Apple’s WWDC conference in June announced many hardware and software changes, some available now and some due in the fall. First of all, let’s look at the new MacBook Air. Both the 11 inch and the 13 inch come with faster flash storage drives, the latest Intel processors and graphics cards, longer battery life, and 802.11ac WiFi. All of these updates mean a longer work time with faster response. The work time on these is rated at 9 hours for the 11 inch and 12 hours for the 13 inch models. After your work is over you can put it to sleep and it should (with a full charge) be able to sit around for 30 days before running out of power. The new Haswell chips are going to be faster but also conserve energy with up to a 50% savings. The graphics card known as the Intel 5000 is much better than older models and will do a pretty good job of running your video games. The flash storage, which can be ordered as large as 512 Gigabytes, is 45% faster than the previous generation, making for a snappy system boot up. The one feature I was hoping for in this model did indeed arrive and that is the 802.11ac Wi-Fi which will give you up to three times faster performance when paired with one of the new Airport extreme base stations. However these statistics are quoted by Apple and real life will most likely be slower. In fact if you connect with a non 802.11ac device you are most likely looking at bringing the whole wireless network down to 802.11n speeds. Although Apple states that your WiFi range improves it will really depend on your setup.
The preview of the new Mac Pro got plenty of attention at WWDC and well it should have as the Mac Pro has not been updated for at least three years. Much has changed here, some for the better, some for the worse. Per Apple “Engineered around workstation graphics with dual GPUs, PCI Express-based flash storage, high-performance Thunderbolt 2, new-generation Xeon processors, ultrafast memory, and support for 4K video, the new Mac Pro delivers state-of-the-art performance across the board.” You can order one with up to 12 processor cores. It is very sleek and black. There are tons of technical details I could say but but will start with lightweight, 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 wide round with two AMD FirePro graphic processors that can drive three 4K monitors. Now for the crazy: the storage is PCIe Flash, meaning that you will be adding Thunderbolt drives to store those large files. This will create a huge demand for raid enclosures like Drobo with Thunderbolt so that it can keep up with the speed the Mac Pro will be able to produce. There is even a handle on the top for carrying it. There are four USB3 ports and well as six Thunderbolt 2 ports, two Ethernet, one HDMI, speaker out, and a lock port. All this as well as the 802.11ac and BlueTooth in a very small package. To finish up here, with the ability to daisy chain six devices to each of the six Thunderbolt ports the only limit here is how many vendors will increase their support for Thunderbolt? The new Mac Pro will show up sometime this fall—start saving your pennies now. One of the really big announcements was that the Mac Pro was designed in California and is being manufactured in Texas. That should make it a little harder for Samsung to borrow since we are not handing them the blue-prints.
Many other items were announced for the fall lineup including the death of the “cat” nicknames for the Macintosh operating system. OSX 10.9 will become “Mavericks” as in a California beach that has monster waves. Personally I like Waves better than Mavericks but my vote doesn’t count. Mavericks will have a version of iBooks so you can read on your Mac desktop all those books you have been collecting. A better version of maps, calendar that you can scroll month to month. A new version of Safari that should offer better performance. An iCloud Keychain (here we are in the cloud again) so you can have your passwords on all of your devices ,even the mobile ones. It is encrypted with AES 256-bit but good luck if you forget your password. Did I say Finder tabs yet? For those of you who love tabs the Finder will have tabs. This is meant to allow better handling on multiple displays with each being able to display the top menu bar and the Dock. You can go full screen on one monitor without messing up the second monitor or if you please full screen with different applications or even make your HDTV into a second or third monitor using AirPlay and an AppleTV.
Notifications will let you know about email, Chat, FaceTime or even auction alerts without leaving your application. Tags will allow you to mark files for groupings and finding; even tagging with more than one list if needed. If you have ever used Pandora Radio then you will know how to use iTunes Radio. Again coming soon but only in beta now. Set up stations, select music, block music—it’s all there. If you have Siri you can ask her to play a request or ask who is playing the song. If you have iTunes Match there are no ads. You can also choose to buy the song right when you hear it. This should work across all your devices as long as you are in the same account on each of these devices.
AppleTV got some updates to their channels, adding HBO GO, WatchESPN, Sky News, Crunchyroll and Qello. Of course you need a subscription to get them but if you have that you are good to go. See Apple’s web site for other details about the new channels. http://www.apple.com/pr/ library/2013/06/19HBO-GO- WatchEsPN-Come-to-Apple-TV.html
Many other items were announced for the fall lineup including the death of the “cat” nicknames for the Macintosh operating system. OSX 10.9 will become “Mavericks” as in a California beach that has monster waves. Personally I like Waves better than Mavericks but my vote doesn’t count. Mavericks will have a version of iBooks so you can read on your Mac desktop all those books you have been collecting. A better version of maps, calendar that you can scroll month to month. A new version of Safari that should offer better performance. An iCloud Keychain (here we are in the cloud again) so you can have your passwords on all of your devices ,even the mobile ones. It is encrypted with AES 256-bit but good luck if you forget your password. Did I say Finder tabs yet? For those of you who love tabs the Finder will have tabs. This is meant to allow better handling on multiple displays with each being able to display the top menu bar and the Dock. You can go full screen on one monitor without messing up the second monitor or if you please full screen with different applications or even make your HDTV into a second or third monitor using AirPlay and an AppleTV.
Notifications will let you know about email, Chat, FaceTime or even auction alerts without leaving your application. Tags will allow you to mark files for groupings and finding; even tagging with more than one list if needed. If you have ever used Pandora Radio then you will know how to use iTunes Radio. Again coming soon but only in beta now. Set up stations, select music, block music—it’s all there. If you have Siri you can ask her to play a request or ask who is playing the song. If you have iTunes Match there are no ads. You can also choose to buy the song right when you hear it. This should work across all your devices as long as you are in the same account on each of these devices.
AppleTV got some updates to their channels, adding HBO GO, WatchESPN, Sky News, Crunchyroll and Qello. Of course you need a subscription to get them but if you have that you are good to go. See Apple’s web site for other details about the new channels. http://www.apple.com/pr/ library/2013/06/19HBO-GO- WatchEsPN-Come-to-Apple-TV.html
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