Category: Environment

WWDC 2009 keynote releases

  • New 15″ MacBook Pro has built in battery lasts up to 7 hours, 1000 charges, approx. 5 years. 60% better colour gamut, 3.06 Dual Core CPU, 8Gb RAM max, 500Gbx7200RPM drive, or 256Gb SSD. Starts at US$1699 through US$2229
  • SD card slots added to models except 17″
  • 13″ Macbook is now a MacBook Pro
  • MacBook Air updated to up to 2.13GHz CPU

Snow Leopard 10.6:

  • Mail, iCal and Address book now support Exchange, with auto-discovery of Exchange Servers
  • QuickLook can preview Microsoft Office documents in Mail without MS Office being installed
  • Preview 2x faster, better PDF text selection
  • Exposé integration with Dock (“Dock Exposé”) for displaying an App’s windows
  • Chinese character input on trackpad
  • Mail up to 2.3x faster
  • Final version of Safari 4 released for Leopard, Tiger and Windows
  • Safari now sandboxes plugins to prevent them crashing the browser (IMHO this means you, Google 🙂
  • Stacks now have scrolling
  • Page through, magnify PDF thumbnails and movies
  • QuickTime X focuses on the content, overlays controls, lets you select from a visual timeline more easily and share it on YouTube, MobileMe or iTunes.
  • All Snow Leopard applications are 64-bit
  • Grand Central Dispatch supports multicore across all of Snow Leopard
  • Open CL (Computing Language) has been open sourced and allows for hardware abstraction of the video hardware for use in processing or display
  • Upgrade cost US$29 or US$49 for upgrading the Leopard family pack

There were some 16593 viewers watching the ustream live stream.

Apple Australia’s recycling program

So it turns out that tucked away on the Apple Store is a page about Apple Australia’s recycling program. Basically if you’ve bought a Mac at the online store, on the phone or at the Sydney Apple Store they’ll take away your old gear.

Presumably though you couldn’t buy an iPod nano and get them to take away a pile of junk, although it does mention requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis. No UPS’s or cracked or naked CRT’s either.

Apple education trade-in and recycling

Apple are running a trade-in and recycling program for US Educational customers, which offers features such as:

  • All recycled hard drives are ground into confetti-sized pieces.
  • Data on all hard drives to be resold is deleted in a manner consistent with federal standards.
  • Customers receive a certificate of destruction for each lot recycled through the program.
  • All asset tags and other identifying information are removed prior to disposition.
  • No waste from Apple’s U.S. recycling program is shipped outside North America.

The last part is interesting given that the ‘waste’ wouldn’t have originally originated in North America anyway, having mostly been constructed somewhere in Asia from parts manufactured in Asia.