We arrived at about 7:15am to get our credentials and get in line for the keynote, which was much better organized this year. Everyone was seated early and the Steve Show started right on time. After reading today’s story in the Wall Street Journal about the timing of Steve’s options, I was curious if he would spend as much time on the financial performance of the company as he usually does at WWDC. Nope–only a quick mention of retail store numbers and overall Mac unit and market share growth. Come to think of it, no mention of iPods at all today, either.

There are lots of places to read the blow-by-blow of the keynote (here and here, for example), so I’ll just note my observations. People will think the new Mac Pro is another expensive Mac, but when you do side-by-side comparisons with PC makers (which is easier now, thanks to Intel), these machines are great values. The top of the line machine at education prices: just under $15K. But check out what that buys you: 16GB of high-speed ECC RAM, two dual core Xeon 5100 processors running at 3GHz, 2TB of internal storage, a state of the art graphics card and dual 30-inch flat panel displays. More mundane entry level models start at $2299–really decent for the type of workstation we are dealing with here.

The new Xserves are really nice: on-board graphics (finally!), more internal storage, huge increase in speed over current model, redundant power supplies and lights off management (the ability to start up a machine remotely that is powered down). Agressive pricing and more than a million configuration options make me re-think my server upgrade plans for the next 12 months. When these ship in October, the Intel transition will be complete.

I was initially a little disappointed with the Leopard stuff that was shown. Things like Time Machine are very useful ideas, but I thought the look and presentation are a little hokey and unprofessional. The Mail demos were a mixed bag–I hate the idea of notes and to-do lists in the application (this is confusing, as iCal currently handles this) and I really hated the idea of HTML formatted templates. I changed my mind on the latter, though, after I realized that 1) they do look nice, 2) lots of people want to do this and 3) there aren’t a lot of good tools available to create email like that.

The previews of Spaces, Core Animation and Dashboard Web Clip were good demos, but don’t seem to be worth a likely $129 upgrade. The good news is that Steve said a number of Leopard features are still Top Secret, and we were introduced to a number of new things during the afternoon sessions that are really, really exciting. Unfortunately, all of those sessions are under non-disclosure, so you’ll just have to wait until next Spring.

The weather here has been the typically great San Francisco summer weather: high around 65, fog in the morning and sun in the afternoon. The breeze at night through the hotel window is refreshing. The food so far has been mixed–the lunch at the conference was awful, but they made up for it with good snacks at the afternoon break. We ate dinner at Lefty O‚ÄôDoul‚Äôs, which had a great atmosphere and good, cheap food. Tomorrow we plan to hit Chinatown and later, Lori’s Diner. I ran five miles in the hotel workout room tonight, so I can splurge a little on the eating…DK