| Monday, June 23, 2003 |
13:18 - Hot damn
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
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They kept it under $3K!
Well done, Steve. And IBM, too-- I hope they get the kudos they deserve. This is quite an achievement. People were talking about how they were pretty sure there'd be a new chip, but they had no idea they'd actually be bringing in Serial ATA and PCI-X and all that stuff. Very, very nice-looking system, both visually and mechanically. Check out that case.
Each of the four thermal zones is equipped with its own dedicated, low-speed fans. Apple engineered seven of the nine fans to spin at very low speeds for minimum acoustic output. And Mac OS X constantly monitors component temperatures in each zone, dynamically adjusting individual fan speeds to the appropriate levels for the quietest possible operation. As a result, the Power Mac G5 runs three times quieter than the previous Power Mac G4 enclosure.
Not shipping until August, though, so that's the one gotcha. But hey, that's still earlier than most of us expected; and they're taking pre-orders now, and if you buy it through the Valley Fair online store (and probably all the other ones too), they give you a Pro Card with lots of discount goodies and service guarantees and stuff. I think I'll be exercising that AmEx after all. But maybe it's for the best that I don't actually have to charge it for another couple of months.
Anyway: Panther. I'm all over Panther. Great set of demos; the new Finder, the thing I thought was sort of jumbled in the early leaked photos, actually seems to be a much more cleaned-up metaphor, and the instant search/filtering is now in all sorts of things throughout the OS. (Labels! Woo-hoo!) Mail's all spiffed-up. Exposé rocks-- I'll be using it as my new hey, check this out demo thingy, the one I've been using Zoom for up till now. Unless the thing I choose to show off is actually Fast User Switching.
Because we can
Mac OS X animates transitions from one user to another. The current desktop becomes a texture placed on a 3D cube that rotates out of view while the incoming account desktop rotates into view on another side of the cube.
You have to see it. It had me on the floor and the audience roaring. "We have to admit," said Steve, "that Windows XP beat us to this one. They got there first. So we're catching up to it now, and doing it a lot nicer." God, he's not frickin' kidding.
FileVault, comprehensive encryption of the home folder, good for lost laptops. Preview is now the fastest PDF renderer in the world (a mini-bakeoff showed it kicking the ass of the 3.06GHz Dell in zip-scrolling through an 800-page PDF which it rendered on the fly in 28 seconds). Font Book-- cool little Address Book-like font manager. Integrated faxing in every Print dialog. Auto-syncing iDisk, which lets you keep your folders in sync in the background all the time you have a network connection. Xcode-- kickass new development environment. (He used that word, kickass, about six times today.) And iChat AV turned out to be the heaviest hitter-- integrated text/audio/video IM'ing. Uses any camera with no setup (especially the iSight, Apple's new webcam/mike). Uses cool video transitions to do picture-in-picture. And all based on open standards, so "If anyone else, er, copies what we've done, they can interoperate with us."
Oh, and lots more cool updates under the hood. FreeBSD 5.0 underpinnings. Active Directory integration. Direct SMB server browsing. X11. IPSec VPN. Pixlet. More that I can't remember.
There were some great lines in the presentation, which you should watch if you've got a couple hours to kill and a good connection-- a very jubilant atmosphere. Some of the memorable one-liners:
When showing off iChat AV, Steve first did a video-chat with Phil Schiller in a back room with a bookshelf and stuff. The camera picked up almost instantly; very smooth. Then he went back to his buddy list and picked out one of his old colleagues in Paris; he initiated an audio chat with Jean-Marie Huillot, and it took a few seconds for the audio link to set up. And it took a few more seconds. And a few more. And Steve turned to the audience and said, "It takes a little longer to negotiate with France."
(Immediately afterward he video-chatted with Al Gore: "You're the third Apple board member to use the new iChat!" Gore: "Yeah, well, it's hard to come in first." Ho ho. The only obviously rehearsed line. The man got quite a few ahems and razzes from the crowd, too.)
Early on, Steve showed a clip from Jay Leno, with his "bin Laden videotape"-- which turned out to be a bin Laden impersonator dancing around on a white background holding an iPod singing "I Like Big Butts" like in the iTunes Music Store ad. "It just doesn't get any better than that," Steve giggled.
When opening up the "One More Thing" segment, with the G5, Steve kicked it all off by showing a giant slide of the Apple Store page with the flubbed graphic. He certainly seemed in good humor about it; he put up a slide with what the incident was being called internally: Premature specification.
(He said, incidentally, that the reactions he'd heard regarding the image flub-up fell into three camps: 1) It's too good to be true, and therefore a mistake; 2) It's true; 3) It's brilliant marketing on Apple's part. Well, he said, It was a mistake. Big slide: It was a mistake. We all held our breath. And... it's true. Big slide: It's true. 3800 collective sighs of relief, followed by long rolling applause.
And when the founder of Wolfram Research took the stage for the bake-off with Mathematica, in which the G5 rendered a series of huge fractal images 2.3 times faster than a whoop-ass dual-3GHz Xeon (it's all about the memory bandwidth, apparently), he said that "The G5's competition is no longer PCs; it's the high-end UNIX workstations that cost twice as much. And it's faster than all of them too."
As for the turnout in the Valley Fair store-- excellent. Probably fifty people were crammed in around the theater. One guy was there at 5:50 this morning just so he could be first in line; he got the Geek Prize from the store employees, which was a photo of everyone else in the store pointing and laughing at him, and a t-shirt. They also Dutch-auctioned off a 15GB iPod, and tried to unload some Power Mac G4s and iBots whose shelf life has now become severely limited.
An exhilarating couple of hours indeed.
Oh, and here's the performance bar-graphs for those who find them fascinating.
Interestingly, the specs graphic on the G5s at the Apple Store is different from the one that was leaked. Subtly different, but different. The leaked one was 100% accurate, but they redid it anyway. The header line now rotates between several slogans. Bizarre.
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