Slightly annoying (to say the least) is that the looped streaming netcast of Jobs’ keynote at WWDC is consistently freezing up Quicktime for me, so I woke up at 5am for nuthin’. But it’s not like that’s the only place to find out about the news–I just would have preferred to see it that way.

Yes, the mistakenly leaked G5 (photos, QT VR) details were indeed true, and some other cool stuff got released as well. The CPU is the new IBM PPC 970, and the top-end model is a dual 2.0 GHz processor, which in terms of hertz alone is at least a match to the 3.2 GHz Pentiums coming out about now. But the PPC has always dome better than the Pentiums in a hertz-to-hertz match, meaning that the new top-end system is closer to a 5- or 6-GHz Pentium system. And the price for the dual 2GHz PowerMac will be $3,000–almost $300 less than the present dual 1.25 GHz G4 system sells for today. The “low-end” system (1.6 GHz) will sell for $2,000. Jobs claims the equivalent Dell would cost over $4,000, but that’s probably including software extras whose equivalents come free with the Mac. Still, as I calculate it, the top-of-the-line Dell and Mac G5 will cost about the same, and the G5 will give significantly better performance. Jobs demonstrated the G5 outpacing that Dell 2-1 in a Photoshop test. Even if rigged, you can bet the Mac will still be faster in a more objective test, at least in part because of the new, wider 64-bit architecture, allowing more data to flow through the processor at any given time (like widening the mouth of a bottle to let liquid pass through more quickly).

Better yet, Jobs promised processors up to 3 GHz within 12 months–and it’s not clear if that will be the PPC 970, or the next-generation PPC 980, which is supposed to go up to 5- to 6-GHz within the next few years. Without question, the Mac, long in the Motorola doldrums, is now in clear sailing waters. I’ll likely wait for the 3 GHz model myself, simply because that’ll be in line with my next scheduled desktop buy, and the G5 will be tested and true by then.

Other details on the new system: dual 1 GHz frontside buses, very fast for getting around bus bottlenecks; Apple is finally out of that morass as well, and has jumped ahead of Wintel (max 800 MHz bus). The new bus effectively allows a whole DVD’s worth of data to be transferred through the processors in less than a second, if the DVD could be read that quickly! 512K L2 cache, now up there with the biggest that Wintels have. Up to 8 GHz of DDR400 RAM (if you can afford it). Optical audio for Dolby 5.1 surround sound, fast graphics bus, Firewire 800/400, USB 2.0, the works.

Coming out “before the end of the year” (a bit cryptic, but then the G5 came out WAY earlier than expected), is Panther–Mac OS 10.3. Panther will make the new G5 accelerate to full power, as it will be 64-bit compatible. If you buy the new G5 Macs in August, you’ll still be getting OS X 1.2 (Jaguar), which will run natively on the G5, but won’t give you full advantage of the new chips. All the same, you will get the GHz advantage with Jaguar–it will run natively on the new chip, not in emulator (slow) mode. But Panther will really speed it up. Hopefully for those customers, they will get a free upgrade to 10.3, but you never know.

The new OS does more than just upgrades to run on the new CPUs. It also has a new filing system that catalogs everything on your drives, making a search for a file go amazingly quickly. Up until now, the Mac OS find file feature has run rings around Windows XP, which requires a multi-step process before you can start the search, and the file search itself takes forever. Jaguar introduced the in-window search bar, always visible, which scans whatever folder or volume is open quickly for any text string. Panther will take that further, dropping search times from several seconds to IMMEDIATELY. Fast, no wait, no spinning or waiting cursors. Type in a partial filename and a list will instantly appear, paring down as you type in more letters, just like in Apple’s iTunes. This is now system-wide, available to many apps. Other file-handling features will include a safe-erase, where data is overwritten several times when thrown out.

New finder windows will include customizable favorite folders and a slightly better arrangement of files in the window, and this will also be available in open and save dialog boxes, for the first time. And finally! We’ve got back the Labels ability, so you can customize and sort files by your own definitions. This has been missing since OS X replaced OS 9. They will appear as a colored loop around the file name, a nice touch.

Also made easier will be network connections–they will show up automatically in a new window, instead of having to use the “Connect to” command in the Go menu.

Window control in Panther will also get a nice revision with something called Exposé (if your browser can read that last accented “e”), which allows all open windows to be quickly tiled, highlighted, or set aside to reveal the desktop, using the F9, F10 and F11 keys (keys assignable, Jobs said). I just saw the demo, and MAN, is it nice. On a keystroke or a corner-mouse, you can have all open windows minimize to the point where all windows are fully visible; mouse over any window and you see its title; click on one and that window comes to the front. No more going to menus or trying to select buried windows when too many are open. It’s like spreading everything out and just picking up the one you want, but it’s all automatic and graphically slick, thanks to Quartz Extreme. Another feature is to make all windows step aside so you can see the desktop; select an icon and drag a little, and the windows come back for really easy drag-and-drop.

iChat will get its long-awaited video upgrade, and will cost $29 for Jaguar when it comes out, but will be free in Panther. You can buy a nice Apple camera (“iSight“) set for $150 or so as well, and if you have a good internet connection, you can supposedly get very nice 2-way video conferencing. Apple seems to be claiming you can do it at 56K as well, but I wouldn’t expect very good quality…. Audio connections will also work for those without cameras. Jobs demoed to new technology with Al Gore calling him, and Jobs calling Apple reps across the country and the world. Looks very slick, very good quality in the demo.

Other new features include fast user switching, allowing different accounts to not only be used concurrently without quitting apps, but to switch in just a second or so, with a nice 3-D graphic transition to boot. Font control is being vastly improved, allowing you to switch fonts on and off as well as group them quickly and without quitting or restarting any apps. By creating font “collections” and switching each one on or off, you can go from hundreds of fonts to just a few in just a few seconds. That’ll be great for me, as I use hundreds, but hate going through the vast list in apps like MS Word.

Rendezvous (remote server browsing in Finder), the Preview app (dramatic speed upgrades, very nice text searching added), the Mail app (thread sorting), Print-faxing, iDisk and (for developers) X11 all will be getting tweaks and upgrades as well. So call it a pretty well-rounded upgrade. And count on paying about $130 (probably $100 street price, maybe $70 academic) for the upgrade. I was going to wait to re-install my OS (gotta do that every year or it gets too buggy), but Panther might not be out till December (though it could be sooner), so I’m doing it in August instead, and I’ll just upgrade when Panther comes out.

All in all, a very good step for the Mac. Question is, will it increase the Mac’s faltering market share? Hope so…

UPDATE: Finally got the stream to work. Figures, I’ll have to leave for work well before I can see the whole keynote. Rrrgg. Extra details include the new Tokyo Apple store in Ginza, which is slated to open “early next year.” Jobs showed a rendering of what the shop will look like, but no landmarks to show where on the Ginza it’ll be.

He also showed a cute bit from Jay Leno, where an Osama bin Laden double was singing “Big Butts” while listening to an iPod, as a joke ad for the Apple Music Store.

Now everyone is reporting on the apparently accidental release of the specs on the G5 computers by Apple, and more and more people are accepting it as fact. At first, it was thought to be a hoax, but details about how difficult such a perpetrations would be along with Apple’s silence on the matter, are enough to convince almost everyone by now.

Wired News carried an article on it, and noted something interesting:

…experts say a PowerPC 970 has the potential to perform as well as Intel-compatible chips running at two to three times the clock speed of the 64-bit chip.

If true, then the Dual-2GHz model running OS 10.3 aka Panther could equal the performance of a 5- or 6-GHz Pentium 4. Even at a slightly higher price than new 3.2 GHz models, a Dual-2GHz PowerMac would blow away the Pentium device and be a boon to people who need processor-intensive tasks done–including photo- and video-editing as well as 3D-games and other rendering.

Not to mention the brag factor…

Apple Computer has always been very tight-lipped about new models coming out, saving their presentation for Steve Jobs’ keynote speech, and at this years WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) Jobs was due, according to rumors, to unveil the biggest upgrade to the Mac hardware and software in many years. But it looks like the element of surprise may be gone, and probably some poor web site developer will lose his or her job at Apple, because the specs for the new G5 Mac computers were accidentally posted on the Apple Store web site.

The page (captured here) shows mostly details from present models, but the text graphic in the upper left area would be for the newer models. Presumably, what happened is that the new graphic was accidentally uploaded and replaced the old one, and no one caught it soon enough. Maybe the graphic was accidentally given the same name as the old one and over-wrote it.

HOWEVER: The details of the new machines almost seem TOO good, meaning that it could have been a prank, a hack by someone to get all the rumor sites and customers juiced up only to be let down. But for such a hack to happen on Apple’s own web site is also a bit much to ask–especially since Apple, so far, is not shooting this one down, which you think they would do immediately.

For those of you who Want To Believe, and want to know about the new machines, here are the juicy details:

* New CPU: PowerPC G5 (presumably IBM’s fast new 970 chips)

1.6 GHz, 1.8 GHz or Dual 2.0 GHz models!
The high end dual system would almost certainly blow away the fastest Pentium.

That means the speed that connects the CPU to the RAM, and 1 GHz is amazingly fast;
Apple has always been hobbled by slow bus speeds.

If true, this would increase RAM by four times previously
If, of course, you have the moolah to buy all that RAM!

This would mark the debut of USB 2.0 on the Mac

Meaning you have to add them, but there are slots for them.

OK, now for a little analysis…

There are some reasons to doubt this was authentic. A 1 GHz bus speed goes beyond what anyone was thinking of as possible. (Update–maybe I’m wrong on this one–apparently a bus at half processor speed is not too much to ask… but I don’t know.)

The graphic that caused the hullabaloo does not exactly match the existing graphic’s styles–it is a bit larger, a bit darker, and has a few wording changes that are non-standard. One hopes that it is not a prank, but one must be realistic.

But still hopeful.

If these specs are true, then the Mac will once again blow Windows machines away, and with a new OS that will beat Windows out by two years on many features, it could be a home run for Apple.

Discussion on this can be found at:

MacRumors.com
Apple’s Discussion Boards
Ars Technica MacAch Forum
O’Grady’s PowerPage

Look for updates and more info to come soon–if not Monday at the WWDC.

Remember how, back when Windows 98 was released, there was a big scandal about how Microsoft integrated browser technology into the OS itself, making it difficult if not impossible for Netscape and other browsers to compete? Remember how MS was forced to leave Internet Explorer as a stand-alone app? Remember how Microsoft was on the verge of being brought to a well-deserved justice when, at the last minute, Bush was elected and had the courts do a 180-degree reverse on the issue with the brakes on full?

Well, here’s the latest chapter: IE will no longer be a stand-alone app, according to this CNet News.com article.

Immediately after paying off AOL, the present owners of Netscape, three quarters of a billion dollars and other considerations to effectively shut up about MS’s monopolistic practices, and after starting a campaign of aggressive pricing aimed to cripple any chance of Linux getting any market share and edge out new open-source version of Office Suites, MS now announces its next step in its plan to further dominate and monopolize the market.

What’s it to you? Aside from broken competition and major price hikes down the road, you might also find that this will help implement Palladium, and Microsoft will have a private key that will let them into your computer and be your own personal cybercop. Sounds nifty, right?

The beta version of Eudora 6 is now available for download. The major revision in this version, as one might expect with the recent trend in email clients, is a spam filter. Apple’s Mail app probably took a big chunk of the Eudora market for the Mac, and other Windows apps may very well be doing the same.

Eudora’s response so far seems a fairly good one. I had been waiting for Mail to become more feature-rich, and then switch to them full-time, but if Eudora’s spam filter works well, I’ll stay with them. And so far, after a bit less than a week, it’s been doing well–the filter seems well-trained, and is doing a good job of sorting. Time will tell on that, though.

For the Mac, a new mailbox drawer will pop out the side of any mailbox window, allowing you to easily select a different mailbox for that window to display. It is a lot easier than going up to the menu bar all the time, and deal with multiple windows. They also say that something called “Content Concentrator will be available for both Mac and PC versions, and a format painter will be available for the Windows version.

Eudora has always been a very strong email client, flexible, good interface, very configurable. The down side is that in the past, the address book and filters have been a bit buggy for me. Let’s hope those have been improved some. Also, as with prior Eudora betas, this one has an extended settings control panel, with lots of extra controls you don’t get in their standard releases. I wish they kept the longer list, but hey…

Eudora comes in free and paid modes. The main difference is that the free mode puts up a small ad window (140 x 150 pixels) that cannot be moved from the periphery of the main monitor. If you have a small, low-resolution monitor (like with the old clamshell iBooks), this may be too big to stand, but with a better monitor (like the 1280 x 854 monitor on my Powerbook), you get so you hardly even notice it.

This June, at the World Wide Developer’s Conference, we should get treated to a better view of what has been widely discussed in the rumor web sites, namely the new line of Power Macintosh computers, with the next upgrade to OS X, version 10.3, aka “Panther.”

First, the machines: as Motorola has left Apple without a strong processor for some time now, and in fact is dropping out of the market, IBM picks up the slack with a new chip called the PPC 970. The chip has three major advantages. First, it is a 64-bit CPU, which means that it can double the amount of data handled by the processor. Second, it has a new system bus, which carries the data to and from the processor; until now, Apple’s bus has been notoriously slow, creating a speed bottleneck. The new bus will be much faster than any Wintel chip. And third, unlike the current G3 and G4 chips which have almost maxed out their speeds, the new 970 will start in the 1.4 to 2.0 GHz range, moving up from there. The next generation 980 chip should go up to 2.5 GHz within a year or so.

That may not sound like much, as the Pentium 4 chip is currently pushing over 3 GHz, but there are two factors to be considered in that comparison. First, the Pentium 4 gets a higher hertz rating by compromising actual performance, like a car that revs like crazy but doesn’t go as fast; therefore, a 2.0 GHz 970 chip may well match up to a 3.0 GHz P4. Second, Macs usually come with multiple processors, especially at the high end. So when you look at a dual-2GHz 970 vs. a single-3.2GHz P4, suddenly the Pentium doesn’t look so hot.

Also look for a redesigned case; the new motherboard is said to be longer and thinner than it is now. USB 2 and Firewire 800 will be supported.

Next, we get Panther. The upgrade’s major improvement will be to take full advantage of the PPC 970’s 64-bit architecture, speeding performance considerably. Apple’s iApps will get upgrades across the board; iChat should finally come of age, with full videoconferencing support, iPhoto will get new photo enhancement tools, Quicktime will get another update and Apple’s new web browser, Safari, will end its beta release and come out stronger and more fully-featured. Another project, tentatively dubbed iWorks, may come out. Apple’s Keynote presentation software was seen as a partial answer to Microsoft’s monolithic Office package (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), and Apple may hit them head on with a new word processor called “Document,” and, it is expected, a good spreadsheet program as well. This combined with an upgraded Mail program could offer Mac users a way to ditch Microsoft products altogether on the Mac platform. This could be crucial for Apple, as MS has been rumored to be end-of-lifing it’s Mac version of Office. iWorks would be fully Office-compatible.

Another improvement in Panther would be a new file handling resource called “piles” (I personally think “stacks” would have been a much better name). Piles are supposed to be quasi-folders, a way to organize and group related documents for easy access. Should be interesting to see how they work.

Some believe that 10.3 will be accompanied by 9.3 Classic. If so, 9.3 may only work in Classic mode, and may not be used to boot older computers.

PPC 970 Macs with OS X 10.3 may be released as early as this August.

More as it comes out.

Here’s a story you won’t want to miss. A college student in New Orleans sold his Macintosh Powerbook computer system for close to $3000 on eBay, and got cheated–the man he sold it to sent him a forged check, putting him in a very bad financial position.

Sounds like all too many stories you hear about online fraud, right? Except this guy decided not to be a victim; in his words, “you just shouldn’t mess with Mac people.” So he went into high gear to catch the con man who stole his computer. Not only did he go to all sorts of amazing lengths to catch the culprit, but a great many people in the Mac community who read his story on Mac web sites and discussion groups volunteered their help. Despite having done all the work and practically serving this criminal up on a platter, the Chicago police, FBI, and Secret Service, all who could have claimed jurisdiction, brushed him off. All seemed to no avail, until…

Well, read the story here. [ Editor’s update : the site seems to have been sold, so I reproduced the story here.] It is a lot of fun. And there is a happy ending, too–although this guy will probably never see his computer again, an authorized Mac seller called General Cybernetics gave him a 12″ iBook gratis, the computer he wanted to buy after selling his Powerbook. And an indie producer has bought the rights to make a movie about his experience.

Update: As the site the story was hosted on seems to have been reset, and perhaps sold, I reproduced the story, sans a few things. One thing I could not find was a copy of his driver’s license, which was originally in the post on the web site of the guy who tracked him down.

However, I did find a mug shot for a Melvin Christmas from Chicago—from 2011. He seemed to have been arrested in March 2011, and convicted several months later, on multiple charges of forgery, theft, and credit card fraud. Sure sounds like the same guy.

The report cites his projected parole date as having been 9/19/2013.

Interestingly enough, his name also turned up a Facebook page—one that was active until January 2011, and then stayed quiet until July 2013, when he started posting again. He looks like the same guy in the mug shots. Considering that he studied computer repair in college in 2000, it kind of fits that this was the guy who was stealing computers as reported in the story from 2003. The charges in 2011 are fairly similar to what he was apparently caught doing in 2003. In 2010, he mentioned being back in school to be a computer technician. Then the 2011 arrest on theft, forgery, and credit card fraud. After getting out in summer 2013, he posted in August that he “fell,” but it “wasn’t my fault.” Um, OK. He posts all the time about Christ and God–but more recently posted a photo taken of an overweight person from behind with a less-than-kind comment. So, go figure.