As the Macworld turns

Wait, Steve, back up a slide; I blinked. What was that skinny rack thing with the turbo ports carved out of the front? Oh, never mind. That's a cute little iPod you've got there.

All I can say about iPod mini is that I'm always misplacing business cards. Any device that size would go straight to whatever limbo those cards call home.

Nonetheless, Steve Jobs' keynote at the 2004 Macworld Conference & Expo was dominated by creative tools: substantially overhauled editions of iLife and Final Cut Express. They matter more to you than you probably think, a case I'll make in a later column.

Microsoft also scored a surprising amount of keynote time to demo Office 2004 for Mac, which will probably ship this spring. It will feature a notebook view in Word, a Project Center in Entourage, and a Panther-like look and feel -- all good. But I am livid at Microsoft's failure to even mention the much-needed revision to Virtual PC for Mac that it touted so heavily in the run-up to Macworld.

Fellow InfoWorld columnist Ephraim Schwartz and I got some face time with the trio of beaming papas of the G5 Xserve and revamped Xserve RAID. (Both were a blip in the keynote.) Apple's new server offerings accomplish what the company absolutely had to do this year: Close the performance gap between Xeon and Xserve, and give Xserve RAID the storage partitioning and online RAID set expansion that the IT market demands.

I need more than the hour I spent poking around in a powered-down G5 Xserve to give you so much as a preview. I will report Apple's promise that its new server consumes about 10 percent more power than the G4 Xserve, yet it runs two to three times faster and costs about the same. Um, I think I could be OK with that. Apple has to prove that these dads' boasts aren't akin to Little League tales about their kids' 700 batting averages. In any case, Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Jon Rubenstein quipped, "We don't expect to sell many more G4 Xserves." Change "many" to "any" and you'll get Rubenstein's point.

I can answer the question that has doubtless kept you awake at night: How does Apple cool this thing? With a bank of muffin fans, just as PC servers do. You'll be shocked to learn that the orchard of windmill-sized fans that make the Power Mac G5 so quiet are missing from the 1U G5 Xserve. Apple's fabled ingenuity has failed us. I welcome the pair of intake ports on the front of the G5 Xserve's chassis because I can now confess my secret shame. I leave one G4 Xserve drive bay uncovered so my primary server doesn't have to suck its air through a straw. Or I did until I filed this column. If you try that "look, ma, I redesigned the Xserve's ventilation system" stunt at home, I'll sic AppleCare on you myself.

Through LUN (logical unit number) emulation, multiple servers will make direct connections to the new Xserve RAID, eliminating the need for a compute server that publishes storage as network shares. That ought to restore Apple's feature leadership among units in its price class, as could G5 Xserve. I'd say more about market impact and such, but I'm VPNed into my core Xserve and Xserve RAID servers right now to reapportion workloads to take advantage of performance gains (yay) and the elimination of storage gateway duties (big hurray).

Am I being too hopeful? Possibly, but Apple hasn't underdelivered on me yet.