Apple’s Developer’s conference (WWDC) starts today, and as always there’s been a great deal of anticipation of the keynote speech where Steve Jobs was expected to announce new hardware, features of the next version of MacOS X, and other goodies.

This keynote was a little different… as we’re most of the way through Apple’s transition to Intel processors, there were a lot of certainties about the announcements - that Apple would announce a PowerMac successor, that it would be named “Mac Pro”… just the details were uncertain.

The “Mac Pro” uses two dual-core Xeon “Woodcrest” CPU’s. It’s available in 2GHz, 2.66Ghz and 3GHz configurations. It supports up to 16GB of DDR2-667 ECC RAM and up to four internal SATA drives. It has two optical drive bays but currently only supports the Superdrive (CD+R/RW/DVD+-R/RW) and not Blue Ray or HD DVD’s.

Some model, I’m not clear on which, of the Mac Pro is supposed to be 1.6 to 2.1 times faster than the quad core G5. I’m not surprised that it’s not as much faster as the MacBook Pro was over the Powerbook; the Powerbook’s CPU was a couple of generations old at the end of its run.

The outside of the case is the same as the PowerMac’s last case.

The Mac Pro appears to be shipping immediately.

As always, buying RAM from Apple is expensive. The incremental cost from 1GB to 2GB is $300… if you want to max it out, you’ll pay $5700 extra for eight 2GB modules… pricing on 2GB DIMM’s is pretty bad right now; I’d expect it to improve rapidly as machines that use them become more common.

Apple also announced quad core XServe’s, which apparently won’t ship until October and aren’t even listed in the Apple store yet. This is a little disappointing, considering that all the hardware for them (specifically the CPU’s) is available now.

And they announced various features of MacOS X 10.5 (”Leopard”), including virtual desktops, 64 bit Intel support, Spotlight enhancements including application launching, “Core Animation”, and enhancements to iChat, Dashboard, mail and universal access. It also includes a feature called “Time Machine” which is supposed to allow you to restore your entire drive or specific documents back to the way they were at a certain time. And they mentioned “secret features” which they weren’t going to talk about at WWDC. Leopard is supposed to ship in spring of 2007. It’ll be interesting to see whether it makes it out the door before Windows Vista or not.

Notably missing were updates to the any of the currently shipping Intel machines to Intel’s new Core 2 Duo processors, updated Cinema displays with built-in iSight’s, any iPod announcements, and the purported iPhone. One can only imagine it’s a matter of time for the CPU updates to Core 2 Duo, at least in the MacBook Pro’s. They could still show up this week and probably wouldn’t be deserving of Keynote speech time, anyway.

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