Just as Bell promised earlier this month, the Palm Pre is available today (August 27) in-store and for order. It is only available on a three-year contract for $199. Bell requires you to have a voice and data plan (separate or combo).
Links:
Bell.ca
Bell Palm Pre page
The Globe and Mail on the Palm Pre
Snow Leopard is available in the online Apple Store for $29 USD for a single-user license, $49 USD for a family pack (5 licenses) in the US. In Canada you can get Snow Leopard for $35 CAD for a single-user license and $59 CAD for a family pack (5 licenses).
All of these are available with free shipping or $13 CAD for expedited shipping (in Canada). Expedited shipping is imaginably the roughly the same in the US.
I have been a mostly faithful mac user since 2003 when I got my first Mac (an eMac). It shipped with 384 MB memory, an 800MHz G4 proc, a 40GB HDD, a CD-ROM drive that I had swapped for a combo—then eventually SuperDrive. That Mac saw Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger, and like all versions of Mac OS X are based on a the same core, Darwin—a Unix like core operating system based on FreeBSD, and it points out how well Apple gets OS X to scale to meet the hardware requirements. That Mac was relatively well-equipped with 384MB of memory (for the time), however now, at least is my experience with Leopard, 384MB is less memory than the kernel_task process uses, let alone today’s Adobe AIR based Twitter clients (at almost 500MB for Twhirl).
I think it’s interesting how Mac OS X is so robust that it natively runs on a processor as primitive as the G3 while still being able to run on a modern SSSE-enabled Intel Xenon. Given that Apple has a lot of deep, dark voodoo going on under the pleasant Aqua interface, it still gives credence to the abilities of Unix.
As a special note, today, Apple announced that Snow Leopard is available for pre-order and will ship (in-store and pre-orders) on August 28 (2009)-and this is the first version since Mac OS 7.1.2 to not support any PowerPC-based macs.
| 10.0 | 10.1 | 10.2 | 10.3 | 10.4 | 10.5 | 10.6 | |
| Min. Processor family | G3 | G3 | G3 | G3 | G3 | G4 Intel for some features |
Intel |
| Rec. Processor family | G4 | G4 | G4 / max G5 | G4 / max G5 | G4/G5 | G5/Intel | Intel 64-bit |
| Min. Clock speed | ? | ? | 233 MHz | 233 MHz | 333 MHz | G4-867 MHz | – |
| Rec. Clock speed | ? | ? | 233+ MHz | min 333 MHz | 333+ MHz | >867 MHz | – |
| Min. Memory | 64MB | 64MB* | 128MB | 128MB | 256MB | 512MB | 1GB |
| Rec. Memory | 128MB | 128MB | 256-512MB | 512 | 512MB-1GB | 1GB+ | 1GB+ |
| Min. Free HD | 800MB | 1.5GB | 2GB | 1.5GB | 2GB | 9GB | 5GB |
| Rec. Free HD | 1.5GB | N/A | N/A | N/A | 4 (developer tools) | N/A | N/A |
| Install media | 1xCD | 1xCD | 2xCD | 3xCD or DVD | 4xCD/DVD | DVD DL | DVD DL |
| Other | PB G3 “Kanga” not sorted | Free update to existing users. *unofficial minimum |
Original PB G3 not supported | “New World” ROM & USB | (ignoring Intel version) DVD drive built-in firewire |
All G3s and slower G4s dropped | All PPC dropped. OpenCL/H.264 hw de/encode requires min NVidia GeForece 8600 / ATI Radeon 4850 +) |