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Apple has some amazing new technologies on the way, unveiled Monday, June 28 at its WorldWide Developers Conference (WWDC), but if you want them, you’ll have to wait. The impressive new hardware and intriguing new version of OSX are not yet ready for you, and some of it won’t be available until sometime after January 2005.
But if Steve Jobs’ Keynote address was any indication, it will be worth the wait. Speaking to 4500 developers in a demo which, for the first time in years, was not made available in real time on the web or by satellite, Apple’s CEO unveiled what may have been the worst-kept secret since Apple was upstaged by Time magazine in its announcement of the then-new iMac G4.
Watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs give a preview of Mac OS X “Tiger” from the WWDC at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.
QuickTime 6 is required to view the streaming video.
CINEMA DISPLAYS
Jobs announced three new Cinema Displays, with the smallest at 20-inch and the largest at an amazing 30-inch, with a 23-inch size in the middle. The new displays adopt Apple’s brushed aluminum look, with thin aluminum bezels and an elegant central stand. All three displays abandon Apple’s proprietary ADC connector in favor of the industry standard DVI connector, which makes these the first Cinema Displays which can be used on many Windows-based PC’s.
The use of the DVI connector means Apple was forced to abandon its single-cable solution for power, video, and USB connections, but in the next best thing, it has created a single cable from the monitor to the CPU, which is then broken out into separate connections. These new monitors will require a small external power brick, because the DVI standard does not transmit power to the monitor. The use of DVI means also, for the first time, the 20 and 23 inch Cinema Displays will connect directly to DVI equipped PowerBooks without external connectors or adapters.
The 30 inch display, which weighs in at a hefty $3499, will not connect to a PowerBook. In fact, it won’t connect to any standard Macintosh, because no stock video connection is powerful enough to drive it. The new display will require a $500+ nVidia video card which provides a unique dual DVI connection powerful enough to drive the 4 million pixels of the new monitor. The card offers two sets of dual-channel DVI connections, meaning a well-heeled user could connect two 30-inch Cinema Displays to the same computer, for a display five feet wide. The 20-inch and 23-inch monitors will be available in July, at $1299 and $1999 respectively, while the 30-inch behemoth and the nVidia card won’t be shipping until August.
OS 10.4 TIGER
While Jobs received appreciative applause for the hardware, the developer crowd flocked to San Francisco for the software, specifically, a first look at Tiger, Apple’s feline-founded name for OSX 10.4. It is set to be released sometime in the first half of 2005, a time frame Jobs declined to make more specific. At a price of $129, the OSX update is claimed to carry over 150 improvements and enhancements, some arcane and of interest primarily to developers, but some with interface changes just this side of astounding.
 Probably the most impressive changes came for iChat AV, which under Tiger will get a long awaited upgrade to include video conferencing. Jobs showed how ten people could engage in an audio chat, while three people could join someone in a video chat. What drew cheers was the interface for the video chat. As new people were added, the display for each participant slid away to form a perspective enhanced window, filling larger amount of screen space to accommodate. The quality of the video was amazing, because iChat AV uses one of those "under the hood" improvements in Quicktime, a new video codec known as H.264, to provide vastly improved video over lower bandwidths. The new technology has been adopted for a new generation of High Definition DVD players soon to hit the market, and will become Apple’s main video core technology under Tiger.
Read this article in its entirety in the June 2004 Newsletter, available for download in PDF form.
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