IncisiveGeek

I do not have any inside knowledge or sources this is based off my
web browsing, gut feelings and wants.

iPod

We will get storage size increases or battery life increases, possibly both. I think
it will be a few months before a full video iPod is released, they don’t want to piss
off all the people who got shinny new iPods for Christmas.

.Mac

The service will either get a complete overhaul or the price will be lowered, one of these has
to happen because the service pretty much sucks right now.

iTunes

Small version bump mostly for new features added to the iTunes store and allowing iPod games to play on OS X. Announcement of a few more studios selling movies through the store.

Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)

Will be shown extensively, with a new default look to the interface. A release date will be set for sometime in February and you can pre-order it now.

iTV

A lot of time will be spent on this one and it will be on sale through the Apple store and ship in a few weeks.

Apple/Nintendo Partnership

Apple and Nintendo will announce a partnership to sell a Wii channel that allows users to stream music/videos from iTunes to the Wii. Apple needs this to prevent the Xbox Marketplace from stealing the lime light from the iTunes Store. Nintendo needs this because the Wii does not have a hard disk to store music/videos so streaming is the only real option. They will price the channel similar or higher to the profit being made on the iTV so Apple does not care if iTV sales are cannibalized.

All Macs

Will get the super drive as the standard.

iMac

This product line will get slight processor speed bumps, storage increases, better graphics and the option of a glossy screen.

MacPro

Will now have the option of using quad core chips and an optional Blue-ray drive in the second drive bay.

iWork

Will get a spreadsheet program and a simple database app that uses SQLite.

iLife

The whole suite will be better optimized for multi-core processors. iPhoto will be optimized to handle even larger libraries and have the ability to work with multiple libraries. iDVD and iWeb will get more templates while iMovie and GarageBand get more control/effects.

And one more thing…

Apple will announce the iPhone. The iPhone will have:

• iPod functionality (music,video,games,address book,iCal)

• Unlocked GSM Phone or Apple MVNO

• WiFi

• Safari mobile

• iChat mobile

The iPhone will not be sold at cell phone stores but will instead be sold at Apple authorized stores only (Apple is too much into control to let Cingular and T-Mobile mess this up). The phone will detect when you are in-range of an open WiFi access point and then use WiFi for iChat mobile and calls (these will only use WiFi if you are running Mac OS X, incentive for people to buy Macs) and Safari mobile for all WiFi access points.

I can only hope some of these come true, personally I want the iTunes Wii channel and a revamped .Mac

The people over at Software MacKiev the makers of The Print Shop 2.0 for Mac (I have version 1 which is a very nice program) and 2006 World Book have released free universal updates to a few of their programs.

They also have some benchmarks comparing their universal apps running on an iMac 1.8GHz G5 and iMac 1.8GHz Intel. Their tests show the Intel version anywhere from 1.4 to 3.4 times faster than the G5 version.

I decided to do some simple tests to see how important ram is when runningapplications under Rosetta.What I did was run a few programs under the native binary format and also openedthe ‘get info’ window and checked ‘Open using Rosetta’ then ran the program again.When each program was open I would get the ‘Real Memory’ value for the process fromthe Activity Monitor. Click read more for the results and summary.These tests were run on an iMac 20” core duo with 1 GB of RAM and a PowerMac 933Mhz with 1.5 GB of RAM both running OS X 10.4.4.

Notes- The PowerPC test for Mail is probably misleading because that machine had no mail in its inbox.- An interesting observation is that none of the iLife or iWork apps (iTunes,iPhoto,Pages,etc.)have the option of ‘Open using Rosetta’ in the ‘get info’ window. I do not know if this is afunction of Rosetta knowing that it can not run these or a compile time flag that Apple hasset.

Conclusion

If you rely heavily on applications that are not yet universal make sure you load that newIntel Mac up with plenty of RAM as these programs can take any where from 2.21 - 4.98 times theRAM as when they are run on PowerPC Macs.Also note that currently native applications run on the Intel Mac require 1.04 - 2.3 times the RAMof the same application run on a PowerPC Mac. I am betting that this will decrease over time as thex86 version of OS X matures and the compiler is enhanced.

updated on 01/25/2006
- Made the results easier to read.
- Added RAM usage for a PowerPC Mac.

updated on 06/15/2007
- When transferring to new site and blogging software the posting date of the first 11 comments below got lost, sorry.

Well I got the iMac yesterday and I am very happy with it.The machine is very quite, the only noise I can hear is when a cd ordvd is being read.

The speed of Rosetta is pretty impressive considering it is emulation,Epson’s Film Factory 3 actually runs faster emulated on the Intel iMacthan native on my old PowerMac G4 dual 1.25.

Compiling programs is also very fast about twice as fast as the Dual 1.25 when compiling the wxWidgets library (use ‘make -j2’ for full speed).

updated 06/15/2007
- Removed program compatibility list, useless now that almost everything works with the Intel Macs.

I was just looking at the Xbench site and someone has uploaded some results for
the new iMac Core Duo 20” 2.0 GHz.

The older G5 iMac gets a higher overall score but if you look at the breakdown
of the Intel iMac you can tell there is some room for improvement. The Intel iMac
seems to suffer from non-optimized floating point libraries and immature graphics drivers. The
Intel iMac should get faster as the software matures, even now it is still pretty fast on the
weak spots and really rips on its strong points (threading,integer math, memory).

I will be retiring my PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25 GHz soon, I ordered a 20” iMac Core Duo and will write more about it once it arrives.