Markus

Latest info from the 2006 WWDC:

New Mac Pro annouced. Same enclosure as G5, but with dual optical bays. All dual core, based on core 2 duo (woodcrest). Up to 3ghz processor speed, 64bit, machines will get two chips. Aprox 1.6 to 2.1 times faster than G5 Quad.

Dual 2.66 Xeon,
1 GB RAM,
Geforce 7300 GT (256 MB VRAM),
SuperDrive
$2499

ScoobyDoo555

<dribble>
Dan

KiwiGTI

Who needs pornography.

Markus

I'm with both of you on that

Have to say I was very impressed with the specs and should hopefully get to play with one of the machines at some point soon. Doubt I'll get my grubby mits on one, though I might try the "I need one for testing purposes as it's 64-bit, a xeon, and my iMac doesn't meet either of those requirements" line, but I doubt it'll work

10.5 looks good as well, hopefully the dev preview will be available for download later this week, as I don't have any of the team at the WWDC this year, so will need to download the thing.

In other news, MS has stated they have killed VPC for intel. Their comment was that getting it working on intel would be a complete rewrite, akin to it being VPC v1.0 in effect. Yeah, whatever, they could not be arsed to do it basically, if it was super difficult then how come Parallels came out of nowhere with a VM solution?

Also, VMWare announced a beta of their VM solution for Intel macs. I've signed up for the beta so should hopefully have a test copy at some point soon. I'm curious to see how it stacks up against Parallels, which I rather like. The plus points in VMWare's solution at the mo seem to be USB 2.0 and ACPI support, which means Vista's supported, which Parallels does not support yet, plus Netware is supported (something Parallels may support in a future release)

All in all, a pretty good keynote, and from what I've read, there are probably going to be a few other announcements over the week as well.

stevencotton

And the fact they've been doing it for years. I've used VMWare's server virtualisation products in production for a while, they're great.

Markus

Steve,
That's a valid point, some market recognition there compared to Parallels. There have been complaints about support dropping off drastically for Parallels since it was officially released.

Still no dev preview download of 10.5 yet though If anyone happens to see a 3.52GB image on bit torrent claiming to be 10.5, it's not, it's just an empty image file, so don't waste your time downloading it.

mattbeef

not that you tried it Markus

im just waiting to see how much they have changed inside when i get me hands on one

Markus

I'll admit that I did a quick search for the dev preview, simply as it's not on the ADC yet (doubt it'll appear until next week ) and wondered if any devs had ripped the DVD and created a torrent of it. One assumes they are all very good chaps and don't violate NDA's.

When I saw the image I thought I'd have a peek at the comments and a few people said that it was a blank image file.

It'll turn up soon enough, plus no doubt we'll be shipped a DVD of it at some point.

I'm interested to see whether our stuff will run out of the box or if we'll need to recode as much as we did for Tiger, which is what'll probably happen.

RichB

Time Machine and Spaces look good. iChat with screen controling ala Timbuktu also very useful!

jowl

AS I'm looking to 'build' a mac mini based media centre, I'm interested in what the 'new' front row will look like.

Have their been any annoucements about CPU upgrades for current machines? I wondered if they would want machines to have 64-bit CPU's for leopard....and i want a merom in my mini!

and if anybody wants to send me a Mac Pro, I'll PM my address

RichB

I still waiting for new updates for the MBP or MB before splashing the cash...

Markus

I know someone has taken a mini from core solo to core duo, but I've not heard anyone as yet upgrading to a mermon chip. The non laptop machines have socketed processors, so in theory you could drop a new chip in there, but the front-side bus may well need an update and that's not a DIY job really. I guess you could possibly purchase a new logic board and chip and do it as a DIY job, but bang goes the warranty.

It would make sense for the consumer machines to go 64-bit as the G5 iMacs were, but we'll have to wait and see. Unless the chips are 64-bit and the OS/Firmware needs and update to "enable" this. I have a vauge recollection of reading somewhere that the chips might be 64-bit but it's not enabled, though I'm probably wrong on that point

There has been no mention of speed bumps yet, but they may be coming.

There's no mention yet as to what the new front row has in it. Steve mentioned that it'd be a standard app, as in, not just for currently shipping machines.

jowl

Cheers Markus.

I also recall a debate (in other mac forums) about wheather 'Yonah' was a 64-bit chip. I don't remember the exact outcome.

We'll have to see what price the Merom CPU is before deciding on whether to attempt a DIY upgrade - if the FSB/chipset supports it.

IMO, they may upgrade the Macbook Pro to merom but might wait on the Mini, Macbook and even possibly the iMac.

Good news about Frontrow being a standard app though

Markus

No problem at all

I'd expect to see bumps at Macworld in January, and/or when 10.5 is released. We might see them before though, who knows.

I'm also curious about the "Top Secret" things Steve would not mention in 10.5. I doubt they'll be in the first dev preview, but it's possible they might appear in other seed releases, I'd expect to see them late in the dev cycle, probably around Jan 2007, which ties up with Macworld, which would be a few months off release date, so perfect for showing the new stuff, plus letting devs test with it.