Engadget had the best live coverage, as it turns out–nearly transcribed the event, and included photos.

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The new Power Macs were brought out first. Dual-processor Core 2 Duo Xeon (Woodcrest) Macs, up to 3GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 64-bit. Since the G5’s enormous space required for cooling will not be required any more, there will be space for two optical drives and up to four hard drives (up to 2 TB storage), reportedly snap-installed for easy access. Apple’s page is up.

Amazingly, the lower-level unit (2.6GHz dual) comes with a weak 256MB of RAM. Either Apple is cutting corners hard to reduce the price, or they are commenting on how little minimum RAM you need with the Mac OS–a strong point when comparing to Vista, one has to admit.

Nevertheless, that’s going to be a blazing computer. Love to get one, but I’ll have to do with whatever revision of iMac comes out instead.

Also announced were new XServes, Apple’s server model; these use quad Xeons, 5TB storage, yadda yadda… hey, look it up if you have to know about servers.

They made a point on prices, how the price of these higher-end units is lower (maybe 10% lower) than a Dell–however, one has to assume that they really worked hard to skew the numbers in favor of Apple. I suspect that if you compare Apple with average brands and do some research, it’d be a wash.

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Next came Leopard, but not without first showing how Vista is going to be what the Mac OS has been, with a side-by-side comparison of Vista and Tiger.

Big news: Leopard shipping in “Spring”–so it won’t beat out Vista unless that gets delayed big-time. (That also means I’ll have to wait longer to buy the iMac; last time, I bought Tiger, then a few months later, bought a Powerbook; not doing that again).

Leopard features (Apple’s page is up):

• 64-bit support throughout
• “Time machine” versatile automatic file backup system (no one saw that coming that I know of)
• Software accessories (Boot Camp, Front Row, Photo Booth)
• Virtual desktops called “Spaces” (many predicted these)
• Improved Spotlight
• Improved automatic animation across system & apps
• Universal Access improvements (closed caption in QT, better text-to-speech, Braille support)
• Mail: better standard HTML stationery with templates, more of a graphic-oriented email system; Notes feature; adjunct “To do” list with alarms & systemwide tie-in
• Dashboard: “dashcode” to help developers anyone make widgets (no need to know code, just drag-and-drop!); “Webclip” for users–make a part of any page into a widget (like the “Dilbert” cartoon strip), essentially a “make your own widget” feature
• iChat: multiple logins, invisibility, animated buddy icons, video recording, and tabbed chats; Photo Booth effects, video filters; iChat Theater (voice-over slide shows, Keynote presentations); Backdrops, which allows you to do a green-screen effect without the green screen–simply step out of frame so the computer can discount all background information, then step in front of the backdrop, which can be a photo or video clip; also, share displays–look at a remote user’s screen and control stuff on it.
• iCal: multi-user function
• XCode 3.0 (developer stuff)

Funny about the Mail feature of the “to do” list–Jobs mentioned that he used to send emails to himself to remind himself to do things, but the new feature in Mail does it better. It’s funny because I did that exact thing, sent myself an email as a “to do” reminder, just minutes before monitoring the keynote…

As for “Spaces,” it’s hard to tell, but from what I can see, it’s not what I hoped. It only switches views for application windows you have open–it does not give you new Desktop real estate for your icons. Very disappointing, because that’s what I would want a lot more than what they did. My Desktop is constantly getting cluttered with icons. What I need is a way to have all the icons clutter a Desktop I don’t often use but can call up anytime I need it, keeping my usual Desktop clear and clean. Yeah, I know, I could put them all in a folder–but it’s not the same thing.

More about iCal is shown on Apple’s web site.

A bit of a shocker, though, is what was not said: Jobs announced that “top secret features” are not being revealed yet, purportedly so that Microsoft can’t copy them as early.

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So, that seem about it. No new iPods, no iPhone–just new Mac Pros, new XServes, and most of the new features in Leopard.

So what are the “top secret” missing features for Leopard? Well, if you thought the speculation would be over today like I did, you were wrong. If anything, I imagine this will ramp up the rumor mills. Probable additions:

• Maps (possibly in iChat), a service like Google Maps, which will provide satellite images and driving directions;
• iTunes update, possibly with movie downloads;
• Safari updates (possibly tie-ins with Spotlight, also saving tabs);
• More Spotlight enhancements?
• UI Enhancements?
• Probably iLife and iWork enhancements as well.

But will there be something else big that no one is seeing? After all, many of the items shown today were kept under wraps very effectively, including the major app improvements to Mail, iChat, and Dashboard, not to mention Time Machine. So there is a good chance that there are a few big features left that nobody’s guessed at yet.

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Unexpectedly, the iChat improvements stunned me the most.

The iChat collaborative shared display feature is very cool–effectively it looks like Timbuktu, remote access of someone else’s Mac. That would mean you can troubleshoot someone else’s Mac for them, or show them a process without having to be there.

Another iChat feature, the iChat Theater, allows you to show images, movies, or more importantly, Keynote presentations, with a small image of you on the side. This may not look like much to you, but I can see huge possibilities from a teaching standpoint. Remote teaching suddenly comes to life. What if I’m too ill to go to school and teach, but my voice is OK? I could remote-teach a lesson, given proper preparation. One Mac at school with with the camera pointed at the class, with the screen mirrored to a TV, and presto–instant remote lesson. The Backdrop feature could even hide the hideous mess of a room I didn’t want to clean because I was sick.

That also includes international lessons. My school has “Internet” classes, in which teachers in California lead a class which includes students here in Tokyo. Up till now, the class depended on expensive software to work–but iChat, a free app, could conceivably replace that.

Throw in the shared remote display feature, and you could teach computer classes. Throw in multi-conferencing, with enough joint users, I could teach a whole class that way, too, even more hands-on.

In short, iChat could really lead to some interesting stuff in online classes.