Read the rest for my notes, to the best of my 'typing while listening' skills. I have lots of photos and video that I'll try to upload a bit later today, after I get back to the hotel room -- not sure how good they are, but we'll see!
Keynote notes:
- Apple Retail: 101 stores around the world. Hosting over 1,000,000 visitors per week. London is the newest store; in its first quarter, it became the second highest grossing store in the world.
- iMac Update: Launched in September. Various quotes from media, including "5 out of 5" in PC Magazine. Is now the most popular Mac, after only one quarter.
- Mac OS X: Panther is the most successful OS release ever. 12,000 applications; over 14 million active users. Tiger is next. On schedule for first half shipment. 200 new features. Better Windows client; rehash many other already public features (Spotlight, Automater, Safari RSS, etc.).
Spotlight updates live as the OS changes. Spotlight demo -- very impressive speed, sorting, image finding, etc. Spotlight demo crashed on slideshow; switched to backup system, instantly. The Finder has smart folders -- a folder of "Presentations," or "View this week." Spotlight view is one of the Finder views. New iTunes album artwork screensaver; makes screensavers from your iTunes covers.
Mail: No more drawer. You can search via Spotlight in Mail. Built-in slideshow viewer for email-received images. Support for Smart Mailboxes -- just like iTunes smart folders. Add to iPhoto button right from slideshow.
QuickTime 7: Most major upgrade in last decade. Current release of QT has been downloaded 330,000,000 times. Full HD playback, 24 channel surround, H.264 new video compression codec. Demoed a movie, scaling on the fly, onscreen controls. The movie demo was "House of Flying Daggers." Looked incredible.
Dashboard: Calculator, Address Book, Calendar, Stickies, iTunes Control, Clock, Converter, Dictionary/Thesaurus, Stock Tracker, Flight Tracker, Translation, Yellow Pages, Weather. Lots of very cool new widgets! Widgets now pop-up below the dock when you wish to add one to your collection. Very cool interface, hard to describe -- screen 'slides up' to make room for the list of widgets. Widgets then "splash" onto the screen. The unit converter looks very useful -- MPH to KMH, currency, etc. The weather tracker includes animated weather indicators - rain, wind, snow, etc.
iChat: Up to 10 simultaneous audio chats. Up to four people in a video chat with H264. Live demo with four people -- Paris, and two here, I think. Amazing (I shot a video that will be uplaoded later). - High Definition (HD) video: 2005 will be the year of high definition video. Final Cut Pro HD already in use everywhere. Introducing Final Cut Express HD -- adds HD editing, Live Type titling, Soundtrack, seamless integrate with iMovie, integrates with Motion. Priced at $299, available in February, upgrade price $99.
- iLife: iLife '04 has been a huge hit. Introducing iLife 05, completely new version -- most apps have major upgrades. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iTunes.
iPhoto: What's new: Better organizing & searching, more formats, more powerful editing, advanced slideshows, new books and designs, easier to use. Folders have been added, better keywords, added calendar view - find by month, week day, adds MPEG4 movie support, supports RAW completely throughout app; editing adds multi-picture editing view a toolbar of images, editing dashboard for brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sharpness, straighten, histogram, exposure. It's a dashboard that lays over the images, so you can see and edit at once. Advanced slide shows let you set different transitions per photo, Ken Burns effect on images, and new books. Calendar searching is amazingly powerful: double-click a month to see the weeks, days with photos are boldfaced; click to see that day's photos. New slideshow mode makes some amazingly nice slideshows.
New Make Book button shows a book chooser with themes, sizes. Very very nice looking designs. Books have double-sided printing; very easy to move photos from page to page; auto-layout makes things fit. Can enter edit mode from book creation mode to fix images as you build the book. Printed slide prices are being cut in half. More types of books: hardcover 11x8.5 (current), softcover 11x8.5, softcover 8x6, pocketbook 3.5x2.6. All at least 20 pages ($3.99, $9.99, $19.99, and $29.99!). Available worldwide on day one!
iMovie: Dramatically faster, non-destructive trimming, more transitions & effects, MPEG-4 video editing, Magic iMovie - turn a camcorder into a movie with transitions, titles, etc -- automatically! The biggest feature is HD support in iMovie. HD editing works same as normal editing, but with HD stuff. Demoed an HD iMovie -- quality is stunning. One possible downside for now is that consumer HD cameras are still very expensive. Steve brings this up -- shows the new Sony prosumer HD camera and says it's "only" $3,499! Yikes! Brings up the President of Sony, Kunitake Ando, to talk about the camera and HD video! He jokes that Steve has told him he likes Sony products -- not "all of them, but most of them." He states that Sony will continue to make HD cameras smaller, lighter, and cheaper. As a side note, he's sitting basically right in front of me.
iDVD: 15 new themes, including animated drop zones, one step DVD creation, and supports all DVD formats. Animated drop zones are movies in moving/sizing boxes, etc. I'll upload a video later showing some; they really are spectacular.
GarageBand: Adding a Jam Pack for orchestral instruments. New features: up to 8-track recording, real-time music notation, pitch & timing fixing, recorded tracks are now as flexible as software instruments and loops, create your own loops, and a vocal transformer.
To help show features, John Mayer has come back again. Played some piano, showed notes being added in real time. Did a four-track live demo recording, two guitars, lead vocal, and harmony vocal. Played back recording, turning tracks on and off.
No update to iTunes; just the 'latest version.' Talks about the integration of the suite. Priced at $79, goes on sale on January 22nd, free with all new Macs. - iWork: Building the successor to AppleWorks. Talks about AW lack of OS X integration, lack of iLife integration. Two applications: Keynote 2 is the first. Ten new Apple themes, animated text, powerful animated builds, presenter display, interactive slideshows, self-playing kiosk slideshows. Presenter display shows notes, timers, next slide, etc. New themes include Hard Cover, Watercolor, Scrapbook, and more. Animation demo shows a slide built with one click. Can also now output to Flash, improved PDF output.
Other application is called Pages. Word processing with an incredible sense of style. Includes 40 Apple-designed templates, with multiple page layouts within each template. Looks like brochures in a snap. Multi-columned, photos, varying layouts of images, all the design is done. You add text and photos to finish, and can further customize if you wish. Pages takes care of font sizing, color, etc. A media button gives you an iPhoto library for browsing. Pages resizes, rotates, and places images in the placeholders. Includes alpha-channel transparency. Move images around, and text reflows; alignment guides like Keynote, live resizing of images, etc. You can have very unique looks for each page within a template, yet they all are visually tied together. Add charts, photos, text., and Pages works on all the sizing issues. Changing from one to two columns resizes everything on the page - charts, images, text, etc. Wow. Very wow. Hard to describe how simple it is. Keynote's designers wrote Pages. Compatible with Word, AppleWorks, and PDF.
iWork will be $79, available January 22nd. - Mac mini: A new member of the Mac family. Very small, like a flattened cube. Slot loading optical drive. Quiet. FW, USB2, Ethernet, DVI/VGA, Modem, slot-loading drive. This thing is tiny! Wow. BYODKM - Bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse. Will drive a 20" cinema display. Or "any" keyboard, mouse, and display. Comes wiith OS X 10.3 and iLife '05. Wants to price for switchers. $499 for 1.25GHz G4, $599 for 1.42GHz, available January 22nd.
- iTunes update: iTunes has now sold 230,000,000 songs to date. Now at the rate of 1.25 million songs a day, 500,000,000 songs per year! iTunes has 70% share of the market. Now in 15% countries with 70% of the global market. iTunes Essentials has been re-done, making it easier to find new kinds of music by artist, albums, time periods, etc.
- iPod: iPod and iPod Mini are the current family members. in 2003, the holiday quarter sold 733,000 iPods. In the 2004 holiday quarter, they sold 4,500,000 iPods!! Over 10,000,000 iPods have been sold, and over 8 million of those were sold in 2004. 10 millionth iPod was made on December 16th, 2004.
Cars: People want iPods in their cars. Apple is working on them with Version 2. Other companies are going to join in. These include Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo, Scion. In Europe, Alfa and Ferrari will be rolling them out.
Cell phones: Working with Motorola, Apple put iTunes on their new cellphones. Out Spring 2005. - One More Thing: One year ago, iPod was 31% of all MP3 players. Then introduced Mini; iPod is now 65% of all players sold -- Flash went from 62% to 29%. So what's next? They want the other 29%. Competition has no wheel, small screen, tortured user interface. Apple doesn't want to make one of those; they want something different. Easier to use than an existing iPod. So they got rid of choices, and based it on shuffle: The iPod Shuffle. Smaller than most packs of gum. Weighs under an ounce. Play/pause button, volume up/down, previous/next song. Glowing LED above the controller. Shuffle play or playlist mode, set via a switch on the back. Remove the cap at the bottom, USB2 plug for fast transfer. 12 hour rechargeable battery. PC and Mac compatible. Turn it upside doown, and you can attach it to a lanyard around your neck.
iTunes has a new "autofill" button that will browse your library by your criteria, and then build a playlist to fill the iPod Shuffle. Also use it as a USB disk drive, set via the preferences -- choose the ratio of disk space to songs.
Competition: $149 for 256MB of data. The iPod Shuffle will come in two models: 512MB for 120 songs for $99, 1gb for 240 songs for $149. Shipping out of the factory today.
Accesorize your iPod shuffle; Apple introduces a few: armband, dock, sports case (semi waterproof), battery extender for 20 hours of more time. All priced at $29 each, rolling out in the next four weeks.
-rob.

