Time for the “Dog and Pony” show

At 11:30 Krishen and I managed to sneak away from work and along with Melissa headed to the Tampa Apple Store in search of the future …
One only needs to go as far as apple.com to review the latest changes in our world of bit manipulation. However, the real treat lies in watching the full show, Steve loves his shows. Heck, even Melissa watched, and enjoyed, everything but the stuff on new development tools.
But for a summary:

   – Music store has recorded over 5 Million songs sold
   – Safari is released as 1.0 (and if by far my favorite browser)
   – iChat AV Public Beta is released and includes both voice and video conferencing (I have downloaded it – so join me online … though I only have a mic available)
   – In combo, Apple released a new device – the iSight

But the big news comes with a preview of Panther and the announced availability of the PowerMac G5 this September.
View the specs of the new G5 right here, or here, or here. But we are basically talking upto 8 Gigs of RAM, a 1 GHz frontside bus, and cools its 1.6-2 GHz processor(s) with 4 independently computer cooled air tunnels – bringing the background noise down from the current G4s.
Panther, being release before the end of the year (a copy of which we are expecting here at work within weeks), has some very exciting features – the most relevant to myself would be the fast-user switching. Both Melissa and I agreed that this would solve a number of our home-computing wows. However, the fast searching, MUCH improved finder, and exposé feature are also high on my list of important improvements. Take a sneak peak
So … what else did I see that was interesting.
– Apple released a ‘roadmap’ indicating they will release 3GHz machines within 12 months after the G5 release. This is interesting as Apple does not like releasing information like this … but corporate America has been requesting it
– IBM came on stage and made a very public (in my opinion) commitment to the G5 and to Apple. This is a big thing for a couple reasons: for one IBM is more consistent with their chip production than Motorola and IBM public support brings a more stable peg to the Apple platform (in the eyes of the analysts).
– New Developer Tools, XCode … still waiting to see what it is all about, but this will be a BIG deal in my world. Especially the ‘fix on the fly’ and ‘auto-compiling’ features – not to mention distributed builds using idle machines on your network … very very very cool
Man … wish I was there … the 175 sessions of information packed geekdom would be “insanely great” … but all in all – a very good, positive, and exciting show. Even though the specs were released a little early (oops), I was still not disappointed in what I saw.
What were your thoughts on the show ? The future ? And the public reaction to Apple latest developments ? … comment now. (You of course can always comment using the ‘comments’ link below each posting!)

Follow