“Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs opened Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday with a keynote that put an end to weeks of speculation about new products and features in the next generation of Mac OS X. The announcements Jobs made can be broken down into four major areas: information about Apple, the new Mac Pro, the new Intel-based Xserve and a preview of Mac OS X Leopard, which is due out by next spring,” Ryan Faas reports for Computerworld.
“As I expected, there was no mention of new iPods or an iPhone. This was an event for Mac software and hardware developers, along with other Mac IT professionals. The focus of the keynote was correctly all Mac,” Faas reports. “I’d like to focus not just on yesterday’s announcements, but on what the upcoming changes mean for Mac professionals — both those who work in the IT field and those who use Macs as part of their daily job.”
Faas reports, “The Mac Pro includes two dual-core Xeon processors, effectively giving it the power of four Xeon processors — more than double the computing power of any other Intel Mac (and setting it higher than most Intel PCs) and twice as fast in real-world tasks as the Power Mac G5 Quad it replaces. One reason for the additional power might be that many professional Mac users work with applications such as the Adobe suite that are not yet Universal apps. This extra power should provide significant improvements when running such applications under Rosetta emulation. It also simply provides professional users with more raw power, thus differentiating the Mac Pro from Apple’s other desktop offerings and most PCs. (A comparable Dell PC would be as much as $1,000 more than a standard Mac Pro.)”
Fass covers much more in the full article, including Xserve, Mac OS X Server Leopard, and many upcoming Leopard features like Time Machine which when “paired with a dedicated backup server, could eliminate the need for third-party software. This could easily cut the cost of developing an extensive backup strategy.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “vitaboy” and “LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
A Real IT guy: “A 1:200 ratio is actually quite common in the world of IT. Nothing new in your statement.”
We are about the same, spent most of the year down a tech so it was closer to 1:266 with no big overload. However BustingTheSkullsOfIdiots got his numbers wrong and forgot a zero. The Isle of Man example is 1 tech for 2,000 computers in 40 different institutions. See: http://www.macworld.com/news/2001/04/13/powerbook/index.php
Chris Moore
Now that is an interesting stat to see. However, I still stand by my point that even if the end user is that good (which I agree with regarding Macs) you still have the network and other infrastructure to deal with. At the paper I work for I still see many issues with software and have a really hard time beliveing the one tech in this school system is not seeing any software glitches. The article fails to mention that an engineer is differnet from a tech. Plus, students versues a user community at a company are two differnet things. What techs really need to fear are the up and coming computer savy users of the newest generations who can fix these things without a single thought to call the help desks – not the Apple computer.