iChat AV

adds fabulous audio and video chats to text chats. It is video conferencing for the rest of us. Jobs called a friend in Paris and Al Gore called Jobs at the WWDC. The demos were clear and instant. They are accessed right from the buddy list with zero set up or configuration. One needs broadband internet for video but only 56K dial up for audio. A free beta that runs on 10.2 is availble for download today. iChat AV will be free with Panther and $29 alone for Jaguar.

Mac OS X 10.3 will ship before the end of 2003 and will cost $129, including iChat AV. Attendees received a pre-release version of the client, server and developer tools called Xcode.

iSight is an Apple full motion video camera that connects to your Mac by FireWire and handles up to 30 fps. It does 640x480 with 24 bit color. It mounts on PowerBooks, displays and eMacs and has integrated rotate and tilt. It's available today for $149. WWDC attendees got one free.

Xcode is the new developer tool set based on GCC 3.3. Speed was the first priority. It can run on several computers on the network. The turnaround path during debugging was greatly shortened. It is included with Panther.

Power Mac G5 will be the world's fastest personal computer when they are released in August. They can be orderd today from the Apple Store.

The specs that were revealed Thursday night are real. The release was a mistake, called "premature specification" by Steve Jobs.

It uses the IBM 970 CPU called a G5. Intially they will run at 1.6, 1.8 and 2 GHz and they have a 1 GHz frontside bus. It uses a special system controller designed by Apple to give full symmetric multiprocessing. One measure is the it processes 215 in-flight instructions while the G4 does only 16. It's so fast that it can transfer and entire DVD in a second.

The new box is all brushed aluminum. It is square with two handles on top with a holed grill in the front and back. One of the best features is that it has FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 ports in the front along with a headphone jack and power switch. At 35 dba, it is twice as quiet as the latest Power Mac but has 9 fans with controlled cooling technology.

There are three models, a single 1.6 GHz for $1999, a single 1.8 GHz for $2399 and a dual 2 GHz for $2999.

The road map is to reach 3 GHz in 12 months but it is already faster as 2 GHz duals than the fastest Pentium 4 and dual Xeon 3.06 in integer and floating point according to SPEC tests. The dual 2 GHz is faster than the dual 3.05 Xeon by 2.1x in Photoshop, 2.3x in Luxology, 2.3x in Mathematica 5.

We will supplement this report tomorrow after trying some of the stuff this afternoon.

Steve Jobs' Keynote Kicks Off Apple WWDC 2003 Today--What will he say?: Actually, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference for 2003 started Sunday with Early Bird Workshops and the Student Developer Career Reception. But at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) the music will come down and Apple Computer's CEO will take the stage for a planned 2-hour keynote address to a standing room only gathering of developers and media in the new Moscone Conference Center West. We will be there and will be reporting all week on non-confidential items. The latter will be a bit difficult because Apple deems everything divulged by Apple except at the keynote is confidential.

What will Steve Jobs cover in his keynote? That has been a matter of speculation for months. Speculation reached a fever pitch late last Thursday night when an errant or purposeful or hacked .gif image appeared for a short time in the middle of the night on the online Apple Store's Power Mac G4 page. That image listed some pretty wild specs for a Power Mac with a so-called G5 CPU. While the debate goes on as to whether the specs are real, i.e. purposefully posted as a marketing tease (since no image of the "new" Power Mac was posted) or in error, or simply a hack that was quickly fixed, we are skeptical. Anyway we'll know soon enough so there's no use in us adding to the mire. The only thing that we are certain of is that Apple will at some time switch to using the IBM 970 CPU for at least some of its hardware.

Indeed, will there be any hardware announcements at all? We know that Apple's upcoming version of Mac OS X code-named "Panther" will be previewed and it will support 64-bit processing, doubling the data path width of the current 32-bit PC standard. Every registered attendee will get their hands on "Panther" and run it through its paces--we can hardly wait.

We also know that there will be some 170 sessions covering cutting edge technology in seven tracks including hardware!

Stay tuned for our first-hand WWDC 2003 keynote report.