Apple reveals Leopard's spots

Apple on Monday introduced the Mac Pro, the company's first Intel-based professional desktop, and also gave developers a preview of Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.

CEO Steve Jobs showed off the shiny metal desktop, which will start shipping immediately, as he kicked off the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. (See News.com's video coverage of the event.)

The Mac Pro offers a similar casing to the Power Mac G5 that preceded it, but replaces the older PowerPC processors with two dual-core Intel Xeon chips as well as space for two optical disc drives and up to four hard drives. The standard £1,699 configuration includes 1GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card, a 250GB hard drive and a SuperDrive that can burn CDs and DVDs.

"Today the Power Mac is going to fade into history," said Jobs, wearing his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans. At several points, Jobs handed off keynote duties to several lieutenants, including senior vice president Philip Schiller, who showed off the Mac Pro.

Apple didn't offer a full look at Leopard, but instead showed off a top ten of new features that the operating system will sport when it debuts next spring. Among the features Jobs showed off was a Time Machine option that automatically backs up a Mac. Other features include new video-conferencing options, improved Mail and the inclusion of the Front Row media software and PhotoBooth picture-taking programs that previously have only been available on new Macs.

Jobs led the attendees back through the major enhancements to the Mac OS X operating system, including the most recent version, code-named Tiger, or Mac OS X 10.4. "This is what we've been doing for the past five years. What has our competitor been doing for the past five years?" he asked in one of many jabs at Microsoft, which has been working to ready the oft-delayed Windows Vista, the first completely new version since Windows XP debuted in October 2001.

In addition to the Mac Pro, Apple also introduced its first Intel-based Xserve server, also sporting two dual-core Xeon chips. A sample configuration with two 2.0GHz Xeons, 1GB of memory and a single 80GB Serial ATA hard drive sells for £2,199 and will be available in October.

Apple has added several cool features in Leopard, especially with the Time Machine backup software, said Bob O'Donnell, an analyst with IDC. But the fact that Apple won't ship the update until next spring is disappointing in light of Microsoft's Vista delays, he said.

"They had a huge gaping window of opportunity if they could ship this fall," O'Donnell said. Apple did ship a major update to Mac OS X this year with the porting of Tiger to Intel's processors, and so maybe it wasn't realistic to release Leopard any sooner. But now there's "a good chance" that Leopard won't ship until after Vista, he said.

Apple had previously said that it would ship Leopard by the end of this year or the beginning of next. Microsoft has said it will deliver the consumer version of Vista in January, but many industry analysts would not be surprised by another delay.

Apple also didn't mention anything about new hardware with Intel's Core 2 Duo chips, which were unveiled a few weeks ago. Some PC companies have already started shipping systems based on the Core Extreme processor, and have talked about their plans for laptops using Merom, the laptop version of the Core 2 Duo. Merom systems aren't expected to become available until later this month.