Apple Seeks to Bake Microsoft’s Pie

SAN FRANCISCO – A busy day for Apple. The company unveiled its latest updated products, including a new upgrade for the company’s operating system. “Mavericks is an incredible release, which introduces significant new apps and features, while also improving the performance and battery life of your Mac,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “We want every Mac user to experience the latest features, the most advanced technologies, and the strongest security. We believe the best way to do this is to begin a new era of personal computing software where OS upgrades are free.”

In a shift from the usual in the market, the new OS X® Mavericks is available for free for all Mac products since 2009. The contrast to Microsoft is stark, the cost of upgrading to the latest software on Windows is upwards of several hundred dollars.

OS X® is the 10th major release of the desktop operating system. It features over two hundred new additions; OS X Mavericks brings iBooks® and Maps to the Mac®, includes a new version of Safari®, enhances multi-display support, introduces Finder® Tabs and Tags and delivers new core technologies for breakthrough power efficiency and performance.

OS X Mavericks introduces innovative new features, including:

• iBooks, which gives you instant access to your iBooks library, more than two million titles in the iBooks Store™, and works seamlessly across your devices;
• Maps, which brings powerful mapping technology to the desktop and lets you plan a trip from your Mac and send it to your iPhone® for voice navigation on the road;
• a streamlined Calendar that estimates travel time between appointments, and provides a map with weather forecast;
• a new version of Safari with Shared Links, which helps you find what’s new on the web by consolidating links shared by people you follow on Twitter and LinkedIn;
• iCloud® Keychain®, which safely stores your website usernames and passwords, credit card numbers and Wi-Fi passwords and pushes them to your trusted devices so you don’t need to remember them;
• enhanced multi-display support, which makes using multiple displays easier and more powerful, with no configuration required;
• interactive Notifications, allowing you to reply to a message, respond to a FaceTime® call or even delete an email without leaving the app you’re using;
• Finder Tabs, which help unclutter your desktop by consolidating multiple Finder windows into a single window with multiple tabs; and
• Finder Tags, a powerful new way to organize and find your files located on your Mac or in iCloud.

The new system is easy to use and offers the new features with a simplicity offered by Apple that has become common to the millions of dedicated users who the company seems more than willing to cater to.

New iPad Upgrade

“iPad created an entirely new mobile computing experience, and the new iPad Air is another big leap ahead. It is so thin, light and powerful, once you hold one in your hand you will understand what a tremendous advancement this is,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPad Air with its 9.7-inch Retina display weighs just one pound and packs the incredible performance of iOS 7 running on a 64-bit desktop-class Apple A7 chip, and delivers all-day battery life in the lightest full-sized tablet in the world.”

Precision-engineered to weigh just one pound, iPad Air is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a 43 percent narrower bezel the borders of iPad Air are dramatically thinner. iPad Air’s Retina display makes web pages, text, images and video look incredibly sharp and realistic, and the new power-efficient A7 chip allows the battery to be even smaller, helping reduce the overall volume by 24 percent from the previous generation while doubling its performance and maintaining its up to 10-hour battery life.

New Mac Pro Caters to the Hardcore Pro

Apple® today redefined pro computing with the launch of the all-new Mac Pro®. Designed around an innovative unified thermal core, the Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors with up to 12 cores, dual workstation-class GPUs, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, PCIe-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory. Packing amazing performance in a stunning new design, the all-new Mac Pro starts at $2,999 (US) and will be available in December.

“The new Mac Pro is our vision for the future of the pro desktop, everything about it has been reimagined and there has never been anything like it,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The new Mac Pro packs up to 12-core Xeon CPUs, dual FirePro GPUs, ultra-fast ECC memory, new PCIe flash storage, Thunderbolt 2 expandability and more into a radical new design that is one-eighth the size of the previous generation Mac Pro.”

“From the blazing fast performance of DaVinci Resolve to real-time video capture with UltraStudio 4K, Mac Pro is a revolution in pro desktop design and performance,” said Grant Petty, CEO of Blackmagic Design.

“With the Mac Pro’s dual workstation-class GPUs, we’ve seen MARI run five times faster, creating a fluid painting experience that’s unlike anything we’ve seen. This kind of performance is a digital artist’s dream,” said Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry. 

“At 20Gbps, Mac Pro’s Thunderbolt 2 blows away anything on the market and completely changes the external storage landscape,” said James Lee, CEO of PROMISE Technology.

The all-new Mac Pro is architected around a unified thermal core that allows the system to efficiently share thermal capacity across all the processors. An innovative fan draws in air incredibly efficiently and makes the new Mac Pro as quiet as a Mac® mini. The result is a pro desktop with unprecedented performance packed into a design that is just 9.9-inches tall and one-eighth the volume of the previous Mac Pro.