World of Apple

Yesterday Macworld San Francisco registration opened its doors and immediately concerns were raised by those wishing to attend that in order to see the Keynote they would have to purchase a Platinum Pass.

When the brand new registration site went online it was noticed that an apparent policy change by IDG would force anyone wishing to get a seat at the keynote would have to stump up $1695 for a Platinum Pass, any other pass would simply be relegated to an overflow room.

The issue was quickly rectified by Paul Kent, Vice President of IDG World Expo who confirmed that it was a web site glitch. In an email to one potential attendee Kent wrote:

Thank you for your email. The keynote policy on our website yesterday was an error. Our policy is the same as in previous years. We have corrected the registration pages accordingly.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

The Macworld Expo website has been overhauled this year and includes information on the many conference tracks available at the expo. Macworld offers sessions for new users, graphic designers, digital photographers, digital videographers, musicians, IT staff and educators.

Macworld Expo is currently offer Early Bird pricing until December 1 2008.

Macworld Conference and Expo San Francisco 2009 will run from January 5 - 9 2009 and will represent the 25th anniversary of the expo.

Mac Rumors is reporting that those interested in buying a Apple Cinema Display should wait until Macworld 2009 in January. The rumour site has heard from a source of unknown reliability that Apple is preparing Apple Cinema Display refreshes.

The new Cinema Displays are expected to incorporate LED backlighting, completing Steve Jobs’ promise of a greener Apple.

Mac Rumors adds that a 30-inch LED display is currently available from Samsung but is priced at $4735, considerably higher than the price of the current 30-inch Apple display.

Apple has not updated its line of Cinema Displays significantly since June 2004.

Macworld 2009 runs from January 5th - 9th 2009.

TUAW reported yesterday that Apple could be seeding developers an early build of Mac OS X 10.6 at WWDC next week.

TUAW also reports that Mac OS X 10.6 will ship in January 2009 and that Apple will drop PowerPC support from OS X making it Intel-only. Mac OS X 10.6 is also said to add very few new features and focus purely on “stability and security.”

MacRumors vouches for the report stating that they heard that Mac OS X 10.6 would make a debut at WWDC this year.

Today Ars Technica added to the hype surrounding Mac OS X 10.6 by concurring that the next version of OS X will be Intel-only and is currently code-named “Snow Leopard”.

Ars also clarifies that the release will be “heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability” and should debut in January 2009.

Finally the site adds that Mac OS X 10.6 will be “Cocoa-only” but adds:

There may be some disagreement here as to what exactly “Cocoa-only” means, so take that into account when thinking about this. For example, Apple may only axe Carbon UI stuff.

John Gruber adds:

The “pure Cocoa” stuff is about additional Cocoa wrappers for APIs that currently are only available in Carbon (and/or at the BSD level) — more stuff that developers can do using Objective-C APIs. It is not about dropping Carbon from the OS, which would make no sense. It’s a message for developers, not a description of Snow Leopard.