Apple shows Leopard's spots
Jobs led the attendees back through the major enhancements to the Mac OS X operating system, including the most recent version, Mac OS X 10.4, which is codenamed Tiger. "This is what we've been doing for the past five years. What has our competitor been doing for the past five years?" he asked in one of many jabs at Microsoft, which has been working to ready the oft-delayed Windows Vista, the first completely new version since Windows XP debuted in October 2001. In addition to the Mac Pro, Apple also introduced its first Intel-based Xserve server, also sporting two dual-core Xeon chips. A sample configuration with two 2GHz Xeons, 1GB of memory and a single 80GB Serial ATA hard drive sells for US$2,999 (S$4,718.18). Apple has added several nice features in Leopard, especially with the Time Machine backup software, said Bob O'Donnell, an analyst at IDC. But the fact that Apple won't ship the update until next spring is disappointing, in light of Microsoft's Vista delays, he said. "They had a huge, gaping window of opportunity if they could ship this fall," O'Donnell said. Apple did ship a major update to Mac OS X this year, with porting of Tiger to Intel's processors, and maybe it wasn't realistic to get Leopard out any sooner. But now there's "a good chance" that Leopard won't ship until after Vista, he said. Apple had previously said it would ship Leopard by the end of this year or the beginning of next. Microsoft has said it will deliver the consumer version of Vista in January, but many industry analysts would not be surprised by another delay. Apple also didn't mention anything about new hardware with Intel's Core 2 Duo chips, which were unveiled a few weeks ago. Some PC companies have already started shipping systems based on the Core Extreme processor and have talked about their plans for notebooks using Merom, the notebook version of the Core 2 Duo. Merom systems aren't expected to become available until later this month.
| ||||
- Talkback
-
There are currently no comments for this story.
To post comments, you need to become a member. It's FREE.
