Jobs chucks Leopard titbits to Apple masses
MacOS X 10.5 feature set fleshed out
WWDC Steve Jobs opened Apple's annual developer conference by going back in time one year - in more ways than one. As well as harking back to the announcement of his company's ground-breaking relationship with Intel and taking trademark swiped at Microsoft, the Apple CEO talked up features in Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, mostly previewed at WWDC 2006.
So what genuinely new features did Jobs pick out this year? A desktop look that adds a translucent dock, a menu bar at the top of the screen that now adapts to what users put on the desktop, something called Stacks that lets you group several icons within the dock, and a new downloads folder where the Safari browser stores files by default. The Finder, Apple's file browser, gets a new look with the Cover Flow function to view files the same way you would view iTunes cover art.
There was a strong nod towards gaming as video game publishers Electronic Arts and id Software, the maker of Doom and Quake, came on stage during Jobs' Monday keynote to announce their support of the Mac platform.
This summer, EA will come out with games like Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as well as some sports titles like Madden 08 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08. id Software owner John Carmack demoed a 20GB plus textured 3D environment.
Then it was onto packaging and pricing. The release of Apple's next "big cat" is scheduled for October at $129, "for the ultimate version", joked Jobs referring to Microsoft's layered price structure for Windows Vista.
"We've got a basic version, which is going to cost $129. We've got a premium version, which is gonna cost $129. We've got a business version, $129. We've got an enterprise version, $129. And we've got the ultimate version - we're throwing everything into it: It's $129. We think most people will buy the ultimate version," Jobs said. ®
Jean-Baptiste Su is Editor-in-Chief of Uberpulse.com
COMMENTS
Fred - i totally agree
I love the Mac vs Windoze battles, they're so much fun... i've not used anything other than Jaguar and Tiger on my Mac and i would hardly call the differences between the 2 as equivalent to a Service Pack on Windoze.
My girlfriend (yes i work in IT and have one, it's great!) has a G3 500Mhz iBook, running the latest version 10.4.9 without problem at all.... wheras at work i have a 5 year old laptop that crawls with XP and has to use 3rd party drivers for half of it's hardware that don't work very well at all.... sure MS have a harder task dealing with all the variants of hardware configurations, but i'd still rather pay the £129 for Leopard. Also look at the Family Packs, they're normally around £299 for a 5 license pack... given your average family these days has more than one computer at home, this adds another degree of value to the equation.
I won't be buying Vista for any of the computers i manage at work as the calculated upgrade costs for the hardware and the OS is uneconomical... the 3 Macs will have Leopard from day 1 as that'll cost less than a single license of Vista.
An other way to see things...
If, like me, you only want a computer to read the internet, send and receive emails, write and print a letter to the administration from time to time...
Then, the choice to buy this emac 4 years ago with it's OSX 10.3 was a good choice. The thing works as well, or as bad you may say, as the day I got it out of the box, which means it does exactly what I want and need it to do.
I never cared about those things called virus, malware of any sort, never bought any anti-this or anti-that things, never cared on what site I was visiting, attachement I was opening...
This thing goes to sleep mode in 2 seconds, awake in 2 seconds, and from the very first day I was able to make my beloved wife an account with which I'm pretty sure that no matter what she does, nothing bad possibly can happen..
4 years of enjoying the internet with my wife allowed on it as well, and not a single problem once. When you know close to nothing about computers like I do, this really make me think my first 1800 (and and as of today, last...) swiss francs 4 years ago (around 1200 $) weren't a bad choice.
Re: What really annoys me...
'$129 for a point upgrade. Bargainous. I liken that to paying for a Service Pack that comes with a couple of extra pretty things.'
I think 'a service pack that comes with a couple of extra pretty things' fairly accurately describes Vista's relationship to XP, and that's considerably more expensive than Leopard is going to be.
Misinformation
The amount of misinformation in the comments section is pretty amazing.
It's amazing how many people will write with authority about things they know nothing whatsoever about. And how resistant they are to facts even when they're confronted with them.
-fred
It's worth it.
Having wallowed in XP for so many years, and I still do run both platforms, I can safely say that it is completely worth it, for me at least, simply not to have had to deal with the rubbish Activation, WGA, system failure for as little as adding a hard drive or memory. I don't know if Vista is any better in this respect, but for the time being, I'm very happy with my OS.
