Apple WWDC Announcements

Here's a quick roundup of the announcements from WWDC.

First, and foremost, is the unimaginatively named Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro is the professional workstation, featuring dual dual-core Intel Xeon (Woodcrest) CPUs in every model. That's four cores, even in the base.

The specs are:

2 x 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz or 3.0GHz Intel Xeon 5100 Series CPUs

1 GB DDR2 667MHz Fully-buffered ECC RAM (8 DIMM slots)

4 x 3Gb/s SATA Drive Bays

2 x Optical drive bays

2 x Gigabit Ethernet

2 x FireWire 400, 2 x FireWire 800, 5 x USB 2.0

Digital Optical Audio in/out

Prices starting at $3499

Next up is the Xserve.

2 x 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz or 3.0GHz Intel Xeon 5100 Series CPUs

1 GB DDR2 667MHz Fully-buffered ECC RAM (32GB Max)

3 x 3Gb/s SATA or SAS Drive Bays

1 x Optical drive

Dual redundant power supplies

Onboard Video (no, really!)

On the Operating System front, there's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Time Machine - an integrated backup with visual navigation for past states. My guess is that it uses filesystem snapshots (wishful thinking?)

Improvements to Mail.

Vast improvements to iChat - you can send in an iChat session a keynote presentation, iPhoto slideshows, remote desktop sharing etc...

A really nice virtual desktop manager, called Spaces. Takes the virtual desktop metaphor that one step further and makes it look really intuitive to use.

Dashboard can now easily make a widget from any web page. Plus the official announcement for dashcode - the Dasbhoard graphical IDE.

Spotlight has received some well-needed attention with more powerful syntax, such as boolean searches, being supported.

iCal now integrates with Mail, for things like the To-do list. Plus, there seems to be much better capabilities for sharing calendars via CalDAV.

The easy-access features in Accessibility have been updated with a new speech synthesised voice that's quite easy to understand. Still sounds unnatural, but it's getting better.

There is full 64-bit support throughout the OS, absolutely required to support the new Intel Xeon CPUs.

Lastly, there's some nice eye-candy in Core Animation.

Leopard Server has some nice additions that will be great for many users...

There's an easy setup process (which may, or may not, be a good thing)

There's an iCal Server! and as Apple say, "It's about time" iCal, Mozilla Sunbird and Microsoft Outlook can all talk to the iCal Server. iCal server also natively supports Xsan, so multiple servers can read and write to the same volume, enabling clustering to increase reliability.

For sharing information, there's a Wiki Server. This enables a collaborative website to easily be set up where users can modify the information contained in it. Easily set up a knowledge base for your company.

Server brings Spotlight searches to the server. Now you can use Spotlight to not only search for information on your local machine, but on Leopard servers as well.

There's an easy to use Podcast Producer where you can stream video and audio from something like a Mac mini, via FTP, to an Xserve, and then out via RSS to clients.

Plus, there's a stack more, such as a new version of Open Directory, a new QuickTIme Streaming Server, better Xgrid, mail, and file services.

Go check it all out.

Apple Displays have dropped in price, some by up to $800, which is a great change...