Now I'm drooling! Damn it, why have I just bought loads of airline tickets!

Edit: XCode 3.0 looks pretty interesting too.

Yeah, I'm having trouble understanding why so many of the Apple fanboys are disappointed / underwhelmed. Leopard's clearly not going to be as revolutionary as Tiger was, but we'll see it in our lifetimes, which is more than can be said for Vista. I'm not sure what kind of all-seeing, all-doing OS they were hoping for, but I think Leopard looks like a nice, incremental improvement upon Tiger, one that will surely be worth the upgrade price of, oh, 1/3 of what Vista costs whenever it does come out. The "Time Machine" backup stuff alone (assuming it doesn't degrade performance significantly) will surely be worth the price of admission if it saves you from one disastrous "oops".

As for the hardware, I don't really have a need for a Mac desktop or Xserve, but they both look like nice offerings, and they look to be priced competitively. Rumors of Microsoft's demise have been greatly exaggerated in the past, but I do think this is a solid shot across their bow. The jabs at Redmond in general and Vista in particular during the keynote say to me that Apple's really in it to win it.

I too was also suprised at the lack of enthusiam about leopard.

Time Machine is worth the price of admission if it works as well as I expect it will, very neat.

What people seem to be forgetting is that there is clearly an amount of stuff (and apple are saying it) that hasn't been demonstrated and is going to remain secret for the time being.

I am in the market for a new machine. I want a new development machine, the mac pro looks awesome, so my credit card is going to take a hit very soon! I was tempted by the mbp, but for my laptop needs my pb G4 1.5Ghz does the trick, then I thought mac mini.....no contest now!

One excited geek here!

Yeah, as an everyday development machine, it's hard to beat a Mac these days. I haven't read anything about XCode 3.0 yet, but as long as it doesn't take any steps backwards, I'll be happy (it's free, after all.)

I was hoping to go to WWDC this year, but management decided OSCON was a better fit. Maybe next year...

It's on the sneek peek bit of apples site, linked from the right hand side....

But here's the link anyway

Cool. Somehow I missed that when I looked at the sneak peak stuff earlier. Looking forward to it, for sure.

I'm glad to see Time Machine as well. Combines the features of GoBack/Volume Shadow Copy (in 2003, and Vista) with a true backup since the data can be stored on an external drive or network share. I'll definitely plop a backup drive in my server for this, since my backups these days aren't automated and I don't manually backup as often as I should.

Spaces also looks to be the right feature set on virtual desktops.

My only disappointment was the Mac Pro lineup. While the dual dual core product would be great for work (if I didn't have a Direct3D and Visual Studio dependancy), I was hoping for a headless Mac with more power then the Mini. A single chip dual core Mac Pro option would have been appreciated, but I guess they don't want to step on the iMac market space too much.

I am curious to see when the iMacs will be bumped to Core 2, everyone else is already talking about it. I guess they may be waiting on the mobile chips to provide a drop in replacement for a speedbump, instead of making a new mainboard to move to the desktop chips.

While not discussed at all in the keynote, Leopard Server looks to be a nice update as well. With calendar server support, this might be a perfect box to replace a Windows server with, even if it is hosting a domain, exchange server, and file shares.

As somebody who's company has just sunk some serious change into PowerPC-based Mac hardware (namely a bunch of XServes) and someone who's not watched any of videos about Leopard. I'll be very interested to see how long until Apple's entire range is Intel based. Especially when our playout and production won't run on Intel machines currently!

BTW, Time Machine looks really cool. I assume that means that you never really delete anything. What if you want to clear space on your machine?

EDIT: Wow, just configured my 'dream' machine, I say configured. I just clicked the most expensive option for each thing. A mere snip at just over £11.5K

Apple's entire range is Intel based as of today. At least if you don't count the iPod.

Based on the information on Apple's site, it works more like an incremental backup program. It first saves a complete backup of the system to the external drive or server, then any file change is sent along to the same location. If I open a text file and edit some of it, a diff is generated and sent to the backup device. I'd imagine once the drive becomes full, it will start deleting the oldest incremental change files.

Ah right! Thanks for that. The Apple page is here which explains how it works. It is a shame that it would not work so well without a second big drive or partition to backup to. I wouldn't realistically be able to use it on my Macbook for example without upgrading the drive to a bigger one.

Hopefully it works on a network share. And hopefully Apple fixes the probems associated with waking your machine when a network share is missing.

I'm using Tri-Backup right now as I found it to be the best backup solution available for Mac OS. Its interface is not the most elegant, but it's far better than some. And its features are robust. I started using it with the intention of setting up an automated system using evolutive data but have since only been using it manually. I think Apple's solution will obsolete a lot of backup software and likely open up a market for backup-enhancement and management software using its data.

I think the expression those modern young people use is "FTW".

Peter

I just deployed a dual 5150 dell server this week, and those things fly like nobody's bussiness. The thing has 4GB of ram and a 15k rpm system disk, and it was impressive. It's an SQL server with about 16 users at any given time, and the extrememly non techie employees were thanking me as I left the office and after I left for the speed improvement over their old dual core P4 server.

Of course, all it did was make me want a Mac Pro. I'm starting to look for a job, perhaps I can write one into my contract.

Matthew

don't think the double drive front is as sexy as the old power pc single door one

And just so the definitive answer is on the Web somewhere (I hadn't been able to find this out in advance, despite months of trying), Xorg 7.1.0 will drive the panel at its native 2560x1600 even with the open-source "nv" driver -- you don't need the closed-source "nvidia" one. Very modern Xorg does need an "Option DisplayBlanking" line in the Monitor section of xorg.conf, though.

Peter