In last year's World Wide Developer Conference, Apple's biggest event for software developers, scientists & researchers and IT professionals, Steve Jobs announced the transition of the Mac from IBM's PowerPC processors to Intel. Within the year, we have seen the iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Book Pros and the recent Macbooks replace the PowerPC computers with Intel-chip based Macs (ICBMs). The only Mac left on the PowerPC platform is their PowerMac, with a quad-processor G5 running it.
This coming August, Jobs is expected to unveil the PowerMac replacement along with the preview of the next generation of Apple's operating system, Mac OS X 10.5, code-named Leopard, at the World Wide Developer Conference 2006.
Speculations regarding the specifications of the PowerMac replacement (and as some say it will be called Mac Pro) plague the popular Mac websites. With Intel's recent announcement of their Conroe chips, Apple may just release the Mac Pro with these new Conroe chips or even two of these to make it a 2 dual-core setup - which is not far from the quad-processor G5 specifications. It is also said to come with a free optical bay in anticipation of Blu-Ray drives. Others say that Apple will introduce a new case to differentiate the Intel from the PowerPC specs. Will Jobs finally move the entire Apple computing line from desktop, portables to the XServes to Intel by next month? This is one of the questions that everyone is waiting to be answered.
More people are eager to see what Apple's Leopard will bring to combat the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Vista. The beta version of Vista has been out for quite sometime and personally, I have seen how it performs, albeit on a poorly spec'd computer. I like the way it added eye-candy to the task switching feature but its Aero-powered cascading 3D windows made me cry. Imagine if you have a lot of windows open, do you have to scroll through all those windows just to select one that you need? Apple Tiger's Expose is still better! Anyway, this is about Apple and the World Wide Developer Conference so we'll leave Vista for another article in the future.
Nobody has seen Leopard in the wild and developers are strictly under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), so we will not see a glimpse of how powerful or how lame 10.5 is until Jobs gives us a preview this August at the WWDC. Will there be developer preview releases of Leopard available? I sure hope so!
As a developer, this is one event where you get to meet the engineers responsible for your favorite hardware and software. Imagine hobnobbing with the designer of your MacBook Pro (and asking them why the heck it gets too hot! heheh)? How about challenging those who created those pretty Dashboard Widgets? Do you have a question about your XServe deployment for your company? The WorldWide Developer Conference is the venue for all of these questions.
"One more thing...", the famous three words immortalized by Steve Jobs and almost always anticipated by Mac fans everywhere, may bring us an update to the iPod Nano, perhaps with larger capacity or who knows? Maybe a new video-playing iPod? An Apple mobile phone? iSight- equipped Cinema displays? We can all speculate and hope for the best.
I hope that I'd get a chance to listen (live!) to the keynote of Jobs and then rush to the Apple store for whatever new product he announces. Time to limit my macchiattos and save up! Stay tuned... I may just get lucky and give you WWDC news as it happens. :D
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