Wow....what a morning!

At WWDC, the annual World-Wide Developers Conference, Apple has finally released the long awaited replacement to the PowerMac G5. With Intel's absolute top-of-the-line chip, the Intel Xeon 'Woodcrest', this new MacPro range boasts a massive speed increase along with some very interesting enhancements. In addition to this we're seeing an Xserve Intel revision, an amazing preview of the new Mac operating system, Leopard, and an overall Display price reduction.

Intel Mac Pro

With processor speeds of up to 3GHz Dual Core, this powerful new generation of dual processor Intel machines is being touted as 2.1x faster than the G5 predecessor.

New configuration options include up to 16GB of RAM, a maximum of 2TB of onboard storage in 4 hard drive bays, a choice of ATI X1900 512MB, NVidia GeForce 7300GT 256MB or NVidia Quadro FX4500 512MB video cards and the surprising new feature of optional Dual Optical Drives make this unit an extremely impressive professional-level machine. It's also worth noting that up to 4 x 7300GT's can be hosted in this machine at a single time to drive a total of 8 x displays.

Apple brings to the table a renewed focus on Configure To Order, opting to keep the price low on the standard configurations to enable the largest possible range of choice. There is a single base level 'Vanilla' machine which can then be CTO'd in a vast number of options.

Mac Pro - 2x2.66GHzICDr/1GB-ECC/250GB/Superdrive/7300GT
$3999 inc

http://www.apple.com/au/macpro/

Intel Xserve!

Blasting onto the server scene Apple has released the Intel Xserve with a host of new features. Up to 5x faster than the previous generation of Xserves, and also using the Woodcrest chipset, revisions of particular interest are the new dual redundant Power Supplies, up to 2.25TB of storage in 3 x SATA/SAS compatible bays and Lights Out Management monitoring at a true hardware level while remaining in a compact 1U form factor. Additionally the performance minded are taken care of with up to 32GB of RAM addressable.

Xserve base spec:
2x2GHzICD/1GB-ECC/80GB/ATI X1300 Video/OSXUnlim
$4995 inc

http://www.apple.com/au/xserve/

10.5 Leopard...

First and foremost Steve has set the release date for Leopard to be Spring (his timezone) of next year. What this effectively relates to is the first quarter of '07 for release.. most likely March sometime. On the plus side, Bootcamp has been 100% confirmed to be shipping in Leopard and some of the previews we were shown tonight were both amazing and reinforce that it will be well and truly worth the wait.

http://www.apple.com/au/macosx/leopard/

There were too many 'sneak peeks' to go through here in detail however details can be found at the above URL.

Cinema Display prices reductions!

Now even better value, Apple have reduced the pricing across the board for their display range.

Apple Studio 20" 1680x1050 $1,150inc
Apple Studio 23" 1920x1200 $1,599inc
Apple Studio 30" 2560x1600 $3,199inc

Time Machine!

One of the Highlights of 10.5 is Time Machine, an innovative way to retrieve 'lost' data.

"Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard makes a complete backup of all the files on your system. That includes your system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, documents — everything you keep on your Mac. As you make changes, Time Machine only backs up what changes, all the while maintaining a comprehensive layout of your system. That way, Time Machine minimizes the space required on your backup device".