Apple's WWDC 2006 Keynote Announcements--3GHz Mac Pro Quad, Intel-based Xserve and Leopard

The Intel transition is over with today's announcement of the Mac Pro, the replacement for the Power Mac, and the Intel-based Xserve. It took only 210 days for the transition, far faster than originally planned.

The Mac Pro (all images courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc.) uses the same case as the Power Mac G5, except for two optical drive slots. It runs on the top-end "Woodcrest" Core 2 Duo Intel CPU at clock speeds of up to 3GHz--finally. The Mac Pro is up to two times faster than the Power Mac G5 that it replaces.

All Mac Pros have two dual core CPUs so even the Mac Pro base configuration is a quad with two 2.6GHz CPUs, 1GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7300GT graphics with 256MB VRAM, 250MB hard drive and a 16x SuperDrive for $2499. A similarly configured Dell goes for $1000 more, according to Apple's Phil Schiller who demoed the Mac Pro.

The inside of the Mac Pro case has been re-designed because less cooling is needed. Apple has designed the Mac Pro with four hard drive bays. The hard drives "snap in" without the use of cables. The Mac Pro has three PCI Express slots and a double-width PCI Express graphics slot.

There are nearly 5 million build to order combinations as Apple drops its three-level standard configurations. A Mac Pro with two 2GHz CPUs is $300 less and the top-end configuration with two 3GHz dual core CPUs is $800 more. Up to three additional Nvidia GeForce 7300GT graphics cards with 256MB VRAM can be added for $150 each. An ATI Radeon X1900 or Nvidia FX4500 graphics card can be added for $350 and $1,650 respectively. A second SuperDrive can be added for $100. Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme can be added for $79.

The base 2.6GHz Mac Pro is shipping today (1-3 business days) with most BTO's, including the 3GHz CPU, showing 3-5 business days so get your orders in now! However, a BTO with ATI Radeon X1900 graphics is showing 3-5 weeks for shipping.

The new Xserve server runs on two dual core 2.6GHz CPUs and retails for $2999. The Xserve will ship in October.

Some features of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" were announced and demoed. Some secret new features are being kept secret from Microsoft to save them from Microsoft's copy machine.

• Leopard will be 64-bit in the Carbon and Cocoa layers so applications can run 64-bit all the way to the user interface rather than just 32-bit.
• Front Row, Apple's Home Media application, will become a standard application with Leopard.
• "Time Machine" is an automatic backup system that keeps everything backed up immediately. If your hard drive fails, just replace it and it will be restored to the place where the old one failed automatically. It also allows one to restore selectively to earlier versions of software if the lastest update causes a problem.
• "Spaces" is a means to select of set of applications and associate them in a "space" and move rapidly among them.
• Spotlight will be able to search computers on a network and use Boolean expressions and file types for more accurate searches.
• "Core Animation" allows developers to create animation at the core OS level in layers using text, images, video or OpenGL.
• "Universal Access" with be improved with support for Braille and closed-captioning in QuickTime. VoiceOver is being improved.
• Mail will get new features like stationary (HTML templates) and To-Do lists, a system-wide service available to any Cocoa native application.
• Dashboard and its Widgets will be improved. Web Clip is a new tool that allows a user to capture any part of a Web page into a Widget and display real-time content.
• iChat will get the capability to use Photo Booth and show presentations from iPhoto or Keynote while video conferencing via iChat Theater. Backdrops will provide video "blue screening" so that the background can show anything the user desires.
• Leopard will also include substantially improved parental controls.

Xcode 3.0's current development build along with the current build of Leopard was made available to developers attending WWDC 2006. The target for the release of Leopard and Xcode 3.0 is Spring 2007.

There was no announcement of upgraded MacBook Pros as we had expected.

WWDC 2006 has over 4200 attendees--a record. This is up from over 3800 attendees at WWDC 2005 despite the lack of a strong Web advertising campaign as in previous years. Readers may remember our splash screen ad last year as we vied for click-throughs to win new Apple products. We received more than a few complaints about the ad but we ended up fourth best, way ahead of many popular Mac Web sites with much higher traffic. [Bill Fox]