In what has been a flurry of announcements today from Apple, a few rumoured additions to the Mac family have been added, along with some nice surprises too. Today, touted as the pro consumer update day, saw the introduction of Apple’s first pro photo editing software, aimed towards professional photographers. Included in Aperture is the ability to work directly on RAW images, which will excite photographers who have, until now, been put off from using RAW because of its incompatibility with photo processing programmes.
Apple have also upgraded their ‘power’ family, with the introduction of the Powermac G5 Quad, and Duo. The mid and low end Power Macs have just one dual core processor, but the high end ones have two. According to Apple, the increase in power is worth upgrading, with Final Cut Pro rendering cut by as much as 60%. Also included are DDR2 Ram modules, and PCI Express graphics ports.
The Powerbook range has also been changed, with the introduction of higher resolution displays in the 15” and 17” models. The 12” model remains unchanged, apart from a price drop. New Powerbooks are said to have a 46% brighter screen than previous models. Apart from the screen, the laptops now make use of DDR2 technology, and have an improved battery life of up to 5.5 hours.
View: Apple.com
Apple have also upgraded their ‘power’ family, with the introduction of the Powermac G5 Quad, and Duo. The mid and low end Power Macs have just one dual core processor, but the high end ones have two. According to Apple, the increase in power is worth upgrading, with Final Cut Pro rendering cut by as much as 60%. Also included are DDR2 Ram modules, and PCI Express graphics ports.
The Powerbook range has also been changed, with the introduction of higher resolution displays in the 15” and 17” models. The 12” model remains unchanged, apart from a price drop. New Powerbooks are said to have a 46% brighter screen than previous models. Apart from the screen, the laptops now make use of DDR2 technology, and have an improved battery life of up to 5.5 hours.
View: Apple.com
Changelog
- Updated: LAME 3.96.1 (sorry, but 3.97 will need to lose its beta tag before we upgrade)
- Fixed: playlist focus issue after adding files to playlist
- Fixed: crash on multichannel songs with EQ enabled
- Fixed: internet connection detection not working when set to "dial-up"
- Fixed: manual playlist advance with winamp videos
- Fixed: EQ text display glitch
- Fixed: video not filling up video window
- Fixed: black bars in fullscreen video
- Fixed: [gen_ml] crash with no write access
- Fixed: [gen_ml] CDDB Dialog Media Library drawing glitch
- Fixed: [in_dshow] seeking on files with no video or no audio
- Fixed: [in_cdda] aspi ripping crash
- Fixed: [ml_wire] "my music" folder creation
- Fixed: [ml_wire] Podcasts with dates before 1970 handled properly
- Fixed: [ml_wire] Downloading of podcasts with parameters in URL
- Fixed: [out_ds] fade-on-seek settings
- Fixed: [in_wm] pause glitch
- Fixed: [in_mp4] view-file-info filename not scrolling
- Coming Soon: Multi-user profile support (preliminary support enabled)
- Lots of other small bugfixes and optimizations (core/gen_ff)
- New: 'Station Info' Prefs page (for configuring radio browser)
- New: Password protection for Shoutcast TV ratings
or put tiger on my wintel box for sure.. this is what I need as a pro photographer
I('m sure that a hacked OS X will appear once the new Intel-based Macs are out.
However, unless Apple releases OS X for the PC completely, I don't see Apple's computer business going much further. But that's just my opinion.
Why, so you can run Photoshop?
You don't 'need' 'Aperture' and you don't even need to shoot RAW.
That has to be some of the silliest reasoning I've ever heard. How would selling copies of their OS on everyone else's computers HELP their computer business? If anything, it would hurt it, as evidenced by the Mac clone fiasco back in the early 90's.
By far Apple's biggest mistake has been in not opening the Mac's architecture to other developers. It actually did do this for a short time but then reversed its decision when it found that other companies could make and sell perfectly good Mac clones at a much lower price. Rather than work with these people, Apple peremptorily withdrew its licensing from the clone makers to ensure that only Apple could make Macintoshes. It's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And a dozen years ago, Apple also walked away, at the 11th hour, from discussions with IBM about merging. It would have created a PC powerhouse, and the deal was all but done. Apple and IBM senior executives met at a hotel near Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in October 1994 to thrash out the final details. At the last minute, Apple's CEO Michael Spindler demanded more money, and the IBM reps walked away.
It isn't Apple's products that are the problem. It's company management. This is why Apple today is at 4% marketshare and not 94%.
But there's always hope. Apple's capable of some nice surprises, I'll grant that.
No, it's called waking up and realizing that by continuing to allow clones, they were killing their own sales.
How on earth do you figure that working with the clone makers could possibly have helped Apple? These people were taking money out of Apple's pocket, plain and simple. The only money that Apple got from a clone was the money they recieved from licensing the OS. That was only a tiny fraction of the money they got from the sales of their own computers.
As for Michael Spindler, that guy was an idiot and was singlehandedly responsible for the near destruction of Apple (such as the clone fiasco). You certainly can't blame things that he did on the current management.
5.5 hours of battery is definately much more than I can get now...
Anyway, how do AMD's dual-core technology/offerings compare? What are their plans?
Edit: my bad, seems this is a companion to Photoshop, not a replacement.
As someone else cleverly put it, as Photoshop replaces the darkroom, Aperture replaces the light table.
Last edited by 2471 on 21 Oct 2005 - 13:30
Check it out.
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