Apple Keynote and Product Announcements

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If you don't already know, Steve Jobs gave the keynote speech at the Worldwide Developer's Conference yesterday. You can watch the entire speech here. Beware, though: it's about two hours long.

In addition to giving updates about some of Apple's earlier releases, like the AirPort Extreme, Safari, OS X, the iPod, and Apple Stores, Jobs announced the next release of OS X, 10.3, code-named Panther. He boasts over 100 new features, including a re-designed Finder with some fancy visual effects for window selection, and iChat AV, which features audio and video conferencing (similar to what NetMeeting and Yahoo messenger have already offered). In conjunction with iChat AV, Apple is releasing its own FireWire web-cam, called iSight. Jobs also listed several other things, but one highly notable release is Apple's Safari 1.0 web browser, especially since Microsoft is dropping its Mac IE development.

Lastly, he confirmed the rumors of the new Power Mac G5, to ship this August. It boasts some very impressive technical specifications, not the least of which is dual 2 GHz, 64-bit processor architecture, on 1 GHz FSBs. Like always, Apple really pushes the envelope for new technologies, with up to 8 GB of 400 MHz 128-bit DDR, sATA hard drives, it's SuperDrive, USB 2.0, FireWire 800 and 400, PCI-X, AGP 8X, and standard 10/100/1000 Ethernet. The speech includes several demonstrations of Panther on the G5, as compared to a dual Xeon 3.06 GHz system.