Apple Mac Pro and Leopard deliver the goods

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 08 August 2006 06:43

Your IT - Home IT

If there's one thing that Apple Computer has been able to do well over the years, it has been to break new ground and give its adoring fans what they want - a superior computing experience. With the unveiling of the Mac Pro and the sneak preview of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple appears to have once again delivered the goods.

The Mac Pro desktop replaces the Power Mac and is the last of the Mac range to transition to the Intel platform. At first glance, it looks to be one powerful hardware package, driven by twin dual-core Intel Core 2 Xeon processors cranked up to 2.6GHz, 250GB of storage, a DVD burner and an nVidia GeForce 7300GT graphics card.

If there is a slight weakness in the overall base level package for US$2499 - perhaps weakness is the wrong word - it is that it ships with just 1GB of RAM. A system like this, which can be loaded up to 16GB, really deserves 2GB as a minimum. However, the gripe is minor and, without doing any hands-on benchmark testing, 1GB would probably do the job for base needs. Anyway, if Steve Jobs is to be believed and Mac Pro really is US$1000 cheaper than a Dell with the same configuration, then that leaves plenty of money for an extra Gigabyte or three.

As forecast, Apple also unveiled a sneak preview of its upcoming operating system upgrade Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and what was shown did not fail to impress.

As expected, Leopard will incorporate the new Boot Camp dual boot utility, which allows users to run both Mac OS X and Windows on the hardware natively. However, the most impressive feature is a new automatic back-up utility called Time Machine.

The new Time Machine feature is an acknowledgement by Apple that most people simply don't bother to back-up their systems, although they know they should. So Time Machine not only performs the necessary back-ups automatically but it keeps the previous versions time dated on a continuous time line and allows users to restore past versions from the time of their choice. Where the system finds the necessary storage to do this is still not clear.

Some pundits have expressed mild disappointment that Leopard will not be released before the March 2007 quarter. However, given that the current Tiger system already has pretty much all the advanced features that have been promised for Windows Vista, which may not ship any sooner than Leopard anyway, the folks at Apple don't seem to be in any hurry.