Steve Jobs keynote live from WWDC 2008
So today's the day. We'll have all the live Jobsnote WWDC coverage as it commences -- everything's posted after the break!
Note: Updates are being posted from bottom to top (top newest). Updates are now top to bottom.
Green Apples.
Already hundreds of devs and attendees are piling up downstairs to get in.
8:43AM PT - We're in line at the Moscone Center (which is actually pretty spare at the moment), but it's early. The media's got a ton of MacBook Airs. Stay tuned for our live coverage of the event
9:16AM PT - People are really filing in. You've never heard so many people say the word "iPhone" in your life.
9:37AM PT - Everybody is crowding up at the closed gates, preparing for the Running of the Media.
9:46AM PT - We're in! The cattle rush of the media was pretty mellow this time around. Shockingly enough, they're playing oldies -- not the usual soundtrack of Gnarles Barkley, Coldplay, Gorillaz, etc.
9:51AM PT - People still funneling in -- this auditorium seats thousands of people, so it takes a little while. Say, is that Gavin Newsom? Oh, and there's Al Gore. (See, right in the center there.)
10:02AM PT - Okay, weird, a bunch of attendees just stood up and started clapping -- we don't know why, since it wasn't Jobs (or so we think).
Announcer: "Turn off all cellphones, iPhones, PDAs... our program will start in a few minutes."
10:06AM PT - Lights are coming down! Crowd beginning to roar!
Music's over, and here we go... lights all the way down, Steve's on stage!
Roar, applause.
10:07AM PT - "Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here this morning. We've been working hard on some great stuff... thank you for coming to WWDC 2008. We've got a record 5,200 attendees -- we wish we could have had more, but we sold out!"
"I'm sorry for all those folks that couldn't be here... we're going to have a great week this week. 147 sessions, 85 on the Mac, and 62 on the iPhone... it's going to be packed! 169 hands-on labs, 1k Apple engineers, iFund and Intel sessions. I think it's going to be one of the best WWDCs ever."
"Let's get started. As you know there are three parts to Apple -- the first part is Mac, second part is our music business (iPod and iTunes), and the third part is the iPhone. I'm going to take this morning to talk about the iPhone."
"To help me, I'm going to ask Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller to help me with parts of this. Then, after lunch, Bertrand Serlet will give you a sneak peak at the next version of OS X called Snow Leopard."
10:10AM PT - "Let's talk about iPhone, the place to start is our new software -- the iPhone 2.0 platform, a giant step forward from where we've been... we started a dev program in March, which is just 95 days ago. In those 95 days we've had over 250k download the free SDK. We've had over 25k people apply to the pay developer program... unfortunately we couldn't take everybody, so we admitted 4k people to the program..."
"iPhone 2.0 software, there are three parts: enterprise support, SDK, and new end-user features. Let me start with enterprise."
"Exchange... as you know, we've done it... push email, calendars, contacts, auto-discovery, global address lookup, remote wipe, all this stuff is built in. In addition we've worked with Cisco to build in their VPN services... all sorts of security demanded by the enterprise. Everything they told us they wanted, we built it in."
"We've had a beta going... 35% of the Fortune 500 has participated in that beta program. The top 5 banks, top 5 securities firms, 6 or 7 top airlines, 8 of 10 top pharma, and 8 of 10 top entertainment companies."
10:13AM PT - "We've had phenomenal participation from higher education. Again, gotten fantastic feedback. We made a video of these customers, I'd love to show it to you..." Video time!
Going over some firms, testimonials style. Great if you care about the petabytes in the datacenters of Disney, we guess.
Still going... the Army sure does love the new iPhone software!
Steve's back on: "That gives you a sense of what we're doing in the enterprise, all this stuff built into iPhone 2.0. Next up is the SDK, to take us where we are there and to show us some really exciting stuff, I'd like to bring up Scott Forstall." Applause.
"With the SDK in iPhone 2.0 we're opening the same native APIs and tools we use internally... that means you as a dev can build apps for the iPhone the same way we do. Let's start by talking about the APIs. The APIs and frameworks on the iPhone share extensively with OS X... We use the same kernel in the iPhone that forms the basis of OS X... almost all of them share the same source code line-for-line as OS X." He's going over the bits of Core Services: SQL lite, OpenGL ES, OpenAL.
10:20AM PT - "We top it all off with Cocoa Touch -- our UI object oriented framework, which makes building an app for our fullscreen touch interface an absolute breeze. We have a great set of APIs. On top of this we have a really powerful set of tools."
Going over debugging and Xcode, instruments -- all the stuff from the March iPhone roadmap event.
Demo time! "I want to concentrate on how we construct a UI..." making an app called Nearby Friends. Accesses the contacts database and Core Location to filter all contacts with contacts within 10mi. Building the UI with Interface Builder. Dragging and dropping interface elements.
Okay, Scott, we love what you've done here, but we're yawning. Then again, the thousands of devs in the audience are probably stoked -- those that haven't used the SDK anyway.
The quick-built app is loaded into the simulator and running. "Now let me take it one step further..." he's going to test a tethered app install.
Looks like he's done, getting a rousing round of applause.
"We've got a great set of APIs and a really powerful set of tools. This has been out about 3 months... we asked them, what do they think? The response were unbelievably positive. Let me read you some of their quotes..."
10:26AM PT - Going over quotes flacking the SDK... Disney, InfoWorld. Okay, we get it, you're preaching to the choir here! This is the Apple developer conference, after all.
"Thousands of people are building apps... we were really amazed with the quality of these apps. We've invited a number of these devs up here today." Sega's starting out. "Sega blew us away with what they accomplished in just two weeks with the first cut of Super Monkey Ball..." Ethan Einhorn from Sega is taking the stage.
"Back when we showed you SMB in March, our dev team created four stages from scratch in just two weeks of dev time. 8 weeks later we had 110 stages... they also gave us all four of the classic monkeys!" Chuckles... aww, they're playing as Baby.
Crap, these graphics look unbelievable compared to anything we've seen on a cellphone before. Seriously, these are DS-quality graphics, easily.
Forstall: next is eBay. Ken Sun's on stage.
10:34AM PT - Demoing bidding, watching items, searching, My eBay, all the usual stuff, and bidding from the app. That's nice, but couldn't this have been done over the web?
Next is Loopt, Sam Altman is going to demo.
Man, these demos are crazy boring. Throw us a bone here Apple! Loopt will be free on the App Store at launch.
Next is TypePad, a great mobile blogging app. Michael Sippey is up. Huzzah, blogging.
Showing photoblogging -- they've looped in to the camera API to take shots and fire them off to your blog. Dialogue looks more like an email than a CMS. TypePad will also be available free.
10:40AM PT - Next up, the Associated Press, Benjamin Mosse is up.
Showing photography and video from their news network. Not bad! "We encourage you to get involved with the news you see -- you can send news to us immediately from your iPhone."
Next is long time Mac game developer Pangea Software... two games to be demoed by Brian Greenstone. Man, please let this string of demos end!
Showing Enigmo -- looks pretty hot, water droplets doing polygon-accurate collision tests per second. Next is Cro-Mag Rally, nine tracks, ten cars. Porting both games took "three days to get each game up and running -- totally playable."
10:46AM PT - Forstall back, and another developer demo. Ugh.
Mark Terry from Moo Cow Music, it's called Band, a collection of virtual instruments for creating music from scratch.
Hmm, not too shabby -- showing a piano, and what do you know, it's better than the multi-touch piano they showed at D with Windows 7. They played a riff from Lennon's "Imagine."
The blues simulator just got huge applause!
It'll be out in the App Store "in a few weeks' time." Forstall's back. Next, MLB.com, baseball fans will "love this application." Jeremy Schoenherr is up to demo it.
Showing latest scores, real-time video highlights from every game!
10:52AM PT - Next: Modality, showing a medical learning app. Great.
Wow, we heard Apple's stock is down almost $5 since this keynote started. Maybe they should just demo their top three and keep going.
ANOTHER medical app. This one by MIMvista. Someone, wake us when Steve's back.
"And our LAST app [emphasis ours] comes from Digital Legends Entertainment... they only started two weeks ago." Let's see this fancy game, shall we?
10:59AM PT - Looks a little like God of War, graphics somewhere between DS and PSP. Pretty friggin' impressive. N-GAGE has been after games that look this good for years. Will be ready by September.
Forstall's back: "That was all running on an iPhone! And they had two weeks. One of the most fun parts about building a platform like iPhone 2.0 is seeing the innovation that comes from our developers." Applause for the devs!
"There has been one feature request that doesn't currently exist... it's mainly come from clients like IM, where by their very nature they want to get a notification even if the user isn't running the app. We absolutely want to solve this problem, the question is how?"
"The wrong solution is to enable background processes... to allow an app to continue to run even after their user thinks they quit it." Windows Mobile, we're looking at you. Why's it bad? "First, battery life, it drains power. Second, performance, it sucks up cycles and makes other things feel sluggish." Uh oh, he's showing the WinMo task manager.
"This is nuts." Huge applause for that one.
"We've come up with a far better solution -- a push notification service Apple will provide to all developers.
11:04AM PT - Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone, where a 3rd party server can ping Apple's notification service to your device. It can push badges, sounds, and custom textual alerts (like how SMS overlays look).
"The great thing about this: it scales... it's a unified push notification service for all devs. It preserves battery life and maintains performance. And it all works over the air -- WiFi and cellular. Available in September, but next month we'll be seeding to devs. This has been an update of the SDK, thank you!"
Forstall's off, Steve's back!
"Isn't that fantastic? This is going to be great. In addition... we've got a few new features. The first one: contact search. Type in a few chars, instantly find who you're looking for. Second? Full iWork document support -- Pages, Numbers, and of course, Keynote. Great way to look at your iWork docs on the go. And we've completed MS Office support: Word, Excel, and now PowerPoint, too."
11:07AM PT - "It's super easy to download these docs and look at them on your iPhone. We've also added bulk delete and move, it's rather handy. And the ability to save images you might get in an email, tap on them and save them to your library. The calc has a scientific mode... we've added parental controls. Teenagers might not like this, but that's the way it has to be." All the stuff we saw a couple months back.
"Really importantly, we've added many many languages, some of the ones we're most excited about: two forms of entry for Japanese, two forms of entry for Chinese (simplified and traditional), including character drawing / recognition." Eat up Martha.
"This is pretty cool. It's one of the great advantages of not having plastic keys for your keyboard!" Big applause.
"We think the iPhone 2.0 software will be phenomenal and raise use to a whole new level. We'll release it in early July."
"It will be a free software update for all iPhone owners, and the price is down to $9.95 for iPod touch owners." Meh applause.
"Of course, we'll have all these great apps, but how will we distribute them? The App Store... it's a way for devs to reach every single user. Users can pick their apps and wirelessly download them right to their phone."
"And for those apps you bought, when there's an update you can download that update wirelessly as well. Devs set the price of the apps, keep 70% of the revenues, we don't charge them any fees -- we FairPlay their apps so they're secure, and if they want to give them away for free, there's no charge whatsoever."
11:11AM PT - "Now, we've enlarged the scope of the App Store from the 22 countries it was going to be in -- it's going to be in 62 countries, so almost anywhere in the world where there's an iPhone. If your app is 10MB or less, they can download it over cell, WiFi, or iTunes -- if it's over 10MB they can get it on WiFi or iTunes. So that's the App Store. We think there's never been anything like it."
"We got some other feedback that enterprises want another way to distribute apps -- they want to distro them for themselves, so we're adding enterprise app distribution." Enterprises authorize iPhones, and then create and distribute apps on their intranet that can only run on those phones. Users sync their custom apps through iTunes. Yes, iTunes is apparently the new enterprise tool.
"But we're adding a third way -- we call it ad hoc."
"Imagine you're a professor teaching a class on how to write iPhone apps! You want people to mail apps around... you can get certified and register up to 100 iPhones, apps can be circulated and posted for up to 100 iPhones. We think we've got a great story now." Applause.
"Now, we've got something entirely new."
"We're very very excited about this. It's called MobileMe."
Phil Schiller's up! Demo time.
"Good morning, I'm really excited to tell you about this brand new service... so what's the idea? It's like having Exchange -- for the rest of us."
Ouch, Schiller just called ActiveSync "ActiveStink" -- the mockery! Guffawing from the crowd.
Push email, contacts, and calendars... everything is up to date wherever you are.
"MobileMe stores your info up in the cloud so you can get to it anywhere using any of your devices -- Mac, PC, iPhone -- it will push information up and down to keep everything up to date all the time."
Example of email -- gets pushed down to all devices. Change a contact? Gets pushed up to MobileMe, down to all other device. "The best part of this, it works over the air. Everything is up to date."
11:16AM PT - "It works with the native apps on my Mac or PC -- it works with Mail.app, iCal, Address Book... as well as Outlook. You'd expect that it would work with those native apps."
"What's really going to surprise people, we've built an incredible suite of web 2.0 apps using Ajax."
"Go to any browser, type me.com. Simple, easy to remember. Log in... you get an incredibly rich email client. It feels like a desktop app."
Mail, contacts, calendar -- all this stuff looks exactly like Apple's native apps. This is pretty nice.
"It's a breakthrough web 2.0 app interface." Demoing the site.
"I can run this on a Mac or PC -- you might guess which my favorite is. I'm going to launch my favorite browser -- which happens to be Safari. Just log right in." Looks pretty solid, almost identical to the desktop apps.
Quick reply mail feature -- really fast way to send an inline reply. Contacts search with real-time text entry filter. Calendar, you know... it's a calendar.
11:22AM PT - Photos: photo skimming works, resizing thumbs -- it looks exactly like desktop iPhoto. Wonder how much of this is Flash. iDisk is supported as well -- looks like .Mac might be going bye-bye.
Log-off is power-on/off icon. Demo of OTA interaction... email gets pushed to the device. Email takes Phil to Gmaps, where he saves a restaurant as a new contact. He goes back to the computer -- what should happen to be there but the email that was pushed to the phone, including the state (read or unread). And there's the restaurant contact card.
Showing calendar push -- demoing the amount of time it takes to make changes to calendar events over the air from PC to iPhone. 12 seconds, by our count.
Send to MobileMe option from photo. Send to the library of your choosing in the cloud. More applause. "So that's MobileMe, an incredible new experience for all your information. It's like having Exchange for the rest of us. Push email, contacts, calendars -- works with native apps on the Mac and PC. And most exciting are these incredible new web apps. The perfect companion."
"It's available for $99 per year -- 20GB of storage."
"We're going to create a free 60 day trial, available along with iPhone 2.0. You might be asking what about .Mac? MobileMe replaces .Mac."
".Mac users can continue to use service, but they'll be automatically upgraded to MobileMe. So that's MobileMe."
Steve! "Isn't that great? We've been working on that for a while. I think we finally got it right."
"Now I'd like to talk about something near and dear to my heart. That's the iPhone. In a few weeks it's going to be the iPhone's first birthday. An amazing intro -- certainly the most amazing we've ever had."
"And iPhone has had tremendous critical acclaim -- best invention of the year -- it's the widely believed that this it the phone that's changed phones forever." Applause.
"That's all great, but the thing that makes us the happiest is that users love the iPhone. 90% customer satisfaction -- that's off the charts. What products today have that? 98% are browsing -- mobile browsing has gone from nothing to 98% with the iPhone. 94% are using email, 90% are using SMS -- 80% are using 10 or more features. You can't even begin to figure out how to use 10 features on a normal phone!"
"In that first year we sold 6m iPhones since we ran out some weeks ago. We did figure out what our next challenges are... the next mountain we have to climb to go to the next level."
"What are these next challenges?"
"3G." Huge applause.
"Second: enterprise support, third: third party apps, fourth: we need to sell it in more countries. We've sold iPhone in six countries so far, but believe me, they're in use ALL over the world." Hehe. "It's clear there is a demand."
"And last but not least -- everyone wants an iPhone, but we need to make it more affordable." Big applause.
"The number one reason people didn't buy iPhones is because they just can't afford it (56%). So as we arrive at iPhone's 1st birthday -- we're going to take it to the next level."
"Today we're introducing the iPhone 3G.
HUGE applause.
"We've learned so much with the first iPhone. We've taken everything we've learned and more and created the iPhone 3G. It's beautiful. This is what it looks like." Black back! "Thinner at the edges. Full plastic back, it's really nice."
"Solid metal buttons, the same gorgeous 3.5-inch display, camera, flush headphone jack, improved audio -- it's really, really great... and it feels even better in your hand, if you can believe it."
"How does the iPhone 3G tackle these things? Let's take a look at 3G. Why do you want 3G? Faster data downloads, right? There's nowhere that you want it more than the browser and downloading email. First, the browser..."
Showing EDGE vs. 3G -- let's see how we do. 3G version takes 21s to load... but we're still waiting on the EDGE, which is PAINFULLY slow.
Still waiting to load... people are murmuring. Duh, Steve, we've been saying this since the beginning. People are whistling now. 59s on EDGE. Steve: "Slow."
"It's even more remarkable when you look at this next to WiFi -- you can see 3G speeds are actually approaching WiFi. It's amazing, zippy -- 17s."
"We took two other 3G phones -- the iPhone 3G is 36% faster than the Nokia N95 and Treo 750 -- and look at the result you get, by the way! Full page on the iPhone, and quite a bit less on the other phones." Big applause.
Email attachment download demo. 5s over 3G, 18s over EDGE.
"If we compare this to WiFi, we'll see 3G approaches WiFi speeds. We're also really proud that we're doing this with great battery life -- standby time is 300 hours."
"2G talk time is up from 8 hours to 10 hours. 3G talk time... other phones have 3 - 3.5 hours, we've managed 5 hours of 3G talk time, which is an industry-leading amount of time."
"Browsing, 5-6 hours of high speed browsing. Video - 7 hours, audio - 24 hours." Big applause. Dizamn.
11:38AM PT - "So great performance, great battery life. Now, one other thing that benefits from fast data is GPS -- we've built that into GPS." The crowd roars.
"Location services is going to be a really big deal on the iPhone -- you saw a bit of that here today, it's going to explode. We get location from cell towers, from WiFi, and now we get it from GPS." So that's A-GPS, alright. "We can actually do tracking."
Showing a tracking ping moving across the map -- crap, that's hot.
Zig-zagging down Lombard street. "So! Built in GPS, and much, much faster data. We think we can check off 3G and add built-in GPS to boot." Big applause.
"Enterprise support: as we explained earlier, full Exchange support. All secure VPN, everything everyone's asked for is built-in. We're on exactly the right track, we can now check off enterprise support. Third party apps -- the SDK, you saw the great apps, and we've got the best way to distribute them."
"We think we can check off third party apps. We distribute iPhones in six countries -- we set ourselves the goal of 12 countries for the iPhone 3G, and the stretch goal of 25 countries... Here we go..."
Showing all the countries played to the tune of Small World -- most of South America... Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Czech, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Malta, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Niger, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Kenya, Botswana, South Africa... man, way too many countries!
Huge, huge applause. People are on the edges of their seats. "We'll be rolling it out in 70 countries in the next several months. Next time you're in Malta and you need an iPhone 3G, it'll be there for ya." Don't worry people, we'll have maps of these countries!
"These deals are all signed, sealed, and delivered. Our stretch goal was 25 countries -- we'll be in 70 countries this year, we think we can check off more countries." Applause. "Which brings us to: more affordable."
"iPhone started off at $599 for an 8GB device, which now sells for $399 -- we want to make it even more affordable. I'm happy to tell you the 8GB model will sell for $199."
"We think the iPhone 3G will be affordable to almost everyone. 16GB model for $299 -- for that model we have a white one."
"The big news, is $399 to $199 -- we think we can check off more affordable."
"70 countries this year. We're going to start with 22 of the biggest, rolling out the iPhone 3G at the same time in all of these countries. July 11."
"The price is a maximum of $199 all around the world -- we're really, really excited about the new iPhone 3G. And as you might expect, we have a new ad! I'd love to show it to you." Lights are down... spy theme.
Secret Apple vault -- finally we get to see what it looks like!
Tag line: "Finally, the first phone to beat the iPhone. Introducing the NEW iPhone 3G." Steve's rolling the commercial a second time!
11:47AM PT - Big applause, even the second time. "Just like the first iPhone, this new iPhone 3G is one of the most amazing products I've ever had the privilege to be associated with." He's calling all the teams to stand up, giving 'em a round of applause.
"You know, we've got such incredibly talented people at Apple -- they put their hearts and souls into this product. I hope you can feel it. ... and that's just the start. WWDC 2008: I think it's going to be our best so far."
"Take advantage of everything you can learn here and go make some great products. Thank you very much, I'll see you this week!" The lights are up, and now they're all shuffling out.
Thanks to everyone from team Engadget, team Blogsmith, and netops for keeping this thing chugging. We're out!