Once again the faithful gathered to listen to Steve give the keynote address at MacWorld. The Apple Store is backup now, so you can check out the prices and specs for new items and updates.
Perhaps the most anticipated news was the move to Intel CPUs. Lots of speculation was going on about which systems would be the first to make use of these CPUs and would they be announced today. Two Apple systems are now available with Intel CPUs: an updated iMac and the new MacBook Pro. Both of these system sport the new Intel Core Duo, which by the way has to be one of the worst product names to come out of Intel.
The notebook line certainly was in need of an update, the MacBook Pro has a built in iSight camera and a much needed graphics card update to an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. One thing that was removed from the new notebook was the Firewire 800 connector. They still have a Firewire 400 jack, but that point you may as well use USB 2.0. The lack of a Firewire 800 port is real bummer, but not likely to be a deal breaker for most folks.
A fully loaded MacBook Pro will set you back about $3,350. That is with 2gig of RAM, a 7200 RPM 100gig hard drive, iWork 06 and the Apple Care Protection Program (ups the warranty to 3 years). When combined with the standard specs this seems like a well priced system. Because they are using recently announced CPUs we’ll have to wait until other vendors start shipping updated products to get a reasonable comparison. Until then I expect to see reports of people attempting to install Microsoft Windows as soon as the new MacBook Pros start shipping. I would very much like to see these things dual boot between Windows and Mac OS X without having to jump through too many hoops.
The Mac OS X shipping on these sytems is apparently all native for the Intel CPUs, down to the bundled applications. A new version, 10.4.4, is supposed to be available today, but I haven’t seen it show up in the Software Updates yet.
UPDATE 1:45pm 10 Jan 2006: Apple now has the keynote address on their website.