Keynote Coverage
Musical selections: Some hip-hop track, Vertigo by U2, Technologic by Daft Punk, Speed of Sound by Coldplay, the track from the old Macworld iPod ads.
Video coverage of the attendees shows someone with a Windows tablet (slight booing), someone holding up a laptop that says “JIMMY!” on the screen (cheering), someone holding up an iSight to record (laughter), jugglers (what the hell?), Woz (applause).
10:01 and the “program about to begin” sign shows up. 10:03, copyright notice with “Product specifications are subject to change without notice.”
Steve is out, NO JEANS! “Today’s an important day.”
Conference stats:
– 3,800+ attendees, largest in the last decade
– 45 countries, including China and India
– 110 lab sessions, 39 hands-on sessions
– 95 presentation sessions
– 500+ Apple engineers on-site
– 400+ Design Award entries
– 500,000 ADC members
Retail update:
– 109 stores around the world
– 1 million visitors per week
– $500M in third party products in the last year
– Shows the London store, says it’s “phenominal”
– Video shown at a real estate convention made by the retail team. (Music: Rubberneckin’ Oakenfold Remix.)
– $2 billion in sales by the fourth year
– Average earnings of $4000 per square foot
iPod/iTMS update:
– Know you’ve entered popular culture when you’re on the cover of the New Yorker.
– 16 million iPods sold at the end of last quarter total.
– 76% of the entire MP3 market (including flash and hd-based).
– 430 million songs sold on iTMS to date.
– iTMS owns 82% of the marketshare for online music sales in May 2005.
– Podcasting coming in iTunes 4.9
– Steve elaborates on the “Wayne’s World for radio”; he meant you can do it without a lot of capital.
– Calls it the “hottest thing in radio”.
– Gives a list of the major companies that have jumped on Podcasting.
– You *can* type URLs into iTunes 4.9
– New Podcast item in the source list.
– Quick and easy way to grab new podcasts.
– Apple is going to be doing podcasts of new music weekly. As you scrub through the podcast, the artwork changes – big applause. Shows chapter functionality too.
– Expects this to take podcasting mainstream.
Mac general update:
– Growth rates, year-over-year: PC growth rate has gone from 18% to 13%, Mac growth rate has gone from 8% to 42%.
– Today: QT7 Windows Preview release.
– Over a billion QT downloads over its lifetime.
– Tiger is the “best release we’ve ever shipped”.
– This week, Apple will deliver the 2 millionth copy of Tiger (includes retail/maintenance/new Macs).
– Dashboard widget demo
– Uses Business Week widget to look up top stories about Apple to laughter.
– Gets another Longhorn dig in with the countdown widget.
– Tiger represents 16% of OS X user base. Panther is 49%, Jaguar is 25%, 10.0/1 are 10%. Expects Tiger to be 50% for this time next year.
– Next release of OS X will be Leopard. No focus at the conference today. Intend to release it at the end of 2006/early 2007, right around the Longhorn release.
Transitions:
– There is a TON of muttering under breaths.
– Mac in its history has had two major transitions.
– 680×0 to Power PPC
– Classic to OS X, set up for the next 20 years
– Time for the third transition
– It’s true (small intel style e)!
– PowerPC to Intel processors starts now for developers and for customers in 2006-2007.
– “Why are we doing this?” We want to be making the best computer for our customers looking forward.
– Brings up the G5 laptop and the 3.0 GHz Tower, but these aren’t the most important reasons.
– Looking ahead, while we have great products right now, we have ideas of future products and we can’t make them with PPC
– Power consumption is a big key to this motivation (gives an integer comparison chart).
– Next year, at this time, Macs shipping with Intel processors
– In 2007, at this time, transition will be mostly complete, totally done by the end of 2007.
– Two major challenges in this transition.
– First: Making OS X “sing” on Intel
– OS X has been leading a secret double life for the last 5 years.
– #1 rule: Designs for OS X must be processor independent
– #2 rule: Every project must run on Intel and PowerPC
– EVERY release of OS X for the last 5 years has been compiled for Intel and PowerPC, confirming rumors.
– Demo system he’s been using has been runing on this morning is Intel (Pentium 4, 3.6 GHz)
– It’s singing, it’s really indistinguishable from G5 chips.
– Very far along, but not done, going to put this in developer hands.
– Second: Your apps
– Four types of apps
– Widgets/scripts/Java – just work
– Cocoa apps: “Small tweak (few days) and recompile”
– Carbon / Xcode – “Tweak (few weeks) and recompile”
– Carbon / Metrowerks – “Switch to Xcode, tweak (few weeks), recompile.”
– Top 100 developers, over half are using Xcode, 25% are in the process of switching.
– This is “nothing” like Carbonization.
– Trots out Mathematica who he called last Wednesday to port over to Intel.
– Theo Grey out to talk about the process.
– Took two hours to get running on Intel.
– “Twenty lines of source code from a dead cold start”.
– “YMMV”
– Xcode 2.1 out today
– When you build, check a box for Intel or PowerPC.
– Universal Binary, runs on both PPC and Intel.
– Both processors supported for a “very long time”.
– Not every app is going to be universal on Day 1.
– Technology called Rosetta.
– Translates PowerPC to Intel
– Runs existing apps
– Dynamic binary translator
– Transparent to users, nothing like Classic
– Lightweight, no big memory footprint
– “Fast (enough)”
– Demo: Word opens fine. Excel opens fine. Quicken runs fine. Photoshop works fine, although it’s a little slow on load – fine on file open after it’s loaded. Photoshop plugins work fine.
– Developer Transition Kit
– 3.6 GHz Pentium 4
– OS X for Intel 10.4.1
– Xcode 2.1
– Universal Binary Porting Guide
– Development platform only, NOT A PRODUCT
– Have to return by end of 2006
– Select and Premier ADC members only
– ***$999***
– Shipping in two weeks
– From Microsoft: Roz Ho, General Manager of MBU
– Not a great speaker.
– Final touches on updates for Exchange users
– Releasing a new version of MSN Messanger in the next few months
– Team has been working closely with Apple on the Intel thing
– Planning on releasing universal binaries
– No actual solid announcement, just “looking forward to working together into the future”.
– From Adobe: Bruce Chizen, CEO
– “Absolutely committed to putting apps running natively on new Intel boxes.”
– “We will be the first with this transition, as we were for OS X.”
– “Found something pretty amazing: They’re kind of like us.”
– Paul Otellini, President and CEO of Intel
– “We are so excited at Intel to have been given the opportunity to work with Apple to bring you really great products.”
– The story:
– Intel founded in 1968 in Mountain View.
– 1976, Apple founded 5 miles away.
– Bob and Andy Grove were early investors in Apple.
– 1976, Apple went with MOS, IBM went with Intel.
– 1993, Apple goes with PPC, Intel launches Pentium.
– 1996, Apple sets fire to Intel’s bunny man.
– Shows commerical just for kicks, much cheering.
– 2005, “The most innovative computer company and the world’s most innovative chip company finally team up.” Big applause.
Where does this leave us?
– Apple is strong.
– Mac is strong.
– Great time to start building for the future.
– We know transitions.
– We’re getting ready.
– Time for you to get ready, too.
– 90+ of the sessions include content about Universal versions.
– 100+ dev transition systems in 7 labs this week.
– “Soul of the Mac is it’s operating system, and we’re not standing still.”