So, amid the major announcements of 10.4.4, iLife 06 and a new version of iWork something interesting was mentioned…something about Intel…Apple are ahead of schedule with their transition to Intel chips. Today Steve announced not only a new iMac using the Intel Core Duo chip, but the MacBook Pro. The whole product line would be transitioned over to Intel by the end of the year – that’s a whole year ahead of the schedule he gave just 6 months ago at Macworld. Great news!
First the iMac – the pricing stays the same, the design stays the same, the sizes stay the same. No big deal, then? Quite wrong – with the Core Duo chip inside and 2MB L2 cache, these are running fast! Spec 2000 benchmarks for integer and floating point calculations are running 2.1 to 3.2 times faster than the current G5 chips.
Now for the MacBook Pro. It’s the announcement everyone was waiting for – more power in the Power Book. The G5 actually delivers less power per watt than a G4. Intel’s Core Duo chips deliver 3.9 times the performance per watt of a G4 and 4.5 times a G5.
There will be 2 models at 15.4"; a 1.67 and a 1.83 GHz Core Duo. These machines feature SATA hard drives, Express Card slots, built-in iSight cameras, built-in infrared sensors for remote control of Front Row and screens as bright as existing Cinema Displays. If that weren’t enough an all-new power adapter called Mag Safe is on these – it’s a magnetic connector that simply disconnects whenever you trip over the power cable, or your cat charges into it. Anyway – for all those occasions where your power cable has yanked your laptop off the desk, there is now an answer. These monster machines are running the Spec2000 benchmarks for integer and floating point calculations around 4.5 – 5.2 times faster than current Powerbooks.
Full details of both machines and all the other excitement are available on Apple’s website.
Other news…
10.4.4 was announced – the OS and all included apps are fully universal and run natively on Intel chip Macs – Steve’s demo was done on an Intel iMac.
Microsoft committed to 5 more years of developing Mac software and spoke of updates to Office to include SyncServices and Spotlight functionality into Entourage.
Oh, and Steve showed what is quite possibly the greatest ad since 1984…hopefully they’ll put it up somewhere…think of the possibilties…
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