Amongst many others, Engadget covered the event live, and in the end the only real surprise was the lack of real surprises.
While there wasn't a design overhaul, despite optimistic predictions, I'll settle for the new four core Mac Pro as a replacement for the PowerMac G5. Although after playing around on the Apple Store, it looks like the system I'd want seems to be coming in at around £6k, so I doubt I'll be seeing one any time soon.
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| CREDIT: Engadget |
However Engadget have already gone hands-on with the new Mac Pro on the show floor, it looks good, and the new box looks to be fairly price competitive with a similar specification machine from Dell.
The bulk of the keynote was taken up with the Leopard sneak preview, and amongst others Phill Ryu discusses the many applications that Leopard kills off (via TUAW)...
With either the biggest, or the smallest impact, on the current Mac software market, Time Machine really isn't a back-up utility "as we know it" as it has a radical and intuitive UI that's wholly original. I've certainly never seen anything like it before, and perhaps it leaves a niche for existing applications like Carbon Copy Cloner, as it seems to look and feel more like a file versioning application than a traditional back-up utility.
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| CREDIT: Engadget |
Proper file versioning integrated into the operating system is something that UNIX has always lacked, and the one thing I miss from my VAX and VMS days.
Spaces will make a pretty big impact on the Mac software world, in one fell stroke it wipes out a whole generation of utility programs like Desktop Manager that gave those of us used to virtual desktops our fix.
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| CREDIT: Engadget |
But unless Time Machine starts killing off back-up utilities left right and centre, maybe the biggest impact will be from the introduction of Apple's new Dashboard development environment, Dashcode. This will almost immediately kill a whole range of emerging tools like Widgetarium.
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| CREDIT: Engadget |
I could go on, but maybe you should just read Phill Ryu's article instead, or Chris Messina's, who has a remarkably similar post.
Finally there has been a lot of discussion following the conference about whether the Apple and Microsoft rivalry getting out of hand? The banners at the Moscone Center were pretty blatant about Apple's attitude towards Windows Vista.
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| CREDIT: Engadget |
For a company that has to rely of Microsoft to keep producing Office for Mac they're shooting themselves in the foot, just a little, don't you think?
Update: More on what we didn't see from the Apple Blog...
Update: A possibly off the wall, but none the less, interesting analysis of the keynote by Joshua Scott Emmons over on the O'Reilly network. He concludes that,
...he was completely occupied by something more important for the past few weeks, and was unable to find the time he needed to pull the presentation off with his usual flair.and that perhaps Apple's possible legal troubles over their stock options irregularities might be getting ugly..?
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