Mac Geekery

Apple announced the replacement to the Power Macintosh G5 at the event today. The new name is simply “Macintosh” and the case is huge. I cannot imagine this sitting in a normal work area, but I’ve only seen it from afar at this point.

What’s taking up all the room? Well, to start, the Macintosh comes in two variants: the Quad and the Octo. Yes, that’s right, eight cores on four chips. And this isn’t running your iMac’s Core Duo, either. The Macintosh is using Intel’s new Core64 Duo set of chips with two and four chips powering the Quad and Octo, respectively.

The specifications on this monster should have Dell quaking in its itty-bitty footsies:There's more »

• Two or four Intel Core64 Duo processors running at 1.8 to 2.2 GHz

After years upon years of speculation and denial, Apple finally did it – the released a new look on the Newton. Today’s release of the iPad signifies Apple’s re-entry into the Personal Digital Assistant market that it largely created. Designed by the same minds that brought us the iPod, the iPad is slightly larger than the iPod itself and sports the same full-frontal screen style of the new iPod RSS. Hidden along the long edge is a stylus.

The device syncs with Macs and PCs by both USB 2.0 and AirPort, through iSync. When connected, the iPad appears as a hard drive on the user’s desktop, allowing for seamless, at will transferring of documents to and from the device. In a new iSync panel, you can specify specific folders, files, file types, and smart folders to have synced, as well as applications and multimedia.There's more »

Oh, we’ve been waiting for this one. Another toy to come out of the event today is the wireless Mighty Mouse, as well as an upgrade to the entire line of wireless accessories to run on AirPower.

The new mouse sports the same touch-sensitive buttons and scroll ball as the previous mouse, but now also allows for chording of the top and side buttons to fake third and fourth buttons as well. It’s an advanced feature and is off by default so as to not confuse grandma.

As I mentioned before, the wireless mouse and keyboard set has been updated to support AirPower as well, so the entire desktop set will run without batteries. Simply shocking.There's more »

We’re not really sure what they were thinking on this one. The iPod socks were a cute idea, for a little while, but still something that caused people to look at Apple and go “Whaa?” This, too, will cause a “Whaa?” reaction.

Apple released five colored socks for the iPod Hi-Fi. Each sock is large enough to hold the entire unit, with a pocket on the side for accessories and three slots on the inside to hold your iPod, iPod mini/nano, and iPod shuffle. They have with a pull-tie cord that doubles as a shoulder sling as well.

The socks will retail for $69 for the set of five.There's more »

“Steve was nice enough to give Apple a license to his patented RDF technology — that’s ‘Reality Distortion Field’ for you newcomers,” said Apple VP Phil Schiller as he introduced the new iRDF box from Apple at the 30th Anniversary event today. “But don’t worry, you won’t remember a thing about it when you leave here today. You’ll just feel really exited about it and try your best to buy one before the effect wears off.”

It was, like, totally cool. It looked like this white box with an Apple logo on it and it had these awesome specs and ran on that cool new AirPower technology and stuff. iWant.There's more »

My personal favorite release by Apple today was the iPod RSS, the device everyone’s been calling the “true video iPod.” It’s cool enough that it has a full-frontal, wide aspect, video touch screen, but that’s only half of the story. The feature you haven’t seen an any of the rumor board is wireless support.

Not Bluetooth. Not AirPort. Well, OK, it does AirPort, but that’s not the big news. Wait for it…. EDGE. Apple has been prophesied to be working on an MVNO for quite some time and we finally see why. The new iPod RSS uses this wireless support, chiefly, for the obvious. Via Apple’s wireless network, this iPod will provide you with updates to your favorite websites and podcasts. Now you can get your MacGeekery and your RocketBoom on the go. Don’t forget a little Tiki Bar TV while you’re at it. You won’t regret it.There's more »

One of the coolest announcements out of today is a long awaited upgrade to Apple’s rapidly aging AirPort hardware. 802.11g has been out for quite a while and, other than AirTunes, very little has been changed since the advent of AirPort Extreme.

Consistent with the recent twiddling with names Apple has been playing with as it turns PowerBook to MacBook and PowerMac to simply Macintosh, Apple dropped the “Extreme” and went right back to calling its wireless technology “AirPort.” But this upgrade is more than just a name. The Base Station form factor has been retired, leaving us with only the Express-styled access point. Not wishing to compromise, the long facing of the square is used for ports instead of the prior orientation.

The good stuff, though, is on the inside. Still sporting compatibility with 802.11b/g and AirTunes, the little guy packs in the coolest wireless technology I think I’ve ever seen – AirPower. Similar to Power over Ethernet, AirPower is Apple’s implementation of IEEE 802.12c, allowing AirPort to actually charge wireless devices in range. Steve demonstrated how an iPod in range could not only be synced wirelessly, but also charged.There's more »

We would have said something sooner, but it was hushity-hush-hush. Today, Apple is holding a special event for invited guests at their campus in Cupertino, in the quant Town Hall. We’ll be attending the event today with a small group of other reporters and will talk about the events as they’re announced. Apple’s scheduled the event to last three hours, so we’ll try and get everything out by noon because we’re sure that everyone will want to know.

Stay tuned!

There's more »