Today is the first day of the 2009 Apple World Wide Developer Conference, which runs through Friday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. As a result, there are a few new press releases that crossed our desk. We are now happy to present a roundup of the most interesting.
- The aluminum MacBook has been rechristened as the 13″ MacBook Pro (starting at $1199), and has regained the FireWire port (an FW800 port, as a matter of fact.) The MacBook is now solely polycarbonate again. All MacBook Pros now include LED-backlit displays, NVIDIA graphics, integrated batteries and SD Card slots. However, Apple appears to have angered some by dropping the ExpressCard slot from the 15″ model. (And I’m personally still disappointed that the 17″ model still doesn’t have a numeric keypad… but that’s neither here nor there.)
- Snow Leopard, er, Mac OS X 10.6, will be shipping in September. Existing Leopard users will be able to get a single license upgrade for $29 or will be able to upgrade up to 5 licenses for $49 (plus $10 for S&H). Visit Apple’s Up to Date Web site for particulars on or after next Tuesday (June 16). Apple claims a number of major improvements, such as more native 64-bit code, more threading of applications, a new version of QuickTime, OpenCL support, and native support for Microsoft Exchange servers.
- And, for all of you Web users, there’s a new version of Safari waiting in the wings. Version 4.0 includes stability and speed improvements according to Apple. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if you are still using Internet Explorer (particularly a version before 7), you should really try out something different, whether it be Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or a number of other browsers.