Veerle's blog

Apple’s press event at PhotoPlus Expo 2005 has once again brought us some new toys. It wasn’t Steve Jobs but David Moody that had his moment of glory on stage. Not the usual break down of company figures but right onto the cool stuff.

Let’s start with something that will please Jon Hicks and that’s the arrival of two updated PowerBook models. Let’s look at the new PowerBooks: the new 15 inch PowerBook will get a new display with 1440 x 960 resolution and his big brother the 17-inch will get 1680 x 1050 resolution. Both will be 46% brighter than previous models. Battery life has also been improved with 22% and a SuperDrive will be standard. Both machines will have built-in support for 30” display. They are available now. The new prices are:

12-inch to retial now for $1,500,
15-inch for $2,000
17-inch for $2,500

Finally the G5 gets a well deserved update too and yes I know the first question on your mind is “will they have dual core chips?”. The answer is YES, dual-core support and dual velocity engines and dual 1MB L2 cache! According to Apple this baby is a lot faster then my lovely Dual 2.7Ghz G5 w00t!!

Let’s continue with some big figures, you’ll have support for 16GB of 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and you can rock up to 1TB of internal storage.

It doesn’t stop here since they’ll come equipped with PCI-Express (at last) and a new video card. Apple has been working together with Nvidia to come up with 4 new graphics options for the G5, including the Quadro FX 4500 - Nvidia’s fastest workstation card. Good news for people who are doing 3D stuff. The Quadro card can support four 30-inch displays! Boy talking about some screen estate and a deep wallet too :-)

So what’s available then? There is a Quad system that features eight floating point units, four velocity engines and four 1MB Level 2 caches. The beast is capable of processing 76.6 gigaflops, that’s what I call some serious horsepower!

Dual-core 2GHz PowerPC G5 processor for $1,999
Dual-core 2.3GHz PowerPC G5 processor for $2,499
Two dual-core 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 processors for $3,299

Cinema Displays have a new pricing model too, effective from today, the 23-inch Cinema HD Display costs $1,299, previously $1,499, while the 30-inch Cinema HD Display costs $2,499, previously $2,999.

The last thing was announced by Apple’s vice president of Applications Marketing, Rob Schoeben and is an application for photographers. Photographers don’t have a solution like Final Cut Pro but now they do and it is called Aperture, the first all in one post production tool for photographers. Featuring a RAW focused workflow, Aperture makes RAW as easy as JPEG, letting you import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your images more effectively and efficiently than ever before according to Apple.

Solid updates to G5 line, a small update to the PowerBooks and a complete new solution for Digital photographers so all in all not bad for a days work. What’s next, probably 10.4.3 and maybe a little bit further down the road the first Intel based machines (iBooks and Mini)?