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Amongst Apple’s slew of announcements at the Back to Mac Conference one garnered less attention than it should have. Apple’s news that starting January 6th the App Store will offer OS X software downloads is not to be ignored. This is in addition to its already long list of iOS apps by Apple and third party developers featured in the store. The store opening will change how Mac users experience OS X and how businesses manage employee software and licensing.

Simply put, the new Mac App Store will be an all-in-one portal for Mac users to browse, download, and update software. How this translates into workflow for businesses is not as simple however. One issue is license management. How will companies manage end-user App Store accounts and ensure company-wide application updates? Along with licensing concerns arises the issue of budgeting and IT cost management. The App Store, while convenient, does not offer Enterprise pricing. Demand will be high for employees to access the store – especially if they’ve experienced the ease of the iOS App Store on iPads and iPhones. Purchasing through individual accounts will be difficult to monitor and application prices difficult to budget. But the simplicity of the iOS experience on iPhones won’t transfer to the Mac App Store for businesses and it won’t relieve the headache that many IT directors will experience.

iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users rejoice! Much requested (and much needed) updates to Apple iOS have   been released today for the mobile operating system. iPad users may celebrate the most: the update includes over 100 new features including multitasking, folders, and a unified inbox. The other breakthroughs are both big and small, including:

• AirPrint – Print mail, photos, web pages, and more directly to a printer on a wireless network with an AirPrint-enabled printer.
• AirPlay – Wirelessly stream videos, music, and photos to the new Apple TV, and stream music to AirPlay speakers or receivers, including AirPort Express.
• Find My iPhone, Find My iPad, and Find My iPod touch – The MobileMe feature that helps you locate your missing device and protect its data is now free on any iPhone 4, iPad, or fourth-generation iPod touch running iOS 4.2

Apple unveiled new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops with longer battery lives, faster processors and lower prices today at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The price on the ultra-thin MacBook Air was also lowered by more than 15 percent. Also introduced was the iPhone 3G S, the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet. It will be available starting June 19.

By incorporating the new Nehalem processors into the Xserve Apple has given their servers the same benefits the processors delivered to the new Mac Pros, more power with less energy. While the additional oomph is nice for desktops users, the injection of speed and performance at the server level can increase productivity across an entire workgroup. The new quad-core processors are remarkably efficient, utilizing every last bit of productivity of the processor and cache, and removing bottlenecks to significantly improve “memory bandwidth.” The enhanced speed will benefit those running a wide variety of applications, from mail and calendar to web and database applications, as well as video and audio editing applications. We can’t wait to test one out; it looks really, really fast and it is reported to be extremely quiet.

Along with Sever-class 7200-rpm SATA drives, and 15,000-rpm SAS drives, the new Xserve offers a $500 2.5 inch, 128 GB SSD option (an SSD is essentially solid-state memory acting as a hard drive).
SSD provides an ultra-fast, low-power boot drive alternative. Operating at under 1 watt – versus 12 to 18 watts for a typical spinning drive – this solid-state drive delivers random-access performance that’s up to 20x faster than a SAS drive and up to 48x faster than a SATA drive. And since this 1.8-inch drive is installed in a dedicated location, it doesn’t take up a valuable drive bay, leaving all three bays available for primary storage and RAID applications.

Businesses that have been waiting to upgrade their current servers until they saw what Apple was going to offer should be pleased. The quad-core model starts at $2,999 and the 8-core at $3,599.

The new iMacs are very pretty. They come bundled with iLife, the digital lifestyle software suite for consumers. Apple’s marketing copy even positions the iMac predominantly as a home computer. But the iMac packs some serious punch, plenty to make it a business desktop machine. It combines a large 20-inch or 24-inch screen with a small footprint, ideal for tight office environments. Considering how small that footprint is, the iMac can house up to 1TB of hard drive space and 8GB of memory. It is also fast, with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors running from 2.66GHz up to 3.06GHz and powerful new graphics cards from NVIDIA and ATI.

Apple has announced updated versions of the Mac mini, iMac, and Mac Pro, the three desktop platforms in the Mac family. The big news for business customers is the new Mac Pro, which can be scaled with an inordinate amount of size and speed. With the redesigned interior (the exterior dimensions haven’t changed) Apple found a way to allow for up to 4TB of internal hard drive space. A new side-panel makes it much easier to access components, which now slide out easily. That is good, because you will want to slide out the processor tray so you can gawk at the new Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processors which boost performance 2x over the previous model. New video cards nearly triple the performance of previous the Mac Pro standard cards, and with room for four video cards you can drive eight 30″ Cinema Displays.

The new Mac Pro is a beast

One nice surprise is the sheer volume and easy accessibility of the I/O ports. On the front panel two FireWire 800 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and a headphone minijack. On the back three USB 2.0, two FireWire 800, optical audio in and out, analog audio in and out, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. That is a total of seven USB ports and four FireWire ports.

It looks like Apple managed to improve the design of the MacPro at the same time that they increased performance, a neat trick considering how much performance is improved.