Mac news from outside the reality distortion field
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June 9, 2008, 8:27 pm

Video on demand: Steve Jobs’ iPhone 3G keynote

For those who couldn’t be there, Apple (AAPL) has posted the video of the keynote address in its entirety.

Available here in QuickTime and MPEG-4.

For our coverage of the event, click here.

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June 9, 2008, 8:59 am

Live blog: Steve Jobs at Apple’s 2008 WWDC

The following is a live blog from Steve Jobs’ keynote from the great hall at Moscone West. It started just after 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) and ended at 11:50 a.m. PT. Apple’s press release is now available here; you can watch the event in QuickTime or MPEG-4 here.

The posts that follow are in reverse-chronological order, most recent first.

11:45 a.m. Wrapping it up. Steve Jobs just announced the big news: a price point of $199 for the 8 GB iPhone 3G and $299 for 16 GB iPhone 3G

The 8 GB is available only in black.The 16GB model also comes in white.

Will be rolling out in 22 countries on July 11. The price is max of $199 all around the world. New ad. Plays it twice. Introduces team. Tells the developers to go make some great products. And it’s over. 11:50 am PT

11:34: Jobs has just introduced the iPhone 3G and is demoing how much faster it is. People laughing at how long it’s taking to download a photo on Edge: 59 seconds vs. 21 seconds for 3G.

36% faster than Nokia.

Comparing to Wi-Fi. 17 seconds on Wi-Fi. (Which Wi-Fi, we wonder?)

3.6 times faster than EDGE on map downloading.

Great battery life he says. 300 hours standby time. 2G talk time 8 to 10 hours. 3G talk time: 5 hours.

Browsing: 5 to 6 hours of hight speed browsing

Video: 7 hours.

Audio: 24 hours.

GPS built in. BIG APPLAUSE.

Also data from cell towers and WiFi and now GPS too. Using GPS can do tracking. Demo driving down Lombard street (recorded earlier), tracking as you move. Little blue dot wiggling down the twisty street.

Third party: you saw the great apps.

More countries; we distribute in 6 countries today. We set goal to 12 or maybe 25. Colors in map in Apple red to the tune of “It’s A Small World After All.” African countries one by one. This could take awhile. Seventy countries over the next several months. Next time you’re in Malta…

More affordable: $199 for iPhone 3G 8 GB.

11:28: Steve Jobs is back. Now I’m going to talk about the iPhone. In a few weeks, the first birthday. Photos of launch. Time magazine cover. “This is the phone that has changed phones forever.” What makes us happiest is that users love their iPhones. 90% customer satisfaction. 98% are mobile browsing, from nothing. 94% e-mail. 90% text messaging. 80% using 10 features or more.

We have sold 6 million iPhones so far. Until we ran out a few weeks ago.

Next challenges.

First: 3G network.

Second: Enterprise support

Third: Third-party software

Fourth: More countries.

Five: More affordable.

Today We’re introducing the iPhone 3G.

11:22 Schiller demo of MobileMe on an iPhone. Push e-mail. Invitation to lunch. Restaurant. Map. Menu. Save as contact. Pushed to MobileMe. Contact is already on MobileMe. Moves dates. Pushes them through the cloud back and forth to Mac and iPhone. Photos sent through the cloud. Applause. So that’s MobileMe. Terrible name, but seems pretty cool. Service available for $99 a year with 20 gigabytes on memory (same price as .Mac, but twice the memory). It replaces .Mac. Available in July. You keep your .mac addresses. (Phew)

11:18 Demo of MobileMe on a Mac. He’s very excited that a desktop-like app can work as a Web 2.0 app, as if Google apps didn’t exist. Perhaps its faster and more responsive and better integrated, but we won’t know until we do it hands on. Embedded Google map built into address book is cool. Move meeting around. Skims really quickly through photos. Resizing is also pretty fast. iDisk works like before, as near as I can tell. One button log out.

11:14: Phil Schiller. Mobile Me. “Exchange for the rest of us.” We can all get push e-mail, contacts and calendars right to our devices. Stores your info in the cloud. Can get to it on any device: Mac, PC, iPhone. Keeps everything up to date all the time. E-mail gets pushed to all devices. Meeting change gets uploaded and pushed to all devices. If a contact changes, see it immediately. (What Exchange does already.)

Works with Mail, iCal, Address book. Also works with Microsoft Outlook. Built a suite of Web 2.0 apps to give desktop experience on the web.

Get e-mail experience that feels like desktop Mail. Navigation tools on top left. Contacts. Calendar. Gallery. Send to Mobile Me is a button on iPhone. Send photo to Gallery. Docs as well. Goes to demo.

11:13 Jobs: Something entirely new called MobileMe (the rumors were right about the name). Introduces Phil Schiller.

11:12: Jobs on third way to add apps. Called Ad Hoc. For, say, a professor and his students. Can get certified for up to 100 iPhones. The users download and sync through iTunes. Total three ways to distribute apps: Enterprise, App Store, Ad Hoc.

11:04: Steve Jobs back on the stage. New features: Contact search. Full iWorks document support. Also all of MS Office (added Powerpoint to Word and Excel). Also bulk delete and move. Also save images to library. Added scientific calculator (just turn to landscape mode). Added parental controls. “Some teenagers might not like this, but that’s the way it has to be.” Added many languages. Two forms of entry for Japanese. Also two for Chinese, one where you draw the character with your finger. You can switch between all the languages on the fly. “Better than having a lot of plastic keys on your keyboard.”

Apple 2.0 free software update in early July (groans) and got price down to $9.95 for iPhone touch owners.

App Store. Unveiled in March. All iPhones. Wirelessly download. Automatic notification of update. 10 MB or less can download on cellular, WiFi or through iTunes store. (He never says when the App Store launches.)

Enterprises want another way to distribute apps so they work only on their phones. (Scattered applause from IT guys).

10:59: Scott Forestall summing up after all the demos. One feature request not currently in the SDK. Instant messaging client wants to alert you to a message when the client isn’t running. Can’t let it to run in the background, firstly because of battery life issues. Second: performance turns sluggish. Samsung uses a task manager. Big laugh at how complicated it looks. (Although we use the same thing on a Mac when it slows down.) Better solution: provide a push notification service to all developers. (Big applause.) Maintains a persistent IP notification through Apple. 3 types: badges (i.e. how many messages waiting), alert sounds, custom text alerts (like a SMS). It scales to many 3rd party services, but only one connection to the phone. Preserves battery life. Maintains performance. All works over the air. WiFi and cellular network. Available in September, but being seeded next month. Applause.

10:57: Last demo (phew): Digital Legends Entertainment. From Spain, just started developing two weeks ago, if you can believe that. A veteran game developer, new to platform. Ported game called Crawl (?) that is a 3-D game with caves, monsters, giants, etc. Expected to be ready by September.

10:54: MIMvista. Another medical app. Is this a theme? Moving through a CT scan and a PET scan combined with two fingers. It’s like looking into a body in real time. Zoom with pinch and double tap. Scroll through slices. Change contrast or level. Measurement tool lets you measure, say, size of a tumor. Remove with a shake. (applause). Movie: change color and twirling a body that doctors could review with patient. Look for at launch of App Store. No price given.

10:51: Modality for med students to learn anatomy. Using medical illustrations to create electronic flash cards. Zoom into a heart. Unintended laugh when he says “imagine doing this on any other mobile device.” Quotes student who said he learned 5 new brain terms while waiting in line for his latte. Going to K-12. Dozens of apps ble at launch. No price given.

10:48: MLB.com. Official website for Major League Baseball. New app called @bat. All games. Live ones on top. Tie score in Yankee game. Updates all the time. Added real time video highlights. Pretty impressive video, shown “minutes” after it happens on the field. “On Wi-Fi or EDGE.” Hmm. No mention of 3G by anyone yet. No price given, but MLB is usually a subscription service.

10:45: Cow Music. Solo developer from British insurance industry who did this in his spare time. Mark Terry. App called Band. Creating music on iPhone. Piano. Drum. 12-bar blues in one interface. Big applause! Bass guitar. Whoops and claps. A few weeks time. No price given.

10:41: Pangea Software. Ported two games from Mac OS X to the iPhone. First: Inigmo (spelling?) Control droplets of water through 50 levels. Force fields, switches, etc. Hundreds of droplets bouncing like ping pong balls. Second: Cro-Mag Rally. Cave man racing game. Demos glaciers. 10 cars and 1 sub to choose from. Took 3 days to get each game up and running, or at least playable. The iPhone is the steering wheel. Turn iPhone left, the car goes left. 5-10 minutes to add in accelerometer steering. $9.99 each at launch.

10:39: Associated Press. Shows an update of the AP Mobile News Network it launched in May. Using new GPS chip, filters news based on your location. Encourage users to send photos from their iPhones directly to the AP (!).

10:36: Next up: TypePad. Largest professional blogging platform. Creates a post, blog the moment with a photo, or blog a photo from yesterday. Browses photo album, picks a photo, scales, chooses pix, chooses which of his several blogs, chooses categories, adds a bit of commentary, and finally, publishes. Free at launch of Apps Store. (Could this be leading to Steve Jobs announcement when it’s going to open?)

10:33 Next up: Loopt. Where you are, where your friends are. Little yellow pin shows you where you are, blue shows you where your friends are. Pinching, dragging, tapping. Sees a friend a few blocks away. Can see what she’s doing. Her pix, her messages. Messages her to see if she’s free. Can give directions in one click. Location plus contact list plus information about local places means you never have to eat lunch alone again. Free when Apps Store launches.

10:30: Next up: eBay. Auctions on the iPhone, now the No. 1 mobile device on eBay. Home page shows what you are winning and losing. Touch on item, bring up details. Enters a bid. $180 for a Canon camera. Back in the lead! Next, a $12 million house in Mexico. Nice photos on golf course. He chickens out. Ebay app available for free when the Apps store goes live.

10:27: Forestall is about to bring developers to the stage to demo stuff they’ve done in 3 months with the SDK. First up: Sega with Super Monkey Ball. All four of the classic Monkeys! (The crowd giggles.) Showing how the tilt control keeps up with the player’s moves. Applause when he makes the first goal. Price: $9.99 on the Apps Store. Applause.

10:26: Forestall is quoting from developers who have used the platform and the press, e.g. David Pogue of The New York Times, who hasn’t.

10:22: Forestall is done. He’s built an application that searches for names within a certain distance in his address book on an iPhone simulator. It’s pretty impressive, but as I recall he gave this same demo three months ago. Oh, he’s taking it one step further: compiling the code so that it actually runs on an iPhone, although he doesn’t show that step.

10:19: Scott Forestall is going into an SDK demo. A lot of very tiny code on the screen. Some of the language is quite evocative. Like the “controller glue” and the “cocoa touch controls.”

10:18: As far as I can tell, this was all announced months ago.

10:15. Video over. Next up, the SDK. Brings up Scott Forestall. The APIs. The framework. The kernel. Cocoa Touch. The core services layer. It’s all the same stuff the Apple programmers have in house. This means a lot to the developers. This is what they were hoping to get exactly one year ago. Instead Jobs gave them a Web development kit that satisfied no one.

10:11: He’s rolling a video of people praising the enterprise features of Apple 2.0. The Army guy gets a big laugh when he says his enterprise is like any other except people shoot at his.

10:10: Steve Jobs is starting with a general overview of Apple 2.0 software. So far, this is all a recap of the stuff he laid out at the SDK announcement.

10:07 A peek at Snow Leopard coming after lunch.

10:06: Record 5,200 attendees. 147 sessions. 85 on the Mac, 62 on the iPhone. 169 hands-on labs, 1,000 engineers on hand.

10:06: Steve Jobs runs up the stairs.

10:01: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Turn off cellphone announcement

9:59: Air thick with anticipation and reality distortion. Almost constant flashes, like a ballpark before a record is about to be broken, as people take pictures of the empty stage.

9:55: A rush of warm bodies as they fill the empty VIP seats with general admission. There are at least two overflow rooms for people who can’t get seats in the main hall.

9:41: We’re in.The huge room is as cold as a refrigerator. According to one green-shirted usher, it holds slightly more than 2,000 people. According to another, it holds 2,800. The press and general admission section filled up quickly. There are still empty seats in VIP.

9:40: The doors are open.

9:35: Buttonhole Walt Mossberg of The Wall St. Journal. “Do you have one yet?” we ask him.

He cups his ear as if hard of hearing: “What? I can’t hear you.”

I repeat the question. He repeats the same pantomime. That is code for, “yes I have been given a 3G iPhone for review, but I am under nondisclosure and can’t talk about it.” Or maybe he’s just trying to leave that impression.

9:20: Leaving the comfort of free Apple Wi-Fi and getting in line. Fingers crossed.

9:00: A lot of preening and displays of feathers among the tech press. They have a whole hour with nothing to do but talk to each other. This is probably not a good thing.

8:48: News flash from the outside world: The Apple Store has posted the yellow “We’ll be back soon” sign that signals the imminent release of new product.

8:45: A bomb-sniffing dog has arrived. She’s a German shepherd and like all bomb-sniffing dogs I’ve met, she’s very well behaved. Her name is Yana.

8:40: On the third floor, where the filthy press are being plied with croissants and fruit juices, there are lots of Wi-Fi antennas and not enough power outlets. I’ve parked under a column and plugged in. We’re live again.

8:22: Apple staffers in green t-shirts gather in a corner like a school of tiny coral fish hiding from the barracuda.

8:20: Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!

8:15: Registration painless. Developers march by in phalanxes, munching on sticky buns as they are transported from breakfast on the first floor to the developer holding area on the second.

8:10: We’re in. A lot of Japanese journalists with heavy video equipment lined up early.

7:54: VZAccess is misbehaving badly, and we haven’t even entered Moscone. This could be tricky.

7:20: The press are being kept at bay until 8:00 a.m. It’s probably just as well.

7:15: The doors have opened for registration and Apple staffers are tossing black T-shirts to the faithful as they file in.

7:00 a.m. PT: The doors haven’t opened yet and there’s already a queue that stretches around the block and out of sight.

Old links, soon to be outdated:

The editors at USA Today, we notice, haven’t waited for the actual event to put it in the past tense. Their Monday morning, pre-keynote headline: “It’s presto, change-o as new iPhone is unveiled

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June 6, 2008, 3:26 pm

What’s Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?

The World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) that opens Monday morning in San Francisco would be a relatively obscure technical gathering of programmers and IT administrators - with sessions on “Advances in OpenGL” and “What’s New in Objective-C” - were it not for one thing.

Steve Jobs.

The keynote address that Apple’s CEO is scheduled to give starting at 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm ET) is perhaps the second most closely watched event in high tech - after the opening speech Jobs gives every January at Macworld.

In the audience at Moscone West’s main hall will be - in addition to thousands of developers (WWDC sold out for the first time this year) - hundreds of reporters, photographers, TV crews, venture capitalists, CEOs and maybe even a few celebrities from Hollywood and the music world.

What’s Jobs going to talk about? To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns and known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we think we know he’s going to say, and things we know we don’t know. Here’s a rundown:

3G iPhone. Except for a few short sellers on Wall Street, everybody who follows Apple assumes that Jobs will introduce a new iPhone that can send and receive data at so-called third-generation speeds. (In fact, so widespread is this belief that if Jobs doesn’t show up with the thing on Monday, Apple’s (AAPL) shares will get hammered before he leaves the stage.) Almost everything else about iPhone 2.0 are matters of little hard information and intense speculation. Is it thicker or thinner than version 1.0? Will it have a built-in GPS chip so it always knows where it’s at? Will its price be subsidized by AT&T and the overseas carriers? Will it go on sale next week or sometime later? If these questions weren’t still in play, there would be almost nothing to talk about next week.

The SDK. We know Jobs is going to spend some time discussing the so-called software development kit for the iPhone. We know because that’s one of the two main themes of the conference (symbolized by the bizarre image of two Golden Gate Bridges that decorated the e-mail invitation). The other theme is the Macintosh operating system; presumably the two are merging somewhere in Marin County, judging by the doctored photograph. The SDK will finally give third party developers access to the platform Apple has managed to build, as Jupiter Research’s Michael Gartenberg notes, without them. There’s a flood of new software for the iPhone and iPod touch ready for release soon as Apple gives the word - including programs that will allow IT departments, should they be so inclined, to integrate the iPhone into their enterprises the way Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry is today.

.Mac. Even Jobs agrees that Apple’s $99-a-year suite of Internet services (Mail, Backup, iSync, iDisk, etc.) needs an overhaul, if only to match the online applications that Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) now offer for free. By tracking crumbs of information scattered in recent Apple software releases, some observers believe Jobs is set to replace .Mac with something called Mobile Me, or just plain .Me. Probably the single most effective thing Apple could do improve .Mac would be to emulate Google and give it away.

Another iPhone. Speculation that Jobs would introduce a so-called iPhone nano - a smaller iPhone at a more affordable price - has faded; the smart money has pushed this back to next January. However, as American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu points out, there are good reasons to suspect that Apple will keep the first generation iPhone around, if only to have something to sell in those parts of Latin America - and parts of North America, for that matter - where where 3G coverage is spotty or nonexistent.

New MacBooks. Two weeks ago, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster put the odds of Apple introducing redesigned Mac portables next week at 60%. The other odds he gave - 80% by the end of summer - now seem more like it.

New Touchscreen device. Wu in report to clients this week said he’s learned that work on larger, 4-inch and 7-inch multitouch devices has “gone beyond the prototype stage” at Apple. He goes out on a limb and gives 50-50 odds that one will be introduced at WWDC next week.

Those are the key themes, but there’s plenty more to speculate about. If you want to dig deeper - in a suitably interactive way - come to WWDC with a copy of the 2008 edition of John Siracusa’s Keynote Bingo card, pasted below the fold. The rules are laid out in detail at Ars Technica here, but they’re pretty straightforward: put a token over a square if Jobs mentions the topic or says the word or introduces the speaker during the keynote. Cover five squares in an a row, and you get to stand up and shout Bingo!

Nobody’s won the game yet. This could be the year.

[Moscone West photo courtesy of MacNN.]

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June 3, 2008, 11:21 am

If .Mac is down, could .Me be far behind?

Apple’s mail service was offline for about five and a half hours Monday night, and a lot of people got very excited.

“.Mac mail down, speculations abound” read the headline on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

“.Mac outage sparks fresh re-brand rumour” echoed 9to5Mac.

Why the excitement? Because everybody who follows Apple believes that an overhaul of the company’s aging Internet services bundle is imminent. And indeed, one regular at Investor Village reported later that night that a “buddy at Apple” told him that the outage was related to “major server work” and not the irritatingly regular scheduled maintenance.

It’s been more than a year since Steve Jobs, gently rebuked at D5 by the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg for how little Apple (AAPL) has done to develop its $99/year .Mac Internet bundle — especially compared with what Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) now offer for free — promised to do something about it real soon.

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Jobs replied at the time. “And I think we’ll make up for lost time in the near future.”

A few months later, Apple did increase tenfold (to 10 GB) the amount of storage you get for $99, but the rest of the .Mac services — Mail, Backup, Sync, iDisk, etc. — were basically unchanged and growing increasingly long in the tooth.

So with less than a week left before Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference and the keynote speech at which everybody expects Jobs to unveil the new iPhone, at least one Apple watcher thinks his surprise “one more thing” this year might be the successor to .Mac, re-branded for the age of iPhones as .Me.

Why .Me? Saul Hansel at the New York Times’ Bits blog does a good job tracing the genealogy of this particular meme, from .Mac to %@ to Mobile Me to .Me.

Suffice it to say that this may be Apple’s best chance to prove that it really does understand today’s World Wide Web, and that it can do for social networking, cloud computing and online services what it has done in the past for PCs, portable music players and cell phones: put the focus on the user’s experience and make complex technology seem utterly and delightfully transparent.

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Philip Elmer-DeWittSilicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
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