Advertisement

Live from Macworld 2005: Steve Jobs keynote

Steve Jobs Keynote


It's the moment you've been waiting for: they're running a few minutes late, but it looks like the big, big, big keynote is about to get underway at Macworld. We have a couple of reporters there, and barring any unforeseen technical snafus (the WiFi sitch is a mess, apparently), we'll be bringing you live updates from Jobs' keynote as they happen. Keep refreshing to get the latest.



9:11am PST - Steve Jobs arrives on stage, starts talking up HD projection, he's showing off their new Apple store in London, it's their largest store to date, and the second grossing store they have worldwide.
9:14am - Recapping the year, the iMac G5 launch "The most beautiful desktop computer." The best selling Mac they have.
9:15am - Mac OS X update, "The world's most advanced operating system, 12,000 native apps, 14 million users." Tiger on schedule to ship first half of this year with 200 new features. Any process will be able to address 64 bits of memory.
9:16am - New Tiger features. Automator, collects and accomplishes routine tasks. Most important new feature is Spotlight, desktop search allows you to find anything. Photos, PDFs, docs, integrated into OS and applications.
9:17am - Microsoft will be building support for Spotlight into their Mac apps.
9:21am - Spotlight just instantly searched 250,000 files, can sort by people.
9:22am - Spotlight offers searching within Corbis images.
9:23am - Steve just crashed Spotlight photo viewer! "Well, that's why we have backup systems here." Force quit and recovered.
9:25am - Demoing "smart folders" in the finder. "View this week" everything opened this past week is shown. Searched results actually show up in a spotlight effect. Very nice effect.
9:27am - New version of Mail for Tiger. Softer UI, no more brushed metal look. Can search across all mailboxes using Spotlight. Steve showing demo with 100,000 emails.
9:28am - Smart mailboxes" monitor anything with the search phrase. If someone emails you a bunch of pix, there's a "slideshow" button attached to the message. Can dynamically create slide shows from emails. Nice "expose" type ways to view multiple photos. Once in slideshow view you can automatically save any of the pix to iPhoto library. Slick transparent "genie" effect to add photos to iPhoto.
9:30am - QuickTime 7 - 24 channels of surround sound, support for high-def. video, live resizing. Full screen overlay. One button audio and video recording. More transparent onscreen controls. Using H.264 as codec so it could transcode movies for PSP.
9:31am - Lots of smooth resizing of HD video. Scalable from cell phones to full HD. Definitely a knock at you-know-who.
9:34am - Dashboard - "Get in, find something, get out" Controller for iTunes, world clock, measurement converter. Dictionary and thesaurus (applause). Translation, yellow pages, weather. Lots of yuks at stock ticker showing Apple and Pixar up and Microsoft down. Widget bar overlaid under dock. Widgets appear with ripple effect. eBay developed a widget for it to track auctions
9:36am - Demoing controls on "back" of widgets. They flip around like the tiles in that tic tac toe beanbag toss game "Toss-across"
9:38am - iChat - Up to 10 people in one audio chat, multiparty video, up to 4 people in one video chat using H.264.
9:40am - Demoing iChat video fullscreen. As more people are added to video chat, the screen positions them in a sort of folded format. Shipping "long before Longhorn."
9:43am - HD. Declares 2005 the year for high-definition video. Final Cut Pro the most popular HD video app. Introducing Final Cut Express HD. Adds powerful HDV editing. LiveType for animated titles, integration with iMovie titles. Soundtrack for custom music. Seamless iMovie file import. $299 in February or $99 upgrade for FCE current owners.
9:44am - iLife 05. "We are leading the digital media revolution." New cartoony logo, iPhoto has better organizing and searching, new photo editor. Calendar view. New search tool. Supports MPEG4 movies for import from, say, Sony cameras. Supports RAW image files from high-end digital SLR cameras. Editing view looks a bit like Windows filmstrip view.
9:46am - Editor adds controls for Brightness, contrast, histogram, saturation, sharpness, straighten, temperature, tint. And a straighten feature. Beefed up slideshow and new way to make books. Also adds a thumbnail list across the top so you don't have to back to "organize" just to edit another photo.
9:50am - Steve just fiddling with photos.
9:51am - Straigthen overlays a grid on the screen, then you can rotate the pic to match the grid and it recrops the photo.
9:55am - iPhoto demo thankfully ends.
9:57am - iMovie is dramatically faster. Non-destructive trimming. MPEG-4 support. "Magic iMovie." Support for HD up to 1080i. Loads all the video off of your camera and creates movie for you.
10:01am - Steve showing off high-def wedding video. "We're anxiously awaiting Blu-ray so we can burn high definition DVDs"
10:03am - Kunitake Ando, president of Sony just walked on stage. Ando giving Jobs props: "Great admiration and respect for Apple products." Jobs is filming Ando on Sony HDV camcorder.
10:05am - Ando talking about Grand Wega TVs and Blu-ray.
10:06am - Ando says "Just keep introducing great software" and "Stay off the PC!"
10:07am - Ando says looking forward he expects Sony to bring features of FX1 into smaller and lighter cameras. Seems like he's definitely overstaying his welcome.
10:08am - Jobs saying that maybe some day they'll work with Sony on "computers and music, too."
10:09am - iDVD. Supports all DVD formats. Can suck all the footage off a cam and burn it to a DVD in pretty much one click. Demoing new themes. Dropping movies into the theme. They continue to play as the window is rotating. Slick.
10:10am - Jobs says, "Better than most Hollywood DVDs." Even Pixar?
10:11am - Sappy wedding and cute upbeat kids birthday templates.
10:13am - GarageBand. Up to 8 track recording. Pitch and time fixing (so you can do mashups!). Can now change recorded tracks as flexibly as software instruments and loops. Create your own loops. Real time music notation.
10:15am - Vocal transformer. John Mayer walks on stage (just like last year!). He's about to start playing.
10:16am - Music notation does live transcribing as the music is being played. It's pretty sick. John sings "I didn't win any Grammys for playing piano." Now John's playing guitar and singing with a bass accompanyist. Jam session going on now. GarageBand is recording it all.
10:17am - They're recording bass, guitar, drums and vocals live into separate tracks.
10:20am - Steve's playing back the recordings. Playing each track by itself so he can demo that each voice was in a separate track.
10:20: iTunes. No big changes. iLife 05 is $79, goes on sale January 22nd. Free on all new macs.
10:21: iWork. Successor to AppleWorks. Now we're getting into stuff people were getting sued over.
10:22am - iWork is OS X only, includes Keynote 2, as expected. Can create kiosk shows. Cinemaquality presentations for everybody. 10 new Apple designed themes. Animated text. Powerful animated builds. Presenter display (applause). Interactive slideshows. Speaker display is cool. Interactive display. Can output just current slide to video out simultaneously. Compatible with AppleWorks, PowerPoint, Flash, PDF, QuickTime.
10:25am - Brand new app called Pages. Word processing with an incredible sense of style. Supports styles, multi columns, advanced typography, 40 templates, each template comes with a number of pages so not every page in a template layout has to look the same.
10:27am - Phil Schiller takes the stage. Phil picks a template. Don't start on a "scary blank white page." Can access media browser. Autoresizes photos. Pages has incredible live update of all sorts of elements: picture drop zones in templates, text wrap around graphics, etc. Can do charts, table objects.
10:30am - Pages does alot of automatic reformatting and resizing, so when one variable is changed (i.e switch from 3 columns to 2) other stuff is resized to fit. Compatible with Word files!
10:32am - iWork will costs $79, also available January 22.
10:33am - Things are getting good. "Why doesn't apple offer a stripped-down Mac that is more affordable?" The Mac mini. About the width of a CD. Slot load combo drive (DVD/CD-R). DVI & VGA out. Ethernet. USB 2.0. Firewire. Runs quietly.
10:35am - Holding it in palm of hand. Looks about a third of the size of the cube. Like you took a slice of the Cube. BYODKM: Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, and Mouse. It's about 6" x 6" x 2.5". Comes with Panther, iLife '05. $499 with 1.25GHz G4 processor. 40GB hard drive.
10:36am - Faster version is $599. Available January 22nd. Crowd is going wild.
10:37am - iTunes Music Store. Sold more than 230 million songs. 70 percent market share. Selling 1.25 million songs per day.
10:40am - "As you know we have the iPod and iPod mini." Sold 4.5 million iPods last quarter. Sold 733,000 in Q4 2003. 500 percent growth. 10 millionth iPod was sold on December 16th. Steve kept it for himself, we're sure he'll be ebaying it soon.
10:42am - Over 400 iPod accessories. Talking about iPod and BMW. More car adapters to come: Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo, Scion, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari.
10:44am - Cellphones. Rehashing stuff Motorola announced at CES. Will be Motorola-branded phone, out Spring 2005. No applause.
10:45am - One more thing... iPod market share last year: 31 percent. Flash had 62 percent. "Wannabes" were 7 percent. iPod mini went after high end of the flash market. Now iPod market share is at 65 percent, flash is at 29%, wannabes at 6 percent. "We'd like to go after the remaining 29%."
10:47am - Attributes of current flash players: AAA battery, tortured UI, very small display, no click wheel. Needed an original idea.
10:48am - Something happened in the iPod market. They discovered a new way to listen to music: shuffle. Basing new flash-based player around shuffle. iPod Shuffle. No display on player. Looks like a little stick. Smaller than most packs of gum. Like an elegant thumb drive. Weighs less than one ounce. Button to play and pause. Volume up and down button. Previous and next song. That's it. Nothing else.
10:50am - Cap on bottom hides USB 2.0 connector (you can use it as a flash drive!). PC or Mac. Shipping with lanyard. 12 hour rechargeable battery. Integration between device and iTunes. 10:52am - Something called "AutoFill." Will automatically build a playlist for iPod Shuffle.
10:54am - 512MB = $99. 1GB for $149. No 2GB version. Shipping TODAY from the factory. Accessories, armband, dock, waterproof sports case. Battery extender. Accessories are $29 each.
10:56am - Showing TV ad for the new player. "Life is Random" ad plays on silhouettes, adds shuffle arrows.
10:58am - "Might be some at the Apple Store over here today."
10:59am - Steve giving kudos to development team. Thanking their familes and spouses.
11:00am - John Mayer is playing "Daughters" as people leave. That's it!