Bodes well for next week!

First full ScreenCastsOnline show under my belt following the recent trip. It's all about the awesome Apple Remote Desktop. A very impressive app! - SCO0286 - Apple Remote Desktop 3

I'm conscious of the fact I've not been blogging, but lot's to catch up on. Hopefully, I'll be able to blog more going forward.

I just wanted to mention a couple of things about the Apple announcements yesterday.

New MacBooks Seems like an impressive upgrade across the board. I had thought the new range may take some styling pointers from the MacBook Air but it looks like Apple have stuck to boosting performance.

Sandy Bridge Processors As expected, Apple have been able to incorporate these into the new MacBooks, including a new 4 core processor for both the 15 and 17 inch. Looks like performance is through the roof - Primate labs have done some initial benchmarking using their GeekBench app - MacBook Pro Benchmarks (Early 2011) The amazing thing is that the new base 13" i5 model is just as fast as the previous top end i7 models. Even more astounding is the fact that the 4 core i7 machine is showing a higher rating than my existing MacPro (early 2008) with 8 cores and 16GB ram. Amazing. But it doesn't stop there.

Thunderbolt I made a tweet earlier in the week asking if anyone thought that Light Peak would make an appearance as I was highly doubtful. But, here it is in the form of Thunderbolt. You can learn all about it on this post by Dan Frakes and Dan Moren at Macworld.

This is huge!

So huge, I haven't quite got my head around some of the possibilities yet, but believe me, it's huge! Wait until we see this across all Macs with a wide range of supported peripherals. Can't wait!

Upgraded Graphics The speed of the GPUs in these things keep going up - now 3x faster than in previous models.

Now although we were pretty much all expecting the new MacBooks, there was an announcement out of left field that no one was expecting.

Lion Developer Preview Oh my! I never realised they were so far advanced with it and the preview was made available via the Mac App store for developers. All the features previewed in the last keynote were available plus some new features..

New Features Versions, Resume, Mail 5, Safari 5, AirDrop - all new features, worthy of note. Apple have also done a great job at some subtle (and not so subtle) interface tweaks. Gestures play a big part of the new OS and it's certainly a big Back to the Mac direction with the adoption of so many iOS features.

Lion Server Also included in the distribution, with an emphasis of ease of setup.

Delivery via the Mac App Store Apple issued individual redemption codes to developers via the Apple Developer connection site and then allowed Developers to access and download the preview via the Mac App Store.

Very, very neat!

Bye, bye Software DVDs

The download was 3.6GB is size and downloaded and installed flawlessly. Apple delivered a full OS upgrade via the Mac App Store. Impressive.

I'm sure there are many other things that got announced yesterday that I've skipped over, or more things about the items I've mentioned here I could have elaborated on, but there is one thing that is really telling about all these significant announcements.

Apple didn't deem them important enough to hold any one of them back for the Apple special event next Wednesday!

By using the Apple website and press releases (and the inevitable rumour mill and speculation), Apple were able to get the messages across and leave next week for the really big announcement - the next generation of iOS and the iPad.

I know Apple don't like to dilute the message of these big events, but the changes to the MacBooks, the launch of Thunderbolt or the new features of Lion might have warranted their own special event in previous years, heck, all three would have brought the house down at Macworld!

Comments

[Rob]

Don,
Thanks for this great overview of the new macbook features. As you mentioned above, I'm not sure of all the possibilities of Thunderbolt, but its definitely an exciting new offering. I have been waiting to get my first iPad - I really hope it has Thunderbolt!
Love all your comments and tutorials.

Rob from GlobalFundamentalsMedia.com