Blow by Blow of Steve Jobs Keynote Yesterday

Taken directly from T3’s Live Blog and the time-stamps are in GMT – coz we’re in the UK innit :0)

I’ve left the typo’s in as it show’s that this was all typed live :0)

16:31 Right, T3 is at Macworld, and ready to report from everything Jobs might come up with – place your final bets, gentlemen: Will it be a new Apple TV? A new MacBook? Updated iPhones? The next two hours or so will tell – reload the page to stay on the bleeding edge of everything that’s going on!  

16:39 In London, the compere reminds us of the launches of the iPod Mini, the Intel macs, the Apple TV, and the iPhone in Macworlds gone past  

16:48 We are reminded that on September 5th, Apple launched a full set of new iPods    

16:48 In October, Apple launched Leopard, and sold more than 2 million copies of the new operating system in the first 2 days.  

16:49 Obviously, in the past few months, we’ve also seen the UK launch of the iPhone, on the 9th of November.  

16:50 Only last week, Apple launched the fastest Mac ever: The 8-core 3Ghz Mac Pro.    

16:52 By summing up the amazing number of product launches over the past few months, Apple are hinting heavily at some big launches to come over the next few hours…  

17:02 Everyone is waiting with bated breath for Steve to take the stage.  

17:12 Come on, Steve – you’re 12 minutes behind schedule, and we can’t wait to drool over the new Apple gear!  

17:14 The keynote kicks off with showing off a new Apple advert  

17:14 Steve Jobs takes the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.  

17:14 ‘There’s clearly something in the air today’, Jobs says, before starting with a recap    

17:15 Jobs talks about the extraordinary year 2007 was, and mentions the iPhone and the iMac especially.  

17:15 “I’ve got 4 things I want to talk to you today”  

17:15 Leopard sold more than 5M copies since launch, meaning that 19% of the current Macs are running on the new operating system.  

17:17 Jobs is doing a recap about the great reviews that Leopard has been having. He highlights how Microsoft have (finally) launched Office 2008 – the last app to go native on the Intel platform.  

17:18 Jobs is talking about backups ‘You wish you didn’t have to have wires attached’, and then launches one of the newest product: the Time Capsule: Airport extreme base station + a built in external harddrive, perfect for backup.  

17:19 Time Capsule will come in 2 version: 500 GB and 1TB harddisk inside.  

17:19 500 GB costs $299, the 1TB costs $499 – ‘We want people to back up their content, and it is the perfect companion to Time Machine’.  

17:20 Time Capsule is shipping already in February. It looks exactly like the current Airport Extreme base station  

17:21 The 2nd news story is about the iPhone – 200 days after the iPhone originally started shipping. Jobs says they’ve sold 4 million iPhones so far  

17:21 … That’s 20,000 iPhones per day, since launch…  

17:22 Jobs is taking a look at smartphones in the US. Blackberry has 39% market share, and Apple takes 19.5% market share – making it the second biggest smartphone seller.    

17:23 Apple equalled Palm, Motorola, and Nokia for smartphones in only 90 days. Wow.    

17:23 Everyone is excited about the iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit). But they wanted to give us something to day – One new thing: Maps with location ‘find your current location’ on maps. Web clips can be created on your home screen, you can SMS to multiple people (FINALLY!)  

17:24 Up to 9 customisable home screens, too! That’s one hell of a software update…    

17:25 The location system is really cool – you click LOCATE, and it finds out roughtly where you are on the map.  

17:25 You can flip into locations, and select ‘travel from my current location’, which is great for traveling and finding your way, obviously.  

17:26 You can now ‘drop a pin’, which is like adding your own personal bookmarks to the map.  

17:27 Jobs are now demonstrate multi-person messaging. Finally, text messaging makes a lot more sense. Did we mention ‘finally’?  

17:28 The SMS-to-multiple-people function is as simple to use as you’d expect.  

17:28 Web clips demo – There’s a plus button near the centre of your browser. You can now add to home screen. Just go to the page you want to create a web clip from – it can be more than a bookmark, but it doesn’t just remember the page, but also what you’ve zoomed in to.  

17:29 Customising the home screen is easy: Just press and hold any button, and the icons start wiggling, for customisation. Press the ‘home’ key on the iPhone, and it remembers how you customised your home screens. You can have up to 9, so there’s a lot of room for applications and bookmarks.  

17:31 How does the localisation work? They work with a company called Skyhook Wireless. They’ve mapped wi-fi hotspots all over the US – they’ve got 20 million in their database, and you can use the hot-spots (even if they are password protected) to triangulate your location. Google is using the mobile phone towers to do the same – and the iPhone combines both technologies to find your location as precisely as possible.    

17:33 Obviously, there’s not too much data for Europe so far, so it looks we may be limited to cell tower triangulation (which isn’t exactly an exact science), but it makes for a nice starting point, if you’re terribly lost.  

17:33 iPod Touch ‘They do have the same software system inside’. The iPod Touch gets 5 new apps – Mail, maps, stocks, notes, and weather.  

17:34 Jobs quips that Apple are pretty good at making updated software available for free.  

17:34 For existing iPod Touch users, it’s going to cost $20 – boo! (You can download the software update via iTunes)  

17:35 … And that was the 2nd thing. Golly, that wasn’t too bad – 2 more things?   17:36 The 3rd thing… iTunes. Apple have sold their 4 billionth song. On Christmas day, they sold 20M songs in a single day.  

17:36 On iTunes, they’ve sold 125M TV shows – more than anyone else put together.    

17:36 … They’ve also sold 7M movies – and they think there’s a better way to deliver movie content over iTunes… So they are introducing iTunes movie rentals!  

17:37 They’ve never offered rental model for music, because, well, you want your songs to stay with you. Movies, however, is slightly different.  

17:38 12 studios are in on the rental deals, offering you a massive amount of movies available for rental – all the big studios are in on the game!  

17:39 Studios behind the rental service include Touchstone, Miramax, Lions Gate, New Line, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Disney, Sony, Universal and Paramount  

17:39 By the end of Feb, 1000 movies will be available. They’ll be available 30 days after DVD release. Watch them on the Macs, Pcs, Current generation iPods.  

17:40 When you rent a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it, and then 24 hours to finish it once you’ve watching it. Much like Xbox Live movie rental, then.  

17:40 You can move the film around to different devices. To rent an older movie will cost $2.99, a brand new release costs $3.99  

17:41 If you start watching a movie on your mac, but are on your way out the door, you can transfer your movies to your iPod, and finish watching it on a different device, like your iPod Touch.  

17:42 iTunes movie rental starts today in the US – internationally, it’s happening later this year.  

17:42 Jobs says he wants to watch the movies on his big telly, too. He talks about how nobody has been able to take movies from the internet to the big screen. Apple TV was Apple’s attempt, but Jobs admits that it didn’t really work…  

17:43 In other words: Apple TV take 2 is out there: Instead of being an accessory to iTunes, you can use it on its own: you can rent movies in DVD or HD quality, directly from your Apple TV – with full-on 5.1 surround sound!  

17:44 Apple TV will be able to show pictures from .Mac, Flickr, and your computer. You also get the whole 50M videos from YouTube, directly on your TV with Apple TV.  

17:45 You can buy TV shows and music directly from your Apple TV – the shows and music automatically sync back to your computer!  

17:46 HD rental of movies cost $3.99 for library movies, and $4.99 for brand new releases.  

17:46 The Apple TV also gets a brand new user interface, too, a step away from Front Row.  

17:47 The new Apple TV interface makes renting movies really easy – it comes up with suggestions for your rental exploits, and it even allows you to have a look at previews / movie trailers for the movies that are available for rent. Pretty wicked stuff.  

17:48 You don’t have to wait for movies to download completely: The Apple TV will buffer for a while, before allowing you to start playing, and then you’re off – 30 seconds from pressing rent to start watching the movie! Amazing stuff – Apple, please, please, PLEASE bring this to the UK as fast as you can!  

17:50 Jobs shows off a clip of Die Hard 4.0 in full High Def. It looks glorious!  

17:51 You have a whole load of different ways of getting to movies – by genre etc, of course, but the search is also working quite well, with live search – start typing the name of your movie on the on-screen keyboard (this IS Apple TV, after all), and the movies show up as required. Damn smooth.  

17:52 Steve Jobs previews a Linkin Park music video. Oh dear. Dude, we love you, but grow some music taste, okay? (only kidding…)  

17:53 Podcasts, video-casts and all that jazz is also available via the Apple TV. Smooth.    

17:54 Jobs points out that digital cameras nowadays all offer up perfect high-definition photographs: A perfect way to show off your holiday snaps as a slideshow!  

17:56 Jobs shows off the Flickr integration – you can add your friends, and then look at their friend, and their friends’ friends – in short, you can look at all of Flickr’s glorious photos. Well, if Flickr’s server is working, of course (the screen remains black) Whoops!    

17:58 Jobs summarises the Apple TV. All from your hi-def TV. Movies – BOOM. TV shows – buy from over 600 TV shows. Music – buy from 6M songs. Photos – from .Mac, Flickr, etc. And videos – 50 million clips available from YouTube.  

18:00 If you’ve got an Apple TV, updating to Apple TV Take 2 is completely free of charge. Bonza!  

18:00 The Apple TV is going change a little bit as well – It used to sell for $299 – and Jobs is dropping the price down to $229 today, and is offering up the free software upgrade for Apple TV users within 2 weeks.  

18:01 Apple really are being serious about this digital hub thing… But unless I’ve counted wrong, there’s one thing left, right? Right? Hell yes.    

18:02 … But first, Jobs invited Jim Gianopulos the Chairman and CEO of Fox to the stage.  

18:03 Jim talks about business models, as we don’t make much of an effort to stifle a yawn.  

18:03 Jim says that Video on Demand isn’t anything new. he points out that there was music, and then the iPod. There were phones, then there was the iPhone. He says that Apple is about to change the rental market forever.  

18:05 Jim says that the next-generation format will be Blu-Ray. Oh dear. He then rattles on for a bit about digital copies on DVDs, so you can add your movies to your iPod etc.    

18:07 .. That brings us to number 4… There’s something in the air.  

18:08 Jobs introduces the Macbook AIR!  

18:08 What is the Macbook Air? It’s the world’s thinnest notebook.  

18:08 Jobs says most people think of the Sony TZ eries as a thin laptop (and yeah, they are). They weigh about 3lbs, are about an inch thick, and are wedge-shaped. And they have a 11 or 12-inch display… And a miniature keyboard…  

18:10 Apple thought ‘what do we like’ and ‘what can we do better’  

18:10 So, the Macbook Air – it will be the thinnest laptop ever: 0.76 inches, tapers off to 0.26 inches.  

18:11 Jobs points out that the thickest part of the Macbook Air is thinner than the thinnest part of the Sony TZ  

18:11 Jobs holds up the Macbook Air, hidden inside a manilla envelope.  

18:11 It’s a hell of a gorgeous machine, with nicely rounded corners, a full sized screen, a full-size keyboard, but no optical drive. 13.3 inch display – so bigger than the Macbook screens. LED backlit display.  

18:13 Comes with built-in iSight camera. Jobs claims that the laptop keyboard is the best one they’ve ever shipped. It’s also got an ambient light sensor, and back-lit keyboard.    

18:14 Multi-touch gesture support – pan around photos, move windows, use mult-touch to rotate photographs. “We learned from the iPhone, and we’re now putting it in our laptop computers”. You can, of course, also pinch to zoom in and out of pictures etc.  

18:15 “How did we fit a mac in here”, Jobs quips.  

18:15 80GB harddisk is standard, or an option as a 64 GB solid start harddrive. That’s a really bloody fast way of storing stuff, if a bit pricey.  

18:16 1.6 Ghz is standard, 1.8 Ghz is an option – both run on Intel Core 2 Duo processor: the same ones as used in the MacBooks and the iMacs.  

18:17 Apple asked Intel to create a much smaller Core 2 Duo chip – and they did! The new processor is 60% smaller, and quite sexy. Yeah, we just called a processor sexy. Sorry about that. But hey, we’re all geeks here, aren’t we?  

18:18 The new processor is the size and thickness as a 10-pence coin. Wow.  

18:18 The Macbook Air comes with a Magsafe conector, a USB 3 port, micro DVI, and a headphone port. No wired ethernet, but it does have a 802.11n – the most advanced wireless tech available today.  

18:20 “The Macbook Air is built to be a wireless device”, Jobs says, and claims that you don’t need an optical drive anymore. Time Machine for backups, Time capsule for backups, iTunes for music etc.  

18:22 So how do you install software? Well, you can use the brand new ‘remote disc’ software. It allows you to ‘borrow’ another computer’s optical drive, for installing software etc – the CD or DVD in your Mac or PC’s drive shows up as a drive on your Macbook Air. Groovy.  

18:23 Jobs claims that there’s 5 hours of battery life – which includes wireless usage…    

18:23 Jobs summarises – 3 lbs weight – backlit, full-size keyboard, 13.3 inch display, super thin, multi-touch gestures, iSight built in, 2GB standard memory, 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, and Bluetooth built in.  

18:24 The price? $1799 for the basic model – it will start shipping in only 2 weeks!    

18:25 .. That’s only about 800 quid for what is undoubtedly the sexiest laptop on the market today. Wow.  

18:26 Jobs shows off the newest advertisement for the Macbook Air  

18:26 Jobs highlights how recyclable and environmentally friendly the new Macbook Air is, including how they’re now using Mercury-free and arsenic-free glass in the screen.    

18:27 “So that is the 4th thing we wanted to talk with you about today”…  

18:28 “We have a special treat today…”  

18:30 Jobs invites Randy Newman to the stage, to play a few songs.  

18:30 Randy Newman is playing the piano  

18:37 Seems as if the keynote is drawing to an end, as Newman is just rambling along a little bit now.  

18:38 Newman plays ‘You’ve got a friend in me’ – a classic from Newman’s and Jobs’ Pixar days, of course.  

18:40 Jobs thanks Newman, and sends us on our way to go play with the fantastic new Apple products. Awesome.