The rumors about the new Power Mac G5 were true. From $1999 to $2999, these things look great. The dual 2 GHz machine looks awesome. 1 GHz front-side bus (!), up to 8 GB of PC3200 RAM, independent custom-built bus controllers to reduce contention between subsystems, 64-bit chip with full native 32-bit application compatibility. Very sweet. New case is all-aluminum with a fancy cooling system: 9 independently controlled fans that cool independent parts of the new case design. Sounds like it’d be loud, but they’ve got it down below the latest G4 case design.
They showed off Mac OS X 10.3. This thing looks hot. They’ve focused a lot on performance, which is welcome. The hottest stuff, IMO, is the new navigation stuff, called Expose, which provides better navigation through open windows than the Dock. Fast user switching isn’t a big deal to me, but a lot of people seem to like it. I’m not crazy about the new Finder using the brushed metal look-and-feel, but I trust that the overall experience will be improved: people that have played with it seem to love it. Can’t wait for the new Mail.app. All-in-all looks good. It costs $129. If they keep pushing out hot new stuff, I’m happy to pay $129 a year for it.
They released a few things today. iChat AV Beta is an upgrade to iChat that leverages the AOL IM framework to add real-time, configuration-free video conferencing. It looks marvelous. I’ve downloaded it, and there are small, nice fixed to the regular IM capability, but I haven’t had time to really play with the new features. I’ll make another post about them. To go along with it, a stylish, high quality web conference camera with built-in noise-cancelling mic called iSight is also out today.
Safari is out of beta, at version 1.0. It includes the new WebKit framework for OS X, which allows programmers of third-party tools to use the Safari web rendering capabilities inside their programs. Very cool. It comes with API documentation and examples, so prepare to see every program with a need handling complex HTML and JS natively.
All great stuff. The only rumored item missing was the new 15" PowerBook. Maybe MacWorld next month will get that, since there were a lot of announcements already. If it’s a G5, /hooboy/, will that be news. We know they’re making new cases, so there’s got to be something in the works.