Okay, so you want to know the lowdown on what Schiller Dawg brought all up in the hizee, so here it is. Schiller kicked it all off by first (yes, first), announcing updated MacBook Pros and a new organizational arrangement for the models. The biggest change was to move the 13″ MacBook Unibody models into the MacBook Pro fold. Battery life jumps to 7 hours (claimed) for the 13″ and 15″ MBP models, and prices start at US$1,199 overall. The MacBook White budget machine remains, but also get an update, and the MacBook Air also gets a refresh. The big news on the MacBook Air, though, is that they are now offering a new SSD model with a 128GB drive for a mere US$1,799. Oh, and the ExpressCard/34 slot was replaced with an actual SD card slot. Wow. 

Next up is a discussion about what Snow Leopard will bring. There are lots of refinements to Leopard and very few new features. This is a good thing, too, as continually adding new features, like Microsoft does as a standard operating procedure, continually adds new problems. Apple has decided to refine all of the components of Leopard. The three big elements for developers are GCD, OpenCL, and 64-bit support throughout. OpenCL, a new open standard from Apple which is being supported by everyone who is anyone, allows unused processing time from the graphics GPU to be used for other stuff. GCD allows developers to take advantage of multiple CPU cores without effort. Nice. Snow Leopard is out later this year for upgrade pricing of US$29 per license and US$49 for the family pack. 

Finally comes the iPhone OS 3.0 chatter. Honestly, if this thing works like they say it will, the iPhone OS 3.0 on an iPhone 3Gs will be more like a laptop in your pocket than just a phone, and everyone else STILL has a long way to go to catch up (except maybe Palm, but that’s another article). Thirteen years ago when I was still banging away on a PowerMac 7300/200 and an Apple Newton MessagePad MP130 and had a PowerBook 145b and PowerMac 7100/60 in active use I would not have been able to tell you that Apple was going to pull it out again around now. For nearly ten years now, though, I’ve been watching Apple deal Aces off the top of the deck in the form of Mac OS X, the iPod, the new MacBook Pros, the Intel switch, and now the iPhone. 

Here’s to another 30 years of wicked Apple gear.

Purchase this and related items at Amazon now: