Home > iPad Resources > iPad News > Apple Back to Mac by Announcing Lion
Apple Back to Mac by Announcing Lion
Posted on October 21, 2010 by editor
Apple back to Mac on Wednesday by announcing Lion (the next iteration of Mac OS X), two new MacBook Air laptops, FaceTime for Mac, new iLife software and a Mac App Store. Wednesday's announcement comes after nearly 15 months of neglect for Apple's traditional computer business. During its Mac hiatus the company has focused largely on developing iOS devices such as the iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone 4 and the new Apple TV.
But now iOS time is over, at least for now, and Apple back to the Mac with some new ideas for its personal computers. Here's a look at the top 5 announcement from Apple Back to the Mac event.
Apple Back to Mac - FaceTime Beta
It's on the iPhone and the iPod Touch, and now it's coming to the Mac. A beta version of FaceTime for Mac, Apple's new video conferencing application, is available for all Mac OS X 10.6.4 users immediately.
Apple Back to Mac - Multi-Touch in Lion
Apple said that Mac OS X Lion will be focused on bringing some of the software features from iOS onto the Mac platform. In other words, touch gestures are going to play a big part in the next iteration of Mac OS X. But don't expect a touchscreen Mac any time soon as had been previously rumored. Apple went to great pains on Wednesday to say it was not interested in creating a touchscreen Mac. The company said it had done extensive user testing and found that it just wasn't practical to have you extend your arm in front of you to manipulate a vertical screen for long periods of time.
Apple Back to Mac - Apple Launches a Netbook
As the rumors predicted, Apple launched an 11.6-inch MacBook Air on Wednesday. The device has an LED backlit display with 1366-by-768 resolution, Core 2 Duo processor, NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor, full-size keyboard, SD card slot, 2 USB 2.0 ports, mini DisplayPort, headphone jack, microphone, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and a FaceTime camera.
Apple Back to Mac - App Store
It's been speculated about many times, but Apple is officially building an App Store for the Mac. It's not hard to see why Apple would be so attracted to using the App Store format on the Mac. The company said on Wednesday that a total of 7 billion apps have been downloaded from the iTunes App Store for iOS devices since launcing the store in 2007. The iTunes App Store has also been a major selling point for prospective new iPhone users, according to many critics and analysts.
Apple Back to Mac - Spinning Off
Apple's new MacBook Air's also herald what may be the beginning of the end for optical drives and hard drives in Mac computers. Both the new 13.3-inch and 11.6-inch MacBook Air computers rely on flash storage instead of hard drives, and neither includes an optical drive just like the previous MacBook Airs.
Hot iPad Link: The iPad eBooks Download has been designed to iPad eBooks.
More Tips: Connect iPad 2 to TV with HDMI, Put Live TV Shows on iPad
