Newbie here, looking at the Imacs. What advantages will the Santa Rosa and the Leopard provide? How often does Apple come out with new OS and platforms? Thanks
Most of the big things about Santa Rosa are more specific to notebooks than desktops. It has better integrated video than the current chipset, but the iMac does not use integrated video. It has the Robson flash technology (for greatly reduced boot times), which I guess is nice, although you can just leave your Mac on and put it to sleep, so honestly, I don't see caring about a technology that I use once every two weeks when I reboot my iMac. Finally it has faster front-side bus. So overall, it
will perform generally faster at a given clock speed than the current architecture.
Leopard will offer a handful of interesting things...you can
read about that at Apple's site. The Time Machine backup architecture. A resolution-indpendent UI framework that, in time, will really revolutionize the look and feel of OS X. Likewise, 64 bit APIs, which, like the res-indep UI, won't change anything immediately, but which will probably over the course of three or four years deliver some real improvement to computation intensive activities on Macs. Also smaller updates to all the bundled apps - iCal, Mail, iChat, etc.
iLife 07 rumors haven't really said what will be vastly different, but everything is likely to be enhanced. Particularly iWeb, since it's so new.
