PowerPC, We Knew You Well

It took less than a year for the Macintosh line to move to its third line of processors, a process completed today by the release of the Intel Mac Pro and Xserve processors, consigning the PowerMac name to history (*sob*).

But the main part of Steve Jobs's keynote address today was dedicated to showing off a preview of Mac OS X 10.5, codenamed Leopard. They didn't show everything ("to stop Redmond's photocopiers" - just one of many cheap shots thrown Microsoft's way), but there's quite a few impressive new features in the next update, to whit:

• Time Machine is the new system's backup method, and a likely scourge of children trying to hide porn on their family's computer. It allows you to skip back in time to see what you hard disk looked like a day, a week, a month, or any arbitrary time ago (I'm hoping that it also allows you to set the background music to the Doctor Who theme, as the graphical Time Machine display is halfway to its title sequence already). Basic support for this is already in Windows XP and Linux, but the Apple implementation looks a lot friendlier, as usual.
• Mail and iChat are getting lots of new features. Not entirely sure about Mail's 'stationery', as I have an aversion to HTML mail, but the notes and to-do items look handy. iChat gains tabbed chats, multiple logins (at last!), and the ability to create your own Daily Show correspondent reports with its auto-bluescreening feature.
• Spaces — ha! Apple steal from Unix/Linux! Excellent!
• CoreAnimation. Oh my.

No new shiny stuff. I imagine that new iPods will probably be announced in January when Leopard ships, and aside from small performance increases, the Macbook/Macbook Pro lines won't change until the middle of next year. We're all ready for Leopard now. Who needs Vista?

Oh yes, and my Macbook is on its way back to me!