Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Close but no cigar...

Apple's WWDC happened on Monday.  What was announced?  Basically the new iPhone4.  That's it - Well, that and Safari 5 and an update to iTunes.  A shame the mac pro wasn't announced.  It's long overdue.

Not saying I'm not excited about the new iPhone.  It's a wonderful update and since I'm still working with the first Gen. iPhone, I'm really looking forward to the possibility of upgrading.  That said, professional developers and creatives need tools to make the apps and such that these little consumer devices will use.  The mac pro being untouched for such a long time brings doubt into the minds of those professionals that Apple is not committed to them.  Right now, every major PC manufacturer is offering workstations with the new 6-core Intel processor and better choices of video cards.  Apple really has nothing to offer to compare with the speed these new machines provide the user.

Hopefully, the wait is due to Apple waiting on supply chain issues to be worked-out prior to committing their distribution system to providing a product to their high-end customers.  We'll see.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Apple's BIG WWDC?

For you Apple users, WWDC this Monday could prove to be the biggest for announcing new products in many years.

Of course, the new iPhone is reported to be announced (very nice from all leaked accounts), but there's also other reports that lead me to think a new mac pro with a hexacore processor (or two if a Dual) will be coming to shelves. For my friends who are not the geek-type, hexacore means that there is six processors on a single chip. In Intel's latest version, each of the cores is hyper-threaded and so acts like 2 processors per processor. So when you're working in Photoshop CS5 your machine will think it has 12 processors instead of six (or 24 instead of 12 if it's a dual). Lens blurs have never been so fast.  Yummy.

In a more consumer level product, an updated mac mini may be announced as current inventories are said to be very low. Photos posted at Macrumors.com a few weeks ago have shown the device with an HDMI port. Connecting directly to a HDTV would make the mini a near perfect media center. Small, easy to use, and with USB and Firewire, very storage expandable. Not holding my breath on this one as people have asked Apple to do this for a very long time and nothing's changed yet. We'll see.

Speaking of TV, the AppleTV is said to be updated into the form factor of an iPhone - but without a screen. The device supposedly streams 1080p video and, of course, audio.

This leads to the other huge story that may be announced: iTunes Live, supposedly a streaming service that will allow you to access all of your iTunes purchased media from the "cloud". This is conjecture, but there IS a reason Apple purchased Lala and then, last month, shut it down. This guess is also backed-up with the opening of a very large, $1 billion, data center in North Carolina. And with that data center, there's also word that parts of the current MobileMe service will become free. Currently the service, at $130 or so per year, is just too pricey for what's provided.

In summary, there could be a lot of Apple news Monday - may prove to be a very long keynote for Steve Jobs.

Allen Bussell
from my iPhone