James Badger’s Personal Site

Yesterday’s Announcements

Posted James on October 20th, 2005 | Filed under Local Talk

Apple announced some substantial upgrades yesterday, and some of them are pretty nice. Let’s start with the hardware. Powerbooks – I’m not much of a laptop person (never owned one), but increased resolution is a bonus. Squeezing in more palettes in Photoshop or viewing multiple documents side-by-side is much easier, and very handy. Including SuperDrives and better battery life are good things too. Dual-core processors seem to be a new buzzword in the Apple world, where it has been around for awhile on the other side of the fence (X86). In some ways, it really increases the performance, but only if the task is optimized to it. Gamers probably won’t notice too much, but professionals who work at multiple tasks at once, such as DVD burning, image editing, etc. will probably benefit the most. Oh, and F@H users can now run twice as many processes. Sticking in PCI express is something that will keep up with the PC side; most of the tech over there is now on it, as it is the better technology. This will (hopefully) extend the lives of the machines a bit longer, as upgrading the video card is one of the top things you can do to inexpensively increase performance. (My top choice would be install more RAM.) Aperture. At first mention, it might have been the supposed ‘Photoshop-killer’ that Apple had been keeping under wraps. But it is in fact not that kind of program, at all. The editing features don’t come anywhere near what Photoshop offers, because it doesn’t need to do what Photoshop can. It looks like a pro-level iPhoto, for manipulating and managing large photo collections of high-resolution images, which I think will find a good home in some design environments. In summary, I’ll take one of each. Aperture Powerbooks PowerMac G5 “The Photoshop-Killer”