Live from WWDC: Steve Jobs keynote
posted June 6th 2005 1:00PM
Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference begins this morning, and you know what we're waiting for: Stevie J. is expected to drop a bombshell and announce that they're switching to Intel chips. Engadget bestest buddy Paul Boutin is there and will be live-blogging Jobs' keynote for us, so stay tuned for all the gory details:
9:59am PDT - Paul says he's in line to go in, sandwiched between NGerda from Wikinews and John Markoff from the New York Times. Everything should start rolling in a few minutes.
10:06am PDT- "Steve and his bottle of water take the stage. "Today is an important day." Half a million members in the developer community. 109 Apple stores world wide get 1 million visitors a week. $500M in 3rd part products sold in past 12 months.
10:07am PDT - Steve is showing off the London store again. Those lucky RHD geeks! (RHD = right hand drive)
10:09am PDT - Video promo for Apple stores.
10:11am PDT - iPod update: You know you're successful when you're on the cover of The New Yorker (in a goofy cartoon). 76% market share. 430M songs sold thru iTunes. iTunes 82% market share.
10:12am PDT - Steve is explaining Podcasting. "TiVo for radio." "Wayne's World for radio." "We see it as the hottest thing going in radio." 8,000+ podcasts and growing.
10:14am PDT - "The pros have realized this is huge." Rush Limbaugh, ABC News NBC News ESPN Disney Proctor & Gamble etc, long list. ot surprisingly, iTunes is adding Podcasting support, including a podcast directory in the iTMS. [Which is old news to us] "You don't have to type URLs into iTunes, although you can still do that." Demo: Adam Curry podcast in iTunes.
10:15am PDT - Curry sound bite: "Sixty million dollars worth of airplay strapped to my ass." KCRW demo.
10:16am PDT - The Treatment KCRW show, with fat-sounding Kruder & Dorfmmeister theme music. The point being a podcast can sound as good as satellite radio. iTunes shows album cover art to go with songs being 'cast.
10:17am PDT - Mac update. PC units shipped, growth is slowing fromm 10% 5 quarters ago to just above 10%. Mac has gone from less than 10% growth to just over 40% in most recent quarter. Steve showing high points of Tiger. Quicktime with H264 for Windows preview release today.
10:20am PDT - Steve running through gushy quotes about Tiger from the press.
10:21am PDT - 2,000,000 copies of Tiger sold already. 40+ Spotlight plugins, 400+ Dashboard widgets, 550+ Automator programs available in first few weeks.
10:23am PDT - Dashboard demo. Amazon, BusinessWeek, CNN. Calendar (Steve enters far-in-future Longhorn date),
package tracker. NPR station finder. Steve is now explaining Wikipedia as "one of the most accurate encyclopedias in
the world."
10:25am PDT - OS 10.5 will be called Leopard. Timed for release near Longhorn.
10:26am PDT - "Now, let's go to the big topic: Transitions."
10:27am PDT - 1994-1996 Moto 68K -> PowerPC. "I wasn't here then, but from everything I hear the team did a great
job." 2001-2003: OS9 - OS X.
10:28am PDT - "It's time for a third transition. And yes, (puts up slide that says): It's true." Next slide is one
word: "Why?"
10:29am PDT - "I stood up two years ago and promised this (3.0G PowerMac), and we haven't been able to deliver."
Steve says it's bigger than that, though. No roadmap for the future based on PowerPC - they can't see a future.
10:30am PDT - Intel offers not just increased performance, but reduced power consumption. Transition will be complete
by WWDC '07.
10:31am PDT - PowerPC - 15 integer perf units (not sure what) per watt. Intel does 70 per watt. "Mac OS X has been
living a secret double life" for the past 5 years.
10:32am PDT - Satellite shot with crosshairs shows building where a team has been working on the "Just in Case..."
scenario. Every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for Intel for the past 5 years. Here comes the demo!
10:33am PDT - "As a matter of fact, this system I've been using here..." the keynote's been running on a P4 3.6GHz all
morning"
10:34am PDT - Steve's hopping through every app. Performance is snappy. He's playing an H264 movie trailer for something wtih Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. "Ok, enough of that" he says after a few seconds.
10:35am PDT - Here's the geekout for developers: Widgets, scripts, Java: they'll just work. Cocoa - Xcode: small tweak, recompile. Carbon - Xcode - a few weeks of tweaking, recompile. Carbon- Metroworks: Move to XCode.
10:37am PDT - There's a checkbox for builds: "Intel, PowerPC" that makes a cross-platform single binary.
10:38am PDT - Theo Gray, cofounder of Wolfram Research, comes onstage to talk about porting Mathematica in the past 5 days.
10:39am PDT - "I get the most ridiculous phone calls from Apple sometimes. This was like 9 c'clock at night and he says, 'I can't tell you what it is, but ..." they flew out a developer with source code to do a demo for today.
10:40am PDT - Theo is hilarious. "I said, 'I'll send out our crack team of Mac developers that we keep on standby.'" Turns to guy standing next to computer. "That's you, Rob."
10:41am PDT - Theo says it took 2 hours to get it ported: "We had a lot of resources. There's Rob,
there's Apple ... your mileage may vary. But his biggest problem was figuring out what to do with the rest of the
weekend."
10:42am PDT - Mathematica demo. This stuff always makes me wish I'd studied harder at MIT.
10:43am PDT - Theo shows a 3D diagram being built and modified on the fly. "It could be experimental architecture, something you'd see in Vegas, or it could be candidate nanotech architecture."
10:45am PDT - Steve back onstage: "Not every application will be Universal on Day 1." A new technology,
Rosetta, will run existing PowerPC apps on Intel. Dynamic binary translation, transparent to users. "Fast
(enough)," the slide jokes, that most users won't know.
10:46am PDT - Demo: MS Word PowerPC binary on Intel. Excel spreadsheet. They're no notably slower than
usual. Photoshop still takes forever to load, but all the plugins work. Photoshop Filters seem fast enough.
10:49am PDT - Select and premier ADC member software developers will be getting a build kit.
10:50am PDT - Roz Ho, General Manager of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, is onstage to talk about what MS is
doing for the Intel platform.
10:51am PDT - Unfortunately her speech seems to have been written by a junior flack at Waggener Edstrom or
Edelman. Waiting for her to get to a noun... Here we go: Universal binary versions of Office coming, as we just
saw.
10:53am PDT - Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, comes on, jokes that his mom thinks he works for Apple. "The only question
I have, Steve, is what took you so long?"
10:55am PDT - Steve is talking about how Intel engineers turn out to be passionate about their products, just like
Apple employees.
10:56am PDT - Paul Otellini, President & CEO of Intel, is on. "I suspect there's a whole bunch of you who never thought you'd see that [Intel] logo on this stage. I was one of them."
10:58am PDT - Otellini is telling a timeline story that goes back to founding of Intel in 1968, founding of Apple in
1976. Photo of Jobs and Robert Noyce together. As Markoff said to me this morning, people love to see
photos of execs with long hair. Otellini says he asked Jobs, "Is that the last time you wore a tie?"
Steve's answer: "No, it's the last time I wore a moustache." 1996: "They set fire to our bunny person!"
10:59am PDT - Runs old TV ad: "Apple Computer would like to apologize for toasting the Pentium in public." Otellini:
"Now, we didn't have a grudge about that..."
11:00am PDT - Here's the talking point you'll be hearing over and over: Intel chips run cooler than the PowerPC.
More boilerplate about combining our strengths, two legendary companies, relentless advancement (advancement?) of
Moore's Law, etc....
11:01am PDT - More boilerplate: It's not the end of the story, it's just the beginning! He was funny about the bunny,
though.
11:04am PDT - Steve is back on now, restating the theme of this as Apple's 3rd big transition. "It's not
gonna happen overnight. We're making AWESOME machines right now" (Frequent comment in the press line: Will anyone
buy one in the next year?) "When we meet again here next year, we will have products with Intel processors
entering the market." Next year he'll show Leopard. One non-boilerplate truth: "The soul of a Mac is its
operating system." Plus the slick industrial design, of course.
11:05am PDT - That's it, show's over!
#108
Apple has not exhibited at the August Macworld since it moved from NYC to Boston. You'd be more likely to find new hardware announcements at Siggraph or Macworld SF in January....
Great. Now Intel will hit a speed wall and their CPU development will stall and stagnate, too.
Apple = performance killer for CPU manufacturers.
With all computer boxes having USB, Firewire, etc. and now Intel, Apple is only a software company in a nice box. That same box can run winlows. For shame.
Stream Coming
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc05/
OK, this is great. I have been a Mac guy all my life, but been forced into using windows at work, and Linux for fun... anyway....
to all those complaining about know ipod releases or whatever -- the WWDC is not for that...wait for one of the Macworlds...
also, to all those saying 'who is going to buy an apple in the next two years?' ME!!! I was planning on buying a new G5 this week, and guess what? I am still going to buy it! It's not like when they start this transition, my G5 will stop working!! C'mon...
This is a very smart move, and Apple will only continue on its trendsetting ways.
what's this going to do for apple gaming? I bet we're going to see many more games, it'll be fairly easy to port them
OK, this is great. I have been a Mac guy all my life, but been forced into using windows at work, and Linux for fun... anyway....
to all those complaining about know ipod releases or whatever -- the WWDC is not for that...wait for one of the Macworlds...
also, to all those saying 'who is going to buy an apple in the next two years?' ME!!! I was planning on buying a new G5 this week, and guess what? I am still going to buy it! It's not like when they start this transition, my G5 will stop working!! C'mon...
This is a very smart move, and Apple will only continue on its trendsetting ways.
I just saw the interview with Jobs here
http://apple.lu/en/index.php?rub=ArticlesVoir&id_news=65
Has anyone else noticed that he ahs a very pronounced lisp that he never had before? Any news on that? Health related?
Martin, it seems you are the one who has issues because you have to result to making some inane comments as opposed to making any sort of rational sense. It is people like you who have always given the Mac platform a bad name where the whole thing is treated like a religion.
The processor chip is just one component out of many inside of the box. The Mac has always been about the entire widget (hardware and software). What do you get when you replace the Mac OS with Linux on a Power Mac G5? The user experience is of course not Mac-like. Your also showing how ignorant you are with regards to the current state of the Pentium chip using worn out age old myths with nothing of proof to substantiate your "horrible, bloated, clunky architecture". Intel in recent times has been making positive strides in many areas including ones that are important to Apple's portable line such as power consumption and heat dissipation. Things can only get better with Apple providing direct input to Intel in order to hit certain metrics (including performance expectations).
Both IBM and Freescale have stated that Apple accounts for only 2-3% of their revenue (majority of their PPC sales is in embedded and specialized packaging). Bottomline, neither are going to jump through hoops to put significant resources into PPC desktop products. Intel on the otherhand can. I for one feel that Apple working together with Intel can result in even better chips in the future with economies of scale. Long term, this is good for the platform and each of the product lines. Furthermore, everyone has been wishing for a Power Book G5 but it was becoming so obvious that this was going to be difficult getting the PPC770 into a sleek form factor. In the meantime, Intel has been making gains in power reductions on their mobile processors while still maintaining processing parity with their desktop counterpart. There was a time when the Power Book nearly mirrored Power Mac performance but that has slowly eroding as those two pro-lines diverged in architecture. This stagnation also impacts the consumer portable line. I suppose you would prefer that Apple stick to a different processor architecture that did not have a clear strategic future road map which would cause product stagnation across the board just for the sake of being different as opposed to doing something about before it ended up turning into another Motorola G4 fiasco.
Some Mac users are now showing that their platform allegiance was just based on superficialities as opposed to the entire user experience which the platform has offered. Just as some early Mac folks detest Mac OS X, there are now going to be some who will be taking this same vile approach of zealotry against this shift in processors.
Like many, I think, my soul has always been Apple. I love the design of the OS system and the look of the machines but at the time I began buying computers I couldnt even think of affording to buy a mac. That was back in the mid 1980s when the only computer I could afford was an Amstrad 8512. (It was a British machine made by Alan Sugar) Design wise, and every other wise I guess, it was a long way from the Apple Mac. I thought about it a lot while watching Alan Sugar in The Apprentice on BBC television recently. On the one hand, it was a machine that delayed my introduction to what might be considered real computers, but on the other hand it allowed me and thousands of others to ditch the typewriter. It was a cheap(ish) beige bridge to the world of computers for many writers. The next computer I could afford was a Dell 486. From there on in, my files became too Intelisedto consider making the move to Apple, even when I got to the position where I could afford it. And also, perhaps I never felt entirely comfortable with Apples claims to exclusivity and all that think different stuff. Ah but maybe this is all about having a bit of a go at Apple because I couldnt afford their machines all those years ago. And I have to admit that Im one of those sad people who, from time to time. used Windows Blinds to make my windows XP look like the Mac OS. But then, maybe thats not so sad anymore, maybe us intel users with our XP transformed screens were just a bit ahead of the pack all along. Anyway, I think a lot of interesting stuff will arise out of this move by Apple today. And my favourite piece of computing equipment today is an ipod. I am fascinated by machines and the way we interact with them, the interfaces and the icons we create to talk in binary. If Apple released a version of Tiger that I could install on my machine would I do it? Yes, definitely. But I think Im too long with Windows now to completely abandon it, Id at least look for a dual boot function and see where that took me. I still have that old Amstrad in an attic, and last time I looked it still worked. All in all, what a great journey were on in this human/machine mating game!
stream is up
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf05/
Wow. The PC world is going crazy. First M$ announces they are using a triple-core PowerPC in the XBox 360, now Mac is switching to Intel. But just one question: Why Intel? Why not AMD? If they were really looking for faster, cooler procs they should have gone AMD. But oh well, maybe in the future I can have a Mac/Windows/Linux triple-boot (which would be somewhat pointless)
MWSF sorry
http://www.petitiononline.com/notintel/petition.html
A lot of you are havign a really hard time getting your minds wrapped around the idea that Apple has decided to open up their hardware and software platforms, and adopt the industry standard x86 architecture for both. A ot of you seem to think that Apple cannot compete in the mid and high end PC hardware business, because nobody actually buys anything but $399 computers. The reality is that, by allowing any computer owner to purchase and run OS X, Apple will increase their potential OS revenue base by over 20-times. And, by making its gorgeously designed hardware ready to run any choice of OS (but shipped with an installed copy of OS X), it opens its hardware market to a 20-times larger buyer pool, as well. Sony, HP, Compaq, Voodoo, and Alienware must be spluttering and gagging about now, at the prospect of Apple entering the performance PC arena. More of my take on the situation can be read here: http://technicallytrue.blogspot.com
Thinking it over: No, this box isn't going to run Windows apps. Basically, a Mac will still be your father's Mac (Apple designed motherboard, etc.), with the exception of the Intel chip. You won't be able to install Longhorn on this, for example. These boxes will start shipping with 10.4.x on them, which means there will be precious little time for working in Windows compatibility.
However, Leopard (10.5) is really the area things could change. Going all the way back (1995-1998, roughly) to when OS X was code-named "Rhapsody," there was the idea that there would be a Rhapsody PPC and a Rhapsody x86. The "Blue Box" would allow you to run what we now call Classic applications. The "Yellow Box" would allow you to run what we now call Cocoa applications.
And then there was the rumored "Red Box." If Apple has continued to develop Red Box then that would be major, because Red Box was supposed to be the Rhapsody runtime for Windows apps on the Intel version of the OS. If Apple takes a few hints from from the Wine project, takes the QuickTransit stuff they've bought, and the work they've done in X11 themselves, we could see a Windows-compatible runtime in Mac OS X 10.5 on Intel-based Macs. It will not run Windows, but it will run the apps. My guess is that DirectX may be an issue for gaming, but just about anything else may be able to be run.
My prediction: If this goes as smoothly as Jobs would like it to, Macworld 2007 (in January of 2007) will be the place to be for all of the Macheads and the Windows-hatas. Leopard and the high-end Intel Macs would be released at that point.
Maybe they could throw a 120GB iPod in there somewhere. :)
Some Mac users are now showing that their platform allegiance was just based on superficialities as opposed to the entire user experience which the platform has offered
----
Last I checked Intel doesn't make software. You buy the computer to run software...
Hey... doesn't this mean that porting games from Wintel to Mac will be much easier?
I got tired of reading through all the comments so pardon me if this has already been mentioned, but has everyone forgotten (or worse, not even been aware of) the "Palladium" (or the "Next Generation Secure Computing Base" or whatever obscure name they're giving it nowadays to hide the fact they are still working on it) that MessySoft was promoting a while back? (Google "microsoft palladium" and look for articles that aren't gushing over it such as one from Salon.com.) Do you REALLY think they just DROPPED it due to all the negative response?!? Development has continued and because it's partially hardware-based there is no reason Intel couldn't share the technology with Apple to prevent OSX from running on anything but approved hardware.
It's getting to be pretty scary out there - makes me wanna run for my good old C64 - at least I knew what was happening on that box down to the last detail and had complete control over it...
#107 What makes you think that Apple can push anything from Intel when they aren't even close to selling as many CPUs as the major PC makers?
Dell is in first place with a 16.8% share, followed by HP with 15.0% and IBM at 5.6%, Apple is just shy of a 2% market share.
Watch the video of the Keynote. It'll all make sense then. Especially when he gets to the Demo portion.
http://stream.apple.akadns.net/
Here's the biggest problem. What about when they want to switch BACK to the Power PC chip when the CELL processor is reving up for use in about a year and a half. That thing is a super computer on a single chip! It won't run M$, but it'll run OS 10.x, and Unix/linux OS's. They can't expect everyone to do the 2 hours/2weeks of changes BACK to PPC again. They should have just stuck it out and grabbed CELL next year, or gone with AMD (tho i think they were tricked with the Intel DRM onchip crap).
I fucking KNEW it! You can get a preview release of Tiger for Intel already too! STEVE, you are the F'in MAN!!!11!11 :-P
http://n0body.com
This has the potential to put a major dent in the sale of new Apple hardware until the transition to Intel is phased in. Why would anyone buy a new PPC computer today,when the future is Intel? I can imagine tha tthere are quite a few independant resellers that are going to struggle even more, at least in the next couple of years, at least until the transitions is complete.