Just walked out of Jobs’ MacWorld keynote. As always, if you let the rumor sites get you too cranked up, you end up disappointed. No home entertainment digital hub centerpiece, no x86 processors. But what did emerge was still way cool. Apple releases their own browser, Safari – now the fastest and cleanest browser on the Mac. “Keynote” is Apple’s new presentation software. Final Cut Express is a slimmed down version of FCP. Updates to iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, now all integrated with each other under the name iLife. Two new aircraft aluminum (not Titanium) PowerBooks, in 17″ and 12″, with all the Wi-Fi receptivity issues ironed out, and FireWire 800. Read More for my raw notes, blogged from the Speaker Center at MacWorld.
Barely edited notes:
Being webcast in the largest mp4 stream ever. Already 150,000 streams connected.
UPDATES
Switchers: 7.8million visitors to switch site, 68% running windows, ie 5million win users checked out Switch campaign online.
Retail stores – 51 stores, $148 million – 50% of sales to switchers.
290,000 copies of Jag sent to teachers – X for Teachers, extended to March 31.
iCal, iSync : icalshare.com has 750 calendars you can subscribe to. Even has a sherlock channel.
.Mac – “a bit of noise” about charging for it. Now 250k paying subscribers.
iPod – 600,000 sold in 14 months. 42% of MP3 player marketshare in Japan.
New accessory for iPods – Burton jacket with built in iPod pouch. Controls built into the sleeve. (“Softswitch”). $499.
Now 5 million active users of OS X. 5,000 apps. Office X is at the top of the heap. QuickBooks now shipping.
ProTools for OS X shipping this month.
Final Cut Express
FCP3 – #1 Pro video application as measured by units sold. Now releasing Final Cut Express – Same as FCP – a few features. “FCP Express” Projects can be moved back and forth between iMovie and FCE. Real time effects and transitions (what are the limitations to this?). Real-time drag-on color correction. $299
No more booting into 9. “All eggs are in the X basket.”
iLife
People want to use photos in slide shows and movies, want to use music in their movies and photo slide shows, etc. It all needs to tie together. “We’re going to do for the digital lifestyle what Office did for productivity.”
Hidden features in iTunes 3 that will spring to life now.
iPhoto 2 is integrated with iTunes to grab songs. One-click enhance to fix less than perfect pictures. Archive to CD and DVD. Each album can have its own miusic for slideshow. To make an iDVD – photos are transferred over. One-button enhance – very nice. Retouch – subtle and works well, but a great tool for lieing. “Junior never had freckles, or zits.” In the before/after, I liked most of the Before images better.
iMovie 3 – fully integrated with iTunes audio, iDVD. Now has “Chapters” which are automatically picked up by iDVD. Now has the “Ken Burns Effect”. Adds “precise audio editing.” New UI. iTunes library available from iMovie UI. Movie sound effects from Skywalker Sound – big library. Audio editing: Volume envelopes! iPhoto library photos are available from UI. Pick a start and finish point and duration and you get your ken burns effect. Chapter makers – add marker and it’s carried over to iDVD. Scene secelection menu built automatically.
iDVD3 out today. 24 new themes and they really are excellent. DVD blanks lowered to $3.
The whole suite is now called iLife, available Sat. Jan 25, bundled with all new Macs. Free download of iTunes, iPhoto 2, iMovie 3. iDVD is still for sale – $49 for all of iLife.
Safari
Safari – turbo browser for OS X. Why? Speed. Fastest browser on the Mac. iBench tests – IE, Netscape, Chimera, Safari on 800MHz. IE – 53.7 NS 33.6, Chim, 21.8, Safari – 16.6 seconds! Javascript test: Safari 2x faster than IE on Mac. Load times 40% faster.
Innovations: Google search built in. SnapBack takes you right back to the top of search results. New way of doing bookmarks – no one was using them. The bookmarks bar – add a site to the bar – sheet pops down and asks if you want to rename it – very clean. Awesome bookmark manager. The iPhoto manager works perfectly for bookmark management. Every web site in your address book is added here. History is here. SnapBack takes you back to the origin of your search results. SnapBack is both in the search bar and in the URL bar. 1/2 the code in safari is open source (based on KHTML). All Apple improvements will be posted to open source community. Beta release today.
Keynote
Built for Steve Jobs. Used in every macworld keynote in 2002. Hah. Expandible / collapsible slide outlining. Text, graphics, compositing. Fully anti-aliased text at any size. Alignment guides. Full Quartz graphics – full alpha transparency. Scaling, rotation. Opacity sliders for layers. Dissolve and other transitions. Supports almost all graphics formats – PSD, Flash, Illustrator, PNG, etc. Tables and charts: 100 images in library. Nice layering of tables with images. Built tables by moving column, Picture behind. Charts – pushbutton. Themes: Very nice picture cut-outs. Chalk text in the blackboard effect. Letterpress – classy not stuffy. Transitions – iMovie style transitions in Keynote – x-dissolve, push, wipe, pivot, bounche, spin. All transitions go through Quartz graphics and the 3D OpenGL pipleine – 3D mosacis, flip with perspective, map to cube surfaces. Compatibility: Imports and exports PowerPoint. Exports PDF and QuickTime. All open XML format. So a prez could be built with live stats pulled out of a database. $99, available now.
PowerBooks
PowerBook being stepped up to 17″!!! Same display from the 17″ iMac. Still only 1″ thick. Thinner than current PowerBook. 1440×900 display. 16:10 aspect ratio. Photoshop with all palettes up. FCP with all palettes open. Body is aircraft alumninum with illunimated keyes in the dark. Ambient light sensors detect when the light goes down! 6.8 lbs. Most competitors at 15″ are up to 10lbs. Not titanium – aircraft grade alumninum alloy. Hard anodized, not painted. 1GHz with 1MB L3 cache. SuperDrive GeForce 440 Go. 512MBs, 60GB. w/ 64MBs VRAM. 4.5 hours battery. FireWire 800 – 2x FireWire. With adapater it can go back. Gigabit ethernet. USB on either side. PC card slot, line in. Bluetooth built in. $3299, February.
Also a 12″ PowerBook – smallest powerbook ever. Very cute. Smaller than iBook in every dimension. 1024×768. 867MHz. 5hrs battery. $1799 or $1999 w/SuperDrive.
Excellent TV ads for big and small.
AirPort Extreme
Apple going past 11MBs. Now to 54Mbs with AirPort Extreme — 802.11g. g is fast like a, but is backwards compatible with b. New card is built in. Antennas in the screen (2). Range is equal to the iBook.
50 users on the new base station. Wireless bridging in the base station – automatic. USB port on base station. Share a USB printer across the whole wireless network. $199!!!
The shitty thing is that iDVD STILL requires a Superdrive, which means that I can’t use it.
Where does it say that iDVD requires a SuperDrive? A “SuperDrive” is just a Pioneer DVD-R drive anyway. What I want to know is will iDVD 3 support external DVD-R drives? If it does, I’m the first in line to buy it! ;)
Scot, in your report you mentioned that “No home entertainment digital hub centerpiece” was announced. If you check the Rendezvous page, you can find something that I find even more exciting than a Apple entertainment device: TIVO support for Rendezvous! Put a Tivo on a Rendezvous network and you can browse all your photo albums and access your music collection!! I am a die-hard Tivo addict and this was one of the most exciting announcements of the day for me! :)
Apple also released the public beta of their X11 display server. http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/
All in all, this MWSF rocked! I can’t wait to play with the net iApps and see a 17″ Powerbook in person @ our local Apple retail store.
oops. that should have been “new iApps” instead of “net iApps”.
oh, btw, how did your Web Development session go?
Where does it say that iDVD requires a SuperDrive? A “SuperDrive” is just a Pioneer DVD-R drive anyway.
here.
Your site looks pretty good with Safari. :)
Sean, what kind of Mac do you have? If it’s a tower, you can install an after-market Pioneer drive and iDVD will recognize it as a valid DVD burner.
Or, are you hoping that it will support external burners via Firewire? That’s the boat I’m in. Although it’s possible to replace my eMac CDRW with a DVDR, it will void my warranty and I’d rather not go that route if I don’t have to.
I guess it’s always possible Apple will release external Superdrives of their own and allow those to be used by iDVD.
Sean, that sucks. I also think it stinks that iPhoto’s biggest limitation – limited library size – has not been addressed. An Apple employee told me today that libraries of 2000 photos were possible, but ours bogged down at 900, even with 1GB of RAM. This basically puts iPhoto in the “toy” category. Time to apply some pressure.
Javahead, thanks for the headsup on those (X11 and Tivo/Rendezvous). Odd that Steve didn’t mention either of those during the keynote.
I have a Quicksilver Powermac G4… I have a Cendyne DVD-R… I’m not going to buy another DVD-R just because Apple can’t pull their shit together.
Although, allegedly, Cendyne makes Pioneer’s drives, so it would probably work anyway. I just want to see it documented somewhere before I waste $50.
Javahead, thanks for asking – the session went great. Nobody appeared to fall asleep at their desks, and people thanked me later, so I *think* it went well. I’d like to have more involvement in the future.
As a intermediate Unix/Linux gearhead with a (not so) secret desire for a Mac OSX box, I was more excited about the Apple-supplied X server than anything else ;) I suspect I can now “switch” from both WinXP and Linux w/o losing anything I care about. Well, OK – anything except mega dollars. Man, that Apple gear is still expensive ;)
I was also intrigued by the 12″ Powerbook. It seems like an iBook done right. As long as the LCD panel is of decent quality, 1024×768 on a 12″ screen should be workable – even for middle aged eyes like mine.
David, exactly right. OS X is all you need. Throw away your Linux and your Windows. Yep, it’s more expensive hardware. Mercedes are more expensive than Toyotas too. Just go for it ;)
David, you can run OSX happily on less than state of the art hardware, too. If I were shopping now, I’d be looking for whatever the lowest level G4 with AGP was. Possibly a cube? There are 1GHZ cpu upgrades and video accelerators for them, if I didn’t have my souped up G3 B&W chugging along next to me, I’d be looking at one of those. Maybe. Although I am still a SCSI bigot, so I like having PCI slots to put Adaptec cards in…