G5 PowerMacs, Panther and iChat AV!

Steve Jobs' keynote today was no little matter. The long-awaited PowerMac G5s, a greatly improved Panther Finder and iChat AV were unveiled. These are all going to be huge!

Sometime in August, if things go as planned, you'll be able to buy a blazingly fast, dual 2 ghz, G5-based PowerMac in a really cool aluminum enclosure for $3000! A single processor, 1.6 ghz version will sell for only $2 grand (Apple is taking pre-orders now). The G5 processor decisively evens the playing field between Macs and PCs when it comes to speed.

iChat, renamed iChat AV, is available now as a Public Beta. It has video conferencing that's as easy as iChat has always been! Double-click your buddy and go. This is amazing. You can make free long distance or local phone calls with iChat. Or, if you both have video-cams and broadband access, you can video conference.

Apple is selling a hot new monitor-top video-cam for $150 starting this week! Steve and some of the staff at Apple have been discretely trying out iChat AV for the last month and he says it absolutely transforms communication.

OS X Panther seems to have slipped a bit - it's now due by year-end. However, Steve showed us six major new features in Panther that rocked the house:

1. The Places sidebar, is on the left in every Finder window. It is a user-defined list of your favorite places. You can put whatever folders, documents or servers you want on there and have single-click access to all your favorite places. This should cure Apple menu withdrawal in a hurry.
2. Fast Find. When you type into the little find window in the tool bar, files start popping up immediately.
3. A context-sensitive action button in the Finder window tool bar that gives you a handy contextual menu of everything you might be wanting to do.
4. A snazzy way to switch users without closing all your apps and documents first: "the current desktop becomes a texture placed on a 3D cube that rotates out of view while the incoming account desktop rotates into view on another side of the cube."
5. A capability called Exposé that gets rid of window clutter in an instant. Yes. There's a keyboard equivalent. And it goes well beyond hide other in its function.
6. Mail is much improved. It's a lot faster (finally!) and shows threads that you access by clicking on a little triangle icon.