Monday, August 07, 2006

Announcement Summary

No big surprises from Apple today - they did, as I expected, add built-in video to the Xserve. Good move - that frees up both slots for cards (for instance, a SCSI card to run a tape drive and an FC card for your Xserve RAID). It also has 750 GB drives as an option, and either SAS or SATA attachment. And PCI Express is now the standard as well. Most importantly, there's now an option for redundant power supplies. The only disappointment to Xserve is that we can't get them until October - I believe it's due to timing issues in porting Tiger Server's tools over. The hardware is ready.

Mac Pro is pretty much all that is expected. No surprises, other than that it's a little cheaper than I figured that they'd skew. Leopard Server will be the shiznitz (more importantly, it adds a calendar server). And in the third-party arena, VMware announced their port to Intel Macs, Microsoft confirmed the death of Virtual PC (why bother porting it, when Parallels is shipping and VMware is on the way?), and playing the role of Adobe (see my prediction post) was Quark, announcing the shipment of version 6.01 as a Universal Binary (and giving them a golden opportunity to knock out InDesign).

Look for Core 2 Duo product upgrades across the rest of the Mac line over the next month. I wouldn't hold off purchases for the most part, though. If you're looking for a PowerMac G5, you can still get them for now as well.

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