WWDC 2004 Keynote Highlights
On June 28, Steve Jobs gave the annual keynote presentation for Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, a gathering of Macintosh software and hardware developers, in San Francisco.

The keynote speech outlined the current status of existing products and showcased two items of new business: the introduction of a new display line and the demo of Mac OS X's next generation, Tiger.

Huge new displays
On the hardware side Apple rolled out a revamped line of its flat-panel Cinema display family. The 23-inch Cinema display had topped out the monitor family for the last few years while the company phased out CRT monitors and produced flat-panel LCDs following the same basic enclosure design as the first Apple flat-panel display.

This month, Apple showed off a new enclosure design with an aluminum shell similar to the latest PowerBook G4 chassis. In addition to the popular 23-inch diagonal horizontally oriented design a smaller 20-inch model is available.

The topper of the new monitor family is a brand new, huge, 30-inch display which requires a new graphics card and can only be used with a PowerMac tower machine.

A Preview of Tiger
Steve also demonstrated the key features of Apple's next generation operating system, code-named Tiger, due out early next year.

Mac users who upgrade to OS X version 10.4 will find changes to the core operating systems as well as new features added to the Finder and user interface. Check out our preview of Tiger elsewhere in MacBytes for details.