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So, yet another WWDC Keynote has been and gone. The world’s Mac enthusiasts have congregated expectantly in front of Reverend Jobs for another round of surprise product updates and new releases. Well, that’s the theory. In practice nothing spectacular happened. After all, this is a developer’s conference. The normal consumer isn’t the central focus.

There were few surprises today; all that was announced at the Keynote was pretty much accurately predicted weeks in advance by the ‘MacWeb’. As predicted the Keynote centred around two things, the completion of the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors and a preview of the eagerly awaited follow up to Mac OS X ‘Tiger’.

First up was the replacement for the PowerMac G5, dubbed Mac Pro. Aesthetically it is the same machine as its predecessor but on the inside it’s a different monster. In it’s basic form it has two 64bit Dual Core Intel Xeon that run at 2.66 GHz. These processors can be upgraded to 3GHz as a Build-to-order (BTO) option. Indeed, Apple seemed to tout the BTO route quite vigorously (4,976,640 possible configurations don’t you know…), which is good considering there is only one pre-built configuration (created so that the Mac Pro could be sold in retail stores no doubt).

Apple’s suggested configuration is as follows:

• Two 2.66GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon processors upgradeable to 3GHz
• 4mb shared cache per processor
• 1.33Ghz dual independent frontside buses
• 1GB of 667 MHz DDR2 fully-buffered ECC memory expandable up to 16GB
• NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM configurable to ATI Radeon X1900 XT or Quadro FX 4500 (512 MB VRAM)
• 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive
• 16x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

The second announcement of the day was the transition Xserve to Intel Processors. The configurations available are inline with those available for the Mac Pro and it is entirely BTO with over 1 million configurations available. Xserve specs

The other major talking point is the preview of Leopard. This will be covered in more detail next week but I will outline what was announced. There will be several new additions to Leopard including Time Machine, an automatic backup and file restoration system and Space, virtual desktops. There will also be enhancements to Dashboard, Spotlight, Mail, iCal, Front Row and Photo Booth (both of which will be bundled with the OS along with Boot Camp).