tuesday 10 january 2006

Dear All -


Steve Jobs stood up at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco this morning and made the following announcements:

0.	OS X 10.4.4 is released. New Address book, new Google widget, new Calendar, new 'espn' (what's one of them?) And
see Point 6 below.

1.	iLife is now to be released at version 06, with all 5 components updated, and a new one - iWeb, for creating
websites. iPhoto does new things including Photocasting - publishing your photos to the internet, birthday card
making, new effects and processing of images.

2.	iWorks is now at version 06. Updated, little news from the Expo - see it on website.

3.	The BIG announcement. Apple has released *two* Intel-based machines.

4.	The iMac machine has been upgraded with duo-core Intel processor inside, it's 2-3 times faster, but ships at the
same price. 17" is £929; 20" is £1229. Comes with FrontRow and Remote control; built-i iSight camera; superdrive for
CD and DVD reading and burning, and iLife '06 is included. Available now.

5.	There is a new laptop, called the Mac Book. A very bright 15.4" screen (1440x900). It too uses a dual-core Intel
processor, so is very fast (they say 4x faster than machine it replaces). Thinner (just) than the current 15" PowerBook.
Built-in iSight (video) camera. £1429 for the "slower" (1.67 GHz) version; £1779 for the "faster" (1.83 GHz) version.
Comes with an Apple remote control ("so you can watch videos across the hotel room"!), and a magnetic catch for the
power cable - so if you pull on the cable it comes out instead of pulling the machine off the desk! Both come with a
Superdrive optical (CD & DVD) drive. Available in february.

6.	OS X 10.4.4 runs on the Intel machine in native mode, not in emulation. (That's good.) All Apple applications run
native on Intel - either now or by end-march. (That's *very* good).


Other news - Apple has sold 42 million iPods, 32 million of them in 2005! It is selling 3 million iTunes a day. (That's
over a billion a year!) There is a new FM radio for recent-model iPods. Apple has 135 Apple Stores around the world
which took a billion US dollars in the last quarter. Overall the company made sales of 5.7 billion US dollars in the
last quarter. (So anyone who still says "Oh Apple - a really small company on shaky financial terms - you can't trust it
for the future." is either an idiot, or from Mars, or both). MS Office and MSN will run natively on Intel chips very soon,
and Microsoft has committed to releasing Office for at least another 5 years.




Any questions? Let me know! Anything you'd like me to write a note on? Let me know!

thanks for being Mac users

hugh