Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) & other new Apple toys

First, a quick summary of what Apple announced today:

- Mac OS 10.2 (Jaguar) - $129 for normal people, $69 for us academics, currently listed as shipping in August

- A new iMac with a 17" wide aspect screen

- A new iPod (20GB), plus iPod support in Windows
- plus PIM synchronization functionality

And, various new software things:

- iTunes 3, which includes a bunch of nifty features including normalization

- Quicktime 6, including MPEG-4 (but, strangely, not MPEG-2)

Among the random new Jaguar features:

- chat client for AOL

- anti-spam support in the e-mail client

- an address book and calendar
- plus Bluetooth synchronization for SonyEricsson cel phones (!)


The thing that has me the most excited is the Bluetooth and synchronization support; this was one of the original killer annoyances for me when I first checked into switching from Windows to Mac. Apple has finally addresed it.

Personally, it pisses me off that I've gotta pay $130 to go from v10.1.5 to v10.2. Maybe it's just me.

Hey, Steve's gotta pay for the upkeep on his Gulfstream somehow.

Yeah, I saw that price and gulped a little. On the other hand, there seems to be more meaningfully new stuff between OS 10.1.5 and 10.2 than there was from Windows 2000 to XP.

Apple should have offered some kind of discounted upgrade. It will be interesting to see whether enough people scream that Apple offers a better price.

Apple has typicially charged this price for all their OS releases. 10.1 was more of the exception then the rule.

There is a crapload of extra features in 10.2 that make it worth it. Including a fully 3D accelerated interface today. No need to wait for MS Longhorn to see the benefits.

> Quicktime 6, including MPEG-4 (but, strangely, not MPEG-2)

MPEG-2 playback is available as a (pay-for) option. I believe DVD Studio Pro has a playback and encoding QT component.

I can't find any info on it, but any word if Jaguar includes JDK 1.4 in it? There was talk that it would a couple months ago... The fact that they're not talking about it makes me think it's not ready yet.

Mike

Unless it changes before release, it's still at 1.3.