Nontrivial Exercises

What’s An Intel Chip Doing in a Mac?

…”a whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC” – quote from Apple’s new ad campaign showing off their new iMac and MacBook Pro with the Intel Core Duo processor.

This great picture was taken by my friend Blake Burris, who produces the Cocoa Radio podcast, during Steve Jobs’ keynote address at MacWorld in San Francisco last week. Mr. Jobs spent some time talking about the iMac with the Intel processors and the new MacBook Pro laptop with the Intel dual processors, and how they are significantly faster than the current generation of PowerPC-based Mac platforms. Both machines look very neat, and if I had extra money lying around I would be very tempted to acquire one – probably the MacBook Pro. I’ll have to wait, however, and stick with my Toshiba M200, which is still great.

If you haven’t watched Steve Jobs’ keynote address from last week (see the link in the paragraph above), I highly recommend taking a look at it. It is impressive in several aspects:

First, for the details about the computer platforms Apple is bringing out. As I note above, the new iMac and MacBook Pro systems look very powerful and well-designed.

Next, the details about the new iLife 06 software suite are pretty amazing. Apple has some very innovative ideas about integrating personal photo sharing, blogging, music and videos together using their apps.

Third, just the general view of the state of Apple’s business, with detals about number of iPods sold (12M in Q4 2005 !!), number of downloads on iTunes, etc. paints a fairly positive outlook on Apple’s business.

Finally, and most impressive to me, is simply the style and effectiveness of Mr. Jobs’ presentation. Everything, from the amount and type of graphics, to the larger-than-life screen behind him, to the lighting, to his balanced use of pictures, graphs, video, and actual real-time demonstration, work together to make a stunning, engaging, personal and memorable communication experience. Mr. Jobs is a master of communication, and we could all learn a great deal from him.