WWDC: The Shinier the Better

Well, the event that the press has been waiting for in the past few weeks has come and gone. WWDC has come and gone. The traditional "Stevenotes" keynote took place on Monday morning with more than just Steve Jobs' speaking to the developers. Several other guests from Apple's executive team previewed some of the features in the next release of the OS X operating system. VP of software engineering, Betrand Serlet, VP of worldwide marketing Phill Schiller and Scott Forestall, VP of Platform Experience. After an update from the Apple retail store, Phill Schiller took the stage to unviel the new Mac Pro high-end Apple desktop. The "single configuration" features dual Xeon 2.66 Ghz processors, 1 GB of memory a 250 GB Hard Drive, an advanced nvidia graphics card. As well you can drop in TWO Superdrives. The proccesor is upgradeable to 3 Ghz, the memory to 16 GB, the hard disk space to 2 TB and room for up to 3 more PCI-E graphics cards. Wow. That's a killer machine.

Wow is right. If only I had a few grand to spend on that killer machine. But I watched parts of the WWDC "Stevenotes"... and I'm truthfully more interested in the new version of OS X - Leopard. It's going to incorporate a "virtual desktop", which has been in Linux for years, tweaks to features carried over from Tiger, as well as a version of Boot Camp. There was speculation we were going to see Leopard released in the fall, but we won't see it until the spring of '07. I'm not believing Microsoft's January '07 release date for Windows Vista... if they are released about the same time, that would make for something interesting. I'm happy, however that seeing Leopard previewed might stop the ridiculous Photoshopp-ed imagery and videos with Tiger being masquaraded as Leopard.

I liked the the videos and the photos of Leopard. But I agree, it should be interesting to see who comes out on top. The fact is, although Apple came late into the game - because of some horrible corporate managment , OS X was delayed by almost 3 years. Although XP and OS X came out at the same time at the time, XP was superior in terms of features, while OS X had more security oriented features. Over the next five releases, OS X caught up to and passed XP. Now with the release of Vista just around the corner, Apple is readying it's next major weapon against Microsoft. Leopard, from what I've seen so far is going to smack Vista square in the face. Not only does it have more useful features like Time Machine, but it has support for 64-bit applications. And this brings up another point. Leopard has only two versions. One for a single user and one for a 5 user liceance. On the other hand, Vista has Starter, Home Premium, Bussiness, and on and on. Like Bored said, the showdown will come and the fact is, Microsoft better have all the bugs ironed out of Vista if it wants to compete with Apple or even if it wants to retain any of the respect of the geek community.

I have to disagree, somewhat. There's no way you can have all the bugs ironed out of a piece of software before it's released - I don't care who makes it. Not every single one of them - even if you test it to death. Some aren't found until the software is "in the wild", so to speak. With every user having a different system configuration and what they do with the machine and OS varying, some bugs don't come up until after release. You have to hope, for Microsoft's sake however, that they get most of the serious ones ironed out. But who knows? Leopard could be buggy. Apple's OS 9 wasn't great, if anyone remembers. There could be a chance they'll both performe equally... or one could fall below the other, in the minds of users. And I'd honestly not rather make a prediction on which one will perform better. You don't know which one actually does perform better until you're hands-on with it, is my belief. And I can't run the Windows Vista beta on my machine, so I don't have a comment. And then it comes down to the users, as well. There are those who are fans of one platform or the other, of course and will never think of buying the competitor's software... but then you've got users like myself, who don't care about brand loyalty... I base my choices on what performs the best for my own needs. What do I want out of a piece of software? Which will do it better?

One of the things that I was hoping on at the Stevenotes speech on Monday was an upgrade to the new processors in both the notebook and desktop lines. Although the iMac and the Macbook's are fast as is I would love to see a processor upgrade. Especially in the iMac. I would love to see a 2 Ghz processor 17" iMac. Before Apple transitioned to the Intel chips, the lowest end iMac was 1.9 Ghz as apposed to the 1.83 Ghz Intel. Now that might not seem like much, but when you're doing something like Audio or video eiditing, then the smallest amount of proceesor speeds. If they upgrade the processor in the 20" iMac with a 2.33 Ghz, or even a 2.16 Ghz processor and they bring up the speed of the 17" iMac I'll be happy and without hesitation. go out and buy an iMac.

Well, that's all for us,
Sorry this post took so long to get out.
I'm Virtunate and this is Bored SVU Nut.... is there anybody reading to say goodbye to?

Weare Ranting Geeks and we Ranted!