom of the screen, to the bottom-up control panel that slides over the home-screen, to the 'flat' (as predicted) icons and an interface that adjusts as the phone is tilted, this is a total redesign. As a software designer, Ive is clearly a huge fan of basic shapes—circles and squares— and layering translucent elements atop one another."
The new IOS 7 UI looks an awful lot like another mobile UI I've seen without the 3d effect. We better check to see if flat images are patented or part of brand distinction.
I'm going to withhold judgement on this, as I think it looks nice. As long as the parts are all standard and easily replaceable, the shape of the case doesn't make much difference.
Things that caught my eye were (1) iCloud keychain to allow better mobile-system tracking of passwords within the iOS and OS X framework, (2) iBooks on Mac (FINALLY!), (3) some expanded multitasking in iOS 7 (although it's not clear if it's really extended capabilities over iOS 6 or just a spiffier UI), and (4) Airdrop from within iOS 7 to nearby devices. The new Mac Pro line looks sharp, and I definitely lust for one even if I don't need one.
Well, why not? C'mon, you can tell us. It does look nice, and I like the way you can rotate it to get to the i/o on the back. Oh, and that little light that comes on when it's rotated. No need to cuss and go find a flashlight. A little thing, but a nice thing.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I mean really... why?
One thing you should be happy about... putting all the expansion OUTSIDE of the computer using STANDARDIZED interfaces (Thunderbolt was actually developed by Intel and you can get PC adapters) means that any money you put into expanding a computer will be easily portable to other computer or when you upgrade a computer. This isn't necessarily true with internal cards (think ISA / VESA / PCI / PCIe / PCIx). Also, you don't have to worry about upgrading your computer's power supply or cooling when you add expansion.
Windows Explorer for Mac OS X.
Explorer in Windows or one of a million shitty things that sort of work in Linux.
Is it me or is iOS 7 a total rip-off of Android and Google's apps? Same flat style icons, same "cards", similar notifications and on-going events, similar features etc,
I'm just... surprised.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Cray-1 was a cylinder.
We waited a half hour after the end of the keynote for this terrible summary, really? Multiple-monitor support has been in the Mac OS since 1987; the summary doesn't make it even reportedly clear that today's announcement was about (much-needed, IMO) new features for said ability. And "including hdtvs"? Again, this has been possible since hdtvs came into existence (via hdmi out or div->hdmi adapters). The new feature here is being able to use an airplay-cable device as a secondary display.
If Apple's (rather painfully self-satisfied) slideshow thing is anything to go by, there isn't a single standardized part in the entire computer, with the exception of the RAM, and possibly the CPU, depending on whether they went socketed or BGA.
The two GPU cards are probably PCIe electrically; but the shape certainly isn't compatible, the CPU card is its own animal(one that packs a whole four RAM slots, that's Serious Workstation material right there...), and PCIe-attached SSDs in the mini-PCIe form factor are relatively odd ducks(most that are that size and shape are mSATA, and PCIe direct-attached cards are usually rectangular PCIe 8x cards.
According to the product page, it sure doesn't look like those are standard GPUs, as well as it looks like they go from dual socket Xeons to single socket, mounted centrally so the entire system would need to be disassembled to replace the CPU, if it is even replaceable.
From the imagery posted on Apple's website, it looks like a Mac Mini++.
Apple: Mac Pro
Thirty four characters live here.
As long as the parts are all standard and easily replaceable
Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha... ha.... Yeah, probably.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I mean really... why?
Now that Apple.com is updated, you can find out why - it's a cylinder because the GPUs and CPU are mounted around a central cooling core made from a single piece of aluminum with a single massive fan on top.
The TB bus does not have a lot of bandwidth it's only pci-e X4 and I hope that each port or has it's own X4 link or at least one X4 link for 2 ports.
Thunderbolt 2 is 20Gb/s. There are 6 ports and 3 Thunderbolt controllers (each controller handles a full 20Gb/s across 2 ports).
FWIW, PCIe 1.0 x8 is only 16Gb/s and x4 is only 8Gb/s.
The bandwidth here is basically faster than 6 x8 slots.
The video cards are not standard or (apparently) replaceable. As a Mac Pro user needing an upgrade, this is a deal killer for me. Part of the ROI on a Mac Pro purchase has been the abilty to throw a new card in the box every couple years and keep going. These new machines are going to be obsoleted much faster.
Does OSX Mavericks come with a Sarah Palin or a Tom Cruise doll?
No. But it does come with images of the big wave surfing location, Mavericks, for which it is actually named. A location that has 25 foot surf on an average day. A really cool place.
"Thunderbolt 2 is 20Gb/s"
Remember that 'Thunderbolt' speed numbers include both the PCIe and the Displayport data channels(and, to the best of my knowledge, the capacity allocation between the video and data channels is fixed, even if only one is being used). By aggregating the previous 4 10Gb channels into two 20Gb channels, they allowed full Displayport 1.2 resolution and expect to bottleneck external storage devices slightly less; but the PCIe side still looks like PCIe 2.0 x4. Not slow; but substantially slower than x8 and x16 PCIe 2.0 and slower still than PCIe 3.
FWIW - have you tried to upgrade a Mac Pro's graphics card in the past? There are unfortunately very very few options even with the standard connector. I'd bet the situation remains about the same with this newer design.
And PCIe 1.0 is well and truly obsolete. PCIe 3.0 is shipping already and we have devices targeted at workstations maxing out PCIe 2.0 x8 links handily. Never mind the latency increases imposed by Thunderbolt.
TB has its place, but as the exclusive means of expansion in a system it is lacking.
The rotation is nice in theory, but notice that the power cable port is right there as well and also rotates with the unit. So this rotation is great when nothing is plugged in. As soon as you start plugging stuff in then either it doesn't rotate or you've got so much extra cabling on your desk that it's a spaghetti nightmare.
I've been waiting for this event for weeks, as we're buying 90ish laptops for our school district... faculty use.
First thing I noticed was the MacBook Air update... and how they are surprisingly dropping the clock speed of existing systems in favor of battery life. While I know their new software may be more efficient, and even the chipset itself may be more efficient, it just surprised me. Being around for the grand ol days of the "great hardware race", I didn't think they would actually move backwards (from 1.8GHz to 1.3GHz). First thing I thought of was that they are doing this so that they can have the great hardware race again... and announce faster systems all over again for that lineup.
Next up, the Mac Pro looks like an homage paid to the G4 Cube. While I will admit owning one and thinking it was cool at the time, I think someone else pointed out here that the elegance is lost in the external cable mess. But let's be honest, the people who are being power users are already going for external enclosures for everything (especially storage) because it can be had faster and cheaper by going not Apple. To all those also who say "OMG you can't upgrade it", my experience has been those who buy Mac Pros work them hard and run them until they quit or completely replace them anyway. They want an all in one solution that they can use and replace as a whole... because they know about graphic design / video editing, and not necessarily about performance computing.
iOS7. Auto updating, super cool for what we do with 800 iPads sitting here. I like it, even though it seems to be more like the Android phone I tested for a week recently (Galaxy S4). I was really hoping that with the release of iOS7, they would have been releasing what I consider "a properly sized phone for 2013". They didn't. Le sad.
iCloud ... platform agnostic document modification through a web browser, cool... but not when you start having to pay for an over X amount of storage every month. They are just trying to generate more recurring revenue. iCloud keychain seems like a terrible idea in terms of security. I say this because of the whole keys to the kingdom approach. All of my users use iCloud now, and they still are using sticky notes on their laptops, though I'm trying to break them of this.
Lastly, I am annoyed that none of this was even remotely ready to go today. I was hoping to be surprised with the release of software and that they had actually secretly worked with developers to have it out remotely soon. As a school, releasing iOS7 when school starts, well.. that's just a pain in the ass. Tim Cook is one of these most underwhelming speakers, and really just irritates me when I hear him. Whoever the dude in the blue shirt was... that guy was great with his speeches.
PS... thank god no more cat names
Did you look at the specs or just one photo? 12 Xeon cores, up to 128GB RAM, 2 GPUs w/ 6GB RAM, PCIe SSD, etc - with a single near silent fan in a 10" x 6 1/2" form factor?
I'd never buy one and I'm sure it's going to be absurdly expensive and proprietary - but "nothing pro about it"? Right. Macs have never been made for the home enthusiast upgrader market, and clearly they aren't starting now...
Actually it looks like with this design there will be NO upgrading video cards. Do you really think any third party is going to design a card for the small section of the market that is the mac pro. At least with the old mac pro they used standard designs, the only difference being the bios.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
None of these boards are curved. The CPU and two GPU's are attached in a triangular arrangement around a triangular aluminum heat-sink. Much of the "wasted space" in the curved areas contains the SSD, RAM, and Thunderbolt/USB/other ports.
If designed right (and it sounds like a custom-designed 6" impeller fan) 1 big high-quality fan would be a lot more reliable than 4-5 small, crappy OEM fans found in most PCs. It's not like Apple has any reason to cut costs here, this thing is going to cost a mint and have an absurd profit margin, anyway.
But a cylinder? No.
Apple's next product will be donut-shaped expansion cases that fit around it.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Actually, Apple has a lot of fans and they tend to be far from silent.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".