Following a new ‘I’m a PC ad’ announcing “a week of some innovation, but not too much please”, Apple’s senior vice-president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller stepped on stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for Apple’s keynote to announce some changes for the Mac, the iPhone and the iPod touch.
Beginning with the MacBook, Schiller announced a new lower-priced 15-inch MacBook Pro starting at US$$1699 with up to seven hours of battery life, but via a built-in, non-removable battery that promises a five-year life span.
The 15-inch is also getting up to 8GB of memory and an SD card slot, as well as a 500GB hard drive or 256GB SSD.
As for the 13-inch MacBook, it also received an update, with the same long-life non-removable battery and SD slot, but also the addition of a backlit keyboard.
With an update for the MacBook Air too, prices across the board for the new souped-up range make for what Schiller called “the most affordable line-up we’ve ever had”.
Software-wise, Apple went on to talk about OS X Snow Leopard, but not before getting a pop in at Vista and claiming that Windows 7 is essentially the same technology.
As predicted, Exchange support is included in OS X Snow Leopard, but Snow Leopard is also boasting 45pc better speed than Leopard, and through new file-compression technology it can apparently save 6GB of storage on your hard drive.
Schiller then went on to announce the latest version of Apple’s web browser, Safari 4, which has been in beta for the past two months and will load JavaScript 50pc faster than its predecessor, as well as having crash resistance built in.
Apple’s media player QuickTime 10 got not just an upgrade to the backend with HTTP streaming and hardware acceleration, but also a brand-new icon and user interface.
Schiller then went on to demo some new features from Snow Leopard including Dock Expose, a preview-type feature to clean up windows and make it easier to find and display documents and media.
Pictured: the MacBook Family
Image courtesy of Apple
