By George Petersen

Spent the other day down at Apple Computer’s “campus” HQ down in Cupertino—just outside San Jose. The multi, multi-building complex was packed and busy as a beehive. No signs of any slowdowns with those dudes, that’s for sure.

But the reason for my trek was to check out the new Mac Pro CPUs and getting a closer look at Panther, the next iteration of OS X. According to the MapQuest, the ride would take 57 minutes. Strangely, that estimate turned out to be nearly spot-on, mostly because I ignored the first half of MQ’s directions which were largely nonsensical.

Arriving at Building 3 (evidently, this is where the audio, music and media production types hang out) I was ushered into a dark conference room. Inside was Logic 7.2.2—the current update on the 7.2 jump to the Universal version for Intel-based Macs—running on a Mac Pro with twin 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors. On screen—a 30-inch Mac Cinema HD monitor, of course—was an MIDI orchestral session with 50 instrumental tracks (some 400 virtual instrument voices) and four CPU-hungry Space Designer plug-ins and the CPU usage meters were barely hitting the 50% mark.

Then they kicked in Motion—another nastily CPU-intensive application for designing 3-D animated graphics—and the meters jumped, but still had another 33% of remaining headroom, even while viewing Logic in the real-time notation display. Power to spare, that’s for sure…

From that point, we moved on to get a close-in look at Mac OS-X Leopard, which doesn’t ship until next Spring, so everything’s subject to change. I’m not really the sort of person who gets excited about operating systems, anyway. in fact, I’m always skeptical about whether many of the “features” they really offer are really of any value to anyone except people who are enthralled with the concept of new animated thingies that spin on the desktop and maybe make funny noises in the desktop.

True to form, Leopard had plenty of that stuff, like the Photo Booth feature in iChat that allows you to do silly morphs on your face when video chatting or changing the background behind you to insert some tropical beach when you’re sitting in a dorm room. What would be more useful is being able to change the incoming picture (like when you’re talking to your boss or some whiney A&R punk at the record label) so that they appear onscreen a tiny little elf jumping around in a jar. Now that would be useful… But sans the cutsey effects, iChat could be pretty useful for video conferencing during long distance sessions, etc.

Leopard’s Mail 3 will include templates for creating your own professional-looking e-mailed party invites. Oh-weeeeee—the world will never be that same… But what really got me was Time Machine, an automated backup system that simplifies the process of recovering and restoring lost/misplaced/deleted files, with a fast, easy to use interface (certainly a first for any backup/restore program) that could be a real lifesaver in the studio, particularly when working in post, where multiple versions of multiple versions are the norm. The speed and versatility of Time Machine alone makes we want to upgrade my OS, and if they provide me a simplified means of deleting all the “essential” frills in the system, Leopard will be wonderful. Besides, if I ever want them back, I ‘m sure I can just “Time Machine” them into the system again…

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.

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