WWDC, Day One

Today was the first day of WWDC. WWDC consists mostly of lecture sessions about the technologies in Mac OS X and how to use those technologies. The most exciting session of the week is the first: the legendary keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. This is when Steve unveils all the great new stuff that they’ll be doing during the next year. This year’s keynote was as good as any I’ve attended.

The most anticipated news was the introduction of the Mac Pro line of desktop computers. This was the final step towards an all-Intel line for Apple and all evidence indicates that they saved the best for last. These machines will feature:

• Two dual-core Xeon processors at 2.0, 2.66 or 3.0 Ghz
• Four hard drive bays with easy-to-install sleds
• Two optical drive bays
• $2500 base model with many build-to-order options

But this was just the start of the goodies that Apple introduced. Next spring they plan to ship the next version of Mac OS X, code-named Leopard, and it is packed full of great new features:

• Time Machine: Seamless backup for all of your files with greatest user interface ever put on top of backup software. The demo for this was incredible.
• Boot Camp: Boot into Windows on your Mac.
• Spaces: The virtual desktop idea done right.
• Improved Speech: Apple has been using the same speech technology for about 20 years it seems. Now they’ve got speech technology that sounds very human and is very, very close to natural.
• iChat Theater: Show someone a slide show, movie or presentation while chatting with them online. Totally awesome idea and I hope they don’t require the video conferencing as they showed it today.

Leopard is shipping next spring but we got a “Preview” copy for free today. Everyone was madly installing it on their laptops during lunch. Nerds are so funny!