New iLife, Xserve G5 and Mini iPods Grace Macworld
Apple has started the new year off with a bang - unveiling products ranging from a miniaturized iPod, to newly shrink wrapped software, to a G5 based server. CEO Steve Jobs delivered the bevy of offerings to Mac enthusiasts and business partners during his Macworld keynote address this week.
A new 4GB, 3.6 ounce iPod "mini" will come in an assortment of five colors and sell for $249 USD. Like its brethren, the iPod mini gives 25 minute skip protection with a battery life said to last up to 8 hours. Apple's latest portable music device comes in a scratch resistant casing with redesigned "Click Wheel." The mini comes ready with its own family of accessories.
Apple's iTunes has been bundled with iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and an entirely new application dubbed GarageBand to compose the iLife suite.
Apple touts iLife as the equivalent of Microsoft Office for life's less stressful work. GarageBand is a freelance music creation utility meant for musicians and wanna-be's alike that mixes and perfects tracks, which are automatically saved into iTunes in CD-quality sound.
The iLife suite is designed to tightly integrate some of Apple's most popular utilities, and leverages the dominance of iTunes in the online music arena, which has recently faced competition from MusicMatch, Napster, Wal-Mart, and now RealNetworks.
A new version of Final Cut Express has also left the Apple stable. The software will feature the same interface as Final Cut Pro with capabilities Apple deems as "the perfect blend of power, ease of use and affordability." More information can be found on the product's homepage.
On the hardware side, Apple has prepared a new 1U Xserve server based upon the 64-bit G5 architecture found in its desktop systems. Each Xserve supports up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM.
To reduce discrepancy between hardware and network speeds, Xserve includes dual Gigabit Ethernet coupled with a point-to-point system controller. Apple claims processing speeds of up to 9.0 Gigaflops through a test metering double-precision floating point operations per second. This result, it says, outperforms leading Intel Xeon systems.