[MLUG - DISCUSSION] new Apple stuff today...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

The big thing on the consumer front is improvements in "iLife" and
the addition of a new in-home 64-channel mixing/recording app,
Garage Band.  That could end up being pretty interesting, actually.
Among other things, it does software synthetic guitar amps that
might not completely suck, and has a bunch of MIDI/USB input
features.  On a minor note, they also came out with smaller cheaper
iPods.  Big deal.  Seriously, we're talking 4 GB hard-drive based 
players for $249 that are, yes, smaller.  They aim at the high-end 
flash-player market, I'm not sure how well they'll do.

The most relevant stuff for most geeks is the G5 XServe, an updated
XServe RAID, and the software product XGrid.  They did manage to do 
a 1U 2-processor G5 XServe, which means that the old G4 ones should 
be going on deep discount soon. :-)  The XServe RAID is not going to 
officially support Microsoft XP and Linux in addition to MacOS X, 
which means that Apple is serious about getting into the high-ish 
end storage market.  XGrid sounds *really* interesting, since it 
uses Rendezvous (aka zeroconf) to put together a cluster of Macs on 
the fly for compute-intensive software.  In theory, a rack full of 
Xserves could give you a TeraFLOP of performance this way.  In 
reality, you'll probably see a lot more people cloning the VaTech 
clustered supercomputer instead.

jking




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