The Beach Boys were playing before Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Product Marketing, took the stage to give his keynote presentation. Apple CEO Steve Jobs may not have been on hand for the usual “and one more thing…” fun, but Joz proved himself capable of drawing a crowd, as well — if not a capacity one.
He talked about Apple’s latest products announcements and how they affected the creative professional for whom Macworld CreativePro Conference & Expo was designed. Joz said that Apple had seven million users of Mac OS X and there were 6,000 applications native for the platform.
“More developers are coming to the Mac platform every day,” Joz said. “In fact, there are three times the number of Mac developers as there were before we announced Mac OS X.”
He also announced a new developer, PTC, to the Mac platform and talked about the Premiere-to-Final Cut Pro Express trade-in program and the release of the Soundtrack component of Final Cut Pro 4 as a standalone product. Ken Bereskin, Apple’s Mac OS X product manager, joined Joz onstage to demo the products discussed. See our separate stories for details.
Joz and Bereskin also talked about six “professional” features of Panther, the next update of Mac OS X: Font Book, the revamped Preview, revitalized printing capabilities, enhanced AppleScript (with a new Script Action), Exposé, and Pixlet (“the first studio-grade codec designed to run on a personal computer”). Joz also discussed the “single sign-on” feature and Samba 3 native support for Windows users in the upcoming Panther Server, two of over 50 new features.
Moving on to hardware, he spotlighted the Power Mac G5, which offers a “giant leap forward for Apple’s pro desktop line.” The G5 offers the first 64-bit processor in a personal computer, the fastest front-side bus ever (1GHz), a high-bandwidth architecture, fastest memory available, quickest graphics subsystem available (AGP 8x), and the “latest and greatest hard drive interface (Serial ATA), and optical digital audio input/output.
“The enclosure was designed from inside out to be efficient and quiet for pro community,” Joz said.
The shipping date for the G5 systems is still officially August. However, this week’s CreativePro is the first public showing. Joz said that the version of Mac OS X that ships with the new systems has been optimized for the G5. He and Bereskin also pitted the high-end, dual 2GHz G5 against a top-of-the-line Dell in “real world” tests involving graphics (InDesign) and audio (Cubase). Need we tell you who won?
Joz reiterated that the G5 platform would be up to 3GHz within 12 months. All this means faster work flow, “monster” floating point performance for better 3D performance, the capacity for simultaneous video streams, and connectivity to more pro gear, he added.
“Innovation is the life blood of Apple,” Joz said. “… We’re trying to make the best products for the pro community.”