Specifications

San Francisco
Apple WWDC06
As you may be aware, from August 7th to
the 11th 2006 was the really big Macin-
tosh show-and-tell event at the Moscone
Center in San Francisco. Apple’s World
Wide Developers Conference com-
menced on the 7th of August, with Steve
Jobs giving the keynote presentation at
10am California time.
Since Steve Jobs’ keynote speech
was not broadcast live I had to
follow it minute by minute on
a special MacRumors live text
website that was updated in real time every sixty seconds right from the fl oor
of the conference hall during the keynote speech. It was the next best thing to
being there.
There were lots of new software technologies announced, including Leopard,
a.k.a. Mac OS 10.5, but it will not be available to the public until after Christ-
mas. The conversion to Intel processors is fi nally complete with the MacPro
replacing the G5 tower PowerMacs. The new Intel towers feature two 2.66
GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors as standard equipment but the unit can
be ordered with either a slower (2.0 GHz) or faster (3.0 GHz) dual-core intel
chip. The specs are for the new models are listed on
the Apple website and the prices are far lower than the prices for the G5 tow-
ers they are replacing but the performance is much better. Although the new
MacPro looks like the G5 tower from the outside it is completely different
inside with fewer fans, room for four hard drives, and two optical drives.
The software updates described in
the keynote speech were magical but
I’m sure that many Mac users were
as bitterly disappointed as I was with
the lack of news about an upgraded
and faster consumer-level Intel iMac
to replace the 17-inch 1.83 GHz In-
tel iMac introduced back on January
10th, 2006, about seven months ago.
Apple did come out very quietly with
a downgraded iMac for educational institutions and students a few weeks ago
but I know a lot of pent-up purchasing power was hoping to see a new iMac
before school starts in September.