The end of 2008 is upon us, and we thought it would be a good time to take a look at what did and did not happen in the world of professional Apple products during the course of the year. We’ll also review interesting decisions and announcements Apple has made during the year, and explore what we have to look forward to in 2009.

Apple’s professional desktop computer system, the Mac Pro, was updated in January of 2008, and has remained available at the same specification since then. Not much to report on! As an 8-core 64-bit system clocking in at 2.8GHz through 3.2GHz, it still represents a powerful system. However, many users would like to see more powerful graphics card hardware become available. We will see what Apple reveals in 2009.

The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, saw a relatively major update in October. While certainly a more powerful machine than the previous version, with a slick new look, one aspect of the update caught media professionals a bit off-guard — the fact that the new laptops are only available with glossy displays. Under ideal lighting conditions with no glare, especially if properly calibrated, the new displays should be suitable for professional-level work. However, few of us work under ideal conditions, and matte is often preferred for this reason. The fact is, it’s no longer an option, unless you purchase the 17″ MacBook Pro, which has as of today not yet been updated to the newer look and feel of the 15″ model. That will probably happen soon.

2008 will also go down as the year Apple decided to get out of the RAID business, and discontinued the Xserve RAID storage device. Instead, Apple decided to distribute and help develop firmware for an officially “blessed” version of the Promise Vtrak E-class RAID, and associated J-class expansion chassis. Unlike the Xserve RAID, the Promise RAID is a modern system, offering fully redundant active-active 4Gbit fibre channel RAID controllers and SATA hard drives. A huge improvement over the Xserve RAID, with easily two to three times the performance as the Xserve RAID per 3U chassis.

As far as software goes, nothing too significant occurred during 2008 as far as actual brand new releases. Sure, we saw some minor free updates to Mac OS X, Final Cut Studio, and other Apple software packages. Xsan 2 was released, and while fairly significant to us and Xsan users, this means little to most professionals who are not in Storage Area Network environments.

The biggest release was actually Final Cut Server, which was announced and shown off in a preliminary state long before at NAB 2007. Final Cut Server is huge news for Final Cut Pro workgroups, especially in SAN environments, but is not something many have been quick to jump into due to the complexity of the solution.

Apple did offer the first pieces of information regarding the next release of Mac OS X. 10.6, AKA Snow Leopard, is going to be shipping in the first half of 2009 it appears, and will not feature many new features at all. Instead, Apple has decided to focus on “under-the-hood” improvements, namely, adding functionality for software developers that makes it extremely easy for them to write applications that leverage multi-core processors (Apple is calling this library Grand Central).

In addition, Apple will be including the new OpenCL framework, which they were a core contributor to specifying. Like OpenGL, OpenCL will allow programmers to write code that is optimized to leverage the capabilities of the 3D graphics processor in your computer. However, while OpenGL is aimed at code that is inherently graphical in nature, OpenCL allows many types of code, graphical and general alike, to be processed by the very powerful graphics processor chip. Because GPUs are so powerful, this should lead to significant improvements in processing speed for some CPU-heavy tasks, once programmers optimize their applications to take advantage of the new OpenCL library.

2008 did not see a new major release of Final Cut Studio at NAB, but if Apple follows the every-other-year release schedule they’ve been following for a while now, we may indeed see some exciting new professional media applications revealed over the course of 2009, perhaps as early as 2009 at NAB.

Apple made one very interesting piece of news with an announcement several weeks ago, stating that this January’s Macworld San Francisco would be the last they would be actively participating at. Additionally, Apple noted that CEO Steve Jobs would not be delivering the keynote address as he does in most years, instead letting Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP of Marketing, handle the address. While some have speculated that this is due to the supposed ongoing illness of Jobs, just as likely is that Apple simply wanted to send a concrete signal to IDG (who throw the Macworld trade show) and consumers that they are intentionally de-emphasizing the show.