Today’s a big day in MacLand — Steve Jobs is on the stage right now delivering the Gospel according to Cupertino, and it looks cool so far. New OS, new iLife (including updates to iPhoto that will get my attention — 250,000 images in a single library, which will be enough for me for a while), a new iMac based on a dual-core Intel processor that is allegedly 3.2 times faster than the old one, and a promise that the whole hardware platform will be on Mactel before the end of the year. Dang — had those things been announced, I might not have bit on the Quad. OK, OK, I probably would’ve bit on the Quad anyway, but I can act like I wouldn’t’ve! 🙂

Of course, with my shiny new machine and the announcements today, that means my OS and iLife are already “old”! Wonder if there’s a cheap upgrade path for recent purchasers?

One of the things I’ve been harping about is the lack of native code for the new Mactels. Well, it looks like Apple will “dual-head” things for a while — a universal binary that will work on both Mactel and PPC. That’s cool, especially given my concern about the performance of Rosetta with hogs: Photoshop CS2, etc. In fact, even Steve Jobs indicated that PS may not be good enough for professionals under Rosetta. Sounds like Apple’s making the decision I made to pounce on the Quad a little tougher to justify, but for PS alone, I still think I made the right decision, and can’t imagine being on any other platform right now.

On another note, I also found a really cool Lightroom primer at Luminous Landscape. This article just underscores how much I wanna play with this code. Read through it, and see what you think. For me, I believe this will be product that will manage to do things the way I want to, and still give me the features I want.