The past few days have been rather busy and i’ve been meaning to post about the recent announcements:

At the WWDC Apple announced:

- The next generation Apple OS X 10.6  ‘Snow Leopard’ will be shipped in September ’09, for a mere $29.00 U.S. upgrade fee. Much improved multi-core CPU and GPU support, support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, a rewritten Finder with speedier searching and quicklook functionality, all core apps are 64bit clean, trackpad handwriting recognition, wifi braille device support, faster to install, smaller on the hard drive, Quicktime X with a plethora of new features, and more.  On the surface, it doesn’t look like much, but it is a great lot of enhancements!

- Safari 4.0 has shipped and can be grabbed by software update or here.

- The macbooks all got an update:

- The macbook air got a speed bump and price drop.

- All the unibody macbooks are now designated Pro. They come in 13, 15 and 17 inch variations.  All sport a Firewire 800 port. All sport a backlit keyboard.  They all got models with faster CPU’s and a price drop (in some cases).  The 13″ now also has a SD Card slot, as does the 15″ model, however the 15″ loses the expresscard slot which many people, including DSLR camera users used extensively.  tsk.  All models now have the non-user servicable batteries that the new 17″ model had.  I’m slightly annoyed since I got my unibody 13″ last december and they’ve replaced the crappy LCD with a better manufacturers model.  Ah well.. I guess I can hope mine dies under the Applecare period. =p

- The iPhone 3Gs was announced.  New hardware they say is 2 times faster, a new OS 3.0 (also to be available by the end of the month to existing owners, minus some of the new features which are supposedly hardware-bound) which has cut, copy ,paste *finally*, Voice Control, Spotlight Search, Video Recording/Editing, a Compass, a new larger Horizontal keyboard, Tethering (with some providers anyhow), Voice Memos, better Accessibility features, and much more.  The older 8 gig iphone model was slashed to a mere $99 U.S.

For these and more interesting things at the WWDC, check out the posted Keynote Address. (Quicktime required)

Oh yes, almost forgot… Prior to these announcements, Apple had also quietly updated the ‘old’ plastic cased macbook to the same base specifications of the newer unibody design. This is now the last of the non pro models.