Happy with the outcome of WWDC 06? I sure am, we got a nice early look at 10 fresh new features of 10.5 Leopard, saw the new Mac Pro’s and the Xserve, and price drops on the Apple Cinema Displays.
Mac Pro
Probably the most surprising thing that happened today, we all knew that the Mac Pro was going to be released, but for Apple to come out with only one model which can be customized to your personal liking wasn’t something I saw happening.
The Mac Pro features 2 Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 2, 2.66, and 3Ghz, 1GB of RAM (max 16GB, room for 4 hard-drives (to a total of 2TB), and dual optical drives.
There are over 4 million different combinations you can have when customizing the machine so there’s something for everyone, from a $2100 base system, to a $15,000 maxed out machine.
Surprisingly there were no changes made to the outside design of the case, bar the new dual-optical drives.
My take: Great deal on the 2.66Ghz machine, would have liked to have seen HD-DVD, but overall, a stonking machine.
Leopard
Although Steve is keeping tight reigns on the “innovative top secret” feature of Leopard, I wasn’t disappointed one bit with the 10 features he showed off to the developers this morning.
I’m really looking forward to using the brand new Mail 3, and most of all, Time Machine. Time Machine blew me away with it’s magnificent interface using Apple’s brand new Core Image developer tools.
Jobs also mentioned that there would be Front Row and PhotoBooth updates in Leopard, but thats all that was mentioned. Could Apple have something amazing up their sleeves for these two applications? Or were they just not important enough to go over in the keynote..?
Xserve
Nothing much to say here, they look like great servers which businesses will be all over.
Apple Cinema Displays
Nothing new here, as much as I would have liked to see new panels in 23, 27, and 30” sizes, with iSight built it and glossy screen as an option. The displays all had a minor price reductions though. Is this a sign of things to come over the next month or two? Does Apple want to diminish their current stock before unleashing some new displays everyone will have to have!?