Here’s the latest news from Steve Jobs’ keynote address at Apple’s 2006 Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) today…
9:50am (Pacific): The Apple Store is temporarily down for maintenance, so clearly something new will be released today…
10:03am: Steve Jobs has taken the stage.
10:05am: 50% of new Mac purchasers are new Mac adopters, and over 17 million visited Apple stores in last quarter. Shipped 1.33 million Macs this quarter. Over 3/4 of the shipped Macs were Intel-based.
10:10am: New PowerMac replacement the Mac Pro. These will contain Core 2 Duo “Woodcrest” processors. Each with 2 dual-core Xeon processors performing at up at up to 3GHz and 4MB L2 cache. Estimated to run 1.6 to 2.1x faster than a G5 quad machine. Real world increase should be around 2x faster than prior machines. Since the machines require less power, there is less cooling required, and more room for hard drives (up to 4 per box). These machines will feature the same case design as prior PowerMacs, but the interior is totally redesigned. Drives will “snap” into place, room for larger double width graphics cards. 4 PCI Express slots and up to 2TB of storage.
10:15am: $2499 Price for the Mac Pro with:
- Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors
- 4MB shared L2 cache per processor
- 1.33GHz dual independent frontside buses
- 1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC)
- NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 256MB memory
- 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive
- 16x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD
