The new version of Apollo Server 0.2 brings a major upgrade from its previous version, offering improved performance and features such as support for GraphQL with Express, Connect, hapi, and Koa frameworks, simplified and modular codebase, query batching, and stored queries, also known as query whitelisting. The re-write in TypeScript aims to make the project more maintainable and production-ready, while introducing new features that can be easily extended or added by users, making it a solid choice for building GraphQL servers on Node.js.