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Tim Jarrett Blogs the Apple Keynote
Last update: 1/7/2002; 11:50:05 AM Pacific. We're publishing this on a static server, with Tim's permission, because we want lots of people to be able to refresh this page often. Thanks to Tim for blogging this story. DW
Acknowledgements
Discuss In Store Updates
| Sorry--I lost something when my machine went down and that news item got corrupted. Anyway: 14" iBooks are here today. New iMac will be here on Thursday for display and for sale in two weeks. Firesale pricing on old iMacs and on the DVD-only iBook. And iPhoto is available for download.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 2:22:50 PM
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Discuss Pushback
| By the way, Dave and John Robb, have to push back about content management software and Apple. My mother in law needs to be able to manage her photos. That will help Apple sell computers. They're leaving you a space in the ecosystem to capture the mindshare of all of us bloggers.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 2:08:15 PM
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Discuss (1 response) Prognostication?
| Steve's getting hoarse, I think. Now I'd like to end by talking for a few seconds about our strategy. One word: to innovate. We have been busy in the last 12 months and innovating while most of our competitors have been retrenching and laying off. Why? Because I think we can see the future.... Hey, there's no "one more thing!" Good. My fingers hurt.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 2:00:55 PM
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Discuss First reactions
| An email from a reader about the new iMac. Frank Himsl thinks "It looks like a small, expensive flat screen perched on top of a $15 electric tea kettle." Here's another question, how easy is it to keep clean?
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:52:24 PM
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Discuss Early adopters
| Genentech has placed an order for 1000 of the new iBooks (one of their execs is on the board at Apple).
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:48:20 PM
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Discuss More iMac details
| The base is 10.5 " in diameter. Expandability: four screws on the bottom--will hold up to a gig of memory and an Airport card. Antennas built into the display. Three models. 15", 700 MHz, 128 MB, 40GB, CD-RW: $1299. Next: 256 MB and a combo drive, $1499. Last: 800 MHz, 60 GB, and a SuperDrive: $1799. Moore's Law in action, folks. Superdrive model available January, midline Feb, $1299 in March. (Learning curve effects to support the low price models.)
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:44:53 PM
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Discuss The new iMac
| It's an all-in one... "This is the opportunity of the decade to reshape desktop computers." "What I think everyone else is going to do: We could have taken a hacksaw to it. But there's nothing flat about it... and there would be cable mess and we'd have to slow everything down." "Let each component be true to itself." A box rises from the stage, the flat screen pops up--and there's this half round thing underneath. The flat panel is on a chrome arm. One touch move and swivel, the display stays parallel...180 swivel. The disk drive is a slide out tray. The ports are arranged across a 60 degree arc in the back. It's about 6 inches tall. The power supply is built into the base, no brick. Unbelievable.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:40:24 PM
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Discuss iMac changes
| "Lastly, let's talk about the iMac." Ad roll (stalling). Even though we've all seen these about a million times before, some are still classic ("There's no step 3," "It's not easy bein' green..."). "A three year evolution, and I'm really amazed to report we've sold 6 million iMacs. But today we're going to say goodbye to that iMac. We're going to introduce a brand new iMac designed from the ground up." Flat screen..."and we said Yes." 15 inch LCD screen standard (applause at Tysons). "This is the official death of the CRT today." G4..."and we said Yes." At 700 or 800 MHz. "It speeds up everything in the Digital Hub." Superdrive..."and we said Yes." "And as of today the discs are $5 apiece." nVidia GeForce 2 MX with 32MB memory and 24bit at all resolutions. 5 USB, 2 Firewire, internal speakers and Apple Pro speakers in two of the three models. "What about the design?"
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:38:52 PM
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Discuss iBook updates
| Now the hardware. The iBook. $1299 --> $1199. The middle model, the DVD model is going to be eliminated. Everyone wants the 600 MHz Combo Drive unit and we're going to sell it at $1499. New model: 14-inch iBook. Still 1.35" thick, under 6 pounds, and 6 hours battery, slightly larger, at $1799, with combo drive.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:28:37 PM
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Discuss The heartstrings of America
| I lost my sharing update: web, easy into iTools, slide shows with crossfades and music. "Now how much should we charge for this amazing application? For Mac OS X owners, it's free." New ad for iPhoto: "Baby Jack."
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:25:31 PM
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Discuss InDesign or Quark? Let's not do that
| "I've saved the best for last." Hardbound book. InDesign or Quark and design the book? "No, let's not do that. We've built a page layout program into iPhoto that's completely automatic. It lays all these photos out in a book automatically, I do nothing. I can say how many pictures on a page I want. It actually looks pretty darn cool. Can type text right in." Crowd reaction in Tysons: "This is great." (There are now about 150 people here.) Click "Order Book," it connects with servers at Apple and lets me order my book on line without ever leaving iPhoto. More 1-Click buying. Amazon's raking in the royalties today. "When you click this you'll have your hardbound book in about one week with your photos. There's never been anything like this before."
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:18:50 PM
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Discuss "Unfortunately I don't have Photoshop running in X"
| Here's that workflow again. Click Import, can automatically erase after import... "It looks a lot like iTunes, doesn't it?" Libraries of photos and photo albums. "I've got over a thousand photos in here, and I can scroll through it really easily..." He shows zooming out for a few hundred on the screen at a time. Can view by film rolls (applause, oohs in Tysons Corner). Photo albums--"playlists for iPhoto." Editing: How do I crop? Button down, drag, and click Crop. Great transparency effect. Constrained aspect ratios for auto cropping, movable crop window. Or for a DVD, 4x3 aspect ratio... Spoke too soon about limited editing, can also convert to black and white or rotate, or do redeye. Can also pick other apps to open in. "Unfortunately I don't have Photoshop running in X yet" (laughter, applause) "so I'll go into Preview.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:08:18 PM
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Discuss First new product: iPhoto
| Digital cameras were 30% of all cameras sold last year in the US. "Today we are introducing our fourth digital hub application, iPhoto, and it's killer." The problem to solve for iPhoto: the chain of events: import, edit, print... use multiple apps, it's a mess... "the chain of pain." "We made iPhoto so that when you plug it in to your Mac's USB or Firewire port, you click one button, it automatically imports, thumbnails, catalogs." Plus cropping and printing. We have unified under a special print panel for iPhoto. Set the paper, the margins and press print. Looks like they've been very careful not to step on Adobe's toes with Photoshop, which was a rumored sticking point. But "this is just the ante to play the game." "With film, you end up with a shoebox...with digital photography you end up with a bunch of .jpg files that are very easy to throw away." The digital shoebox.... it's about save, organize, and share.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 1:03:06 PM
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Discuss More apps
| Demoing iDVD now. Again, the workflow bores me, but it's important that people see how this is done. But I now know why the keynote was stretched to two and a half hours. iTunes: playing some George Harrison (thanks, Steve--more appropriate music choices for the keynote. How do I get the job of picking that up for him?) A brief wait for the iPod to come up and start syncing. "Any time now... Anyway, you know what it's supposed to do." (I see a new patch for the firmware coming soon.) "But what about this? What about the digital camera?"
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:58:19 PM
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Discuss Protective gear
| "It's time. Starting today, all new Macs will boot up into OS X." Switch booting still possible. This was rumored and he's right, it's time. Get rid of the OS 9 legacy. Time to turn the corner.
Now, the digital hub. "It's a strategy: personal computers will be the center of our new digital lifestyle." Two categories: devices that are dramatically enhanced by a Mac (e.g. camcorder and DVD player), and devices that aren't even useful without a computer (e.g. MP3 player, digital camera). iTunes, iPod, iDVD, iMovie... "And now for a brief demo of those apps in case you haven't seen them." (Groans at Tysons Corner. Someone says, "He's such a tease.") Showing a middle school student, Jonathan Winslow's project movie made in iMovie. Laughter for the boardslide while drinking a Slurpee, and for "And this is why you use protective gear."
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:51:17 PM
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Discuss Lucasfilm
| Lucasfilm, Dan Gregor. This is big: Lucasfilm was rumored to have an agreement with SGI that they wouldn't mention any other platforms. George Lucas on video. Talks about Mac OS X in the animatics department. The other new trend for the 00s: cool places to work ("My name is Dan and I work at Skywalker Ranch.") Demonstrating animatics with texture and lighting on Maya. What if he changes his mind? AfterEffects. "We render in layers." Shows the opening shot: "hero layer, background layer, traffic" (over Coruscant). "It's the marriage between the apps and OS X that makes it possible." This is one of the few times Steve's brought up a customer.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:44:01 PM
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Discuss Surprise hit: the math guy
| Theodore Gray, Wolfram Research, for Mathematica. Demonstrating an integral live? "Okay, so it's math, but look at the typography! Everything looks better in Mac OS X, even that. Yes, this is useful for math students; the homework of the world doesn't stand a chance." He's going to get a lot of high school students hitting the Hotline servers tonight looking for this one... Now showing animations. "I was whipping something up in the background. I would never try to do this on any other operating systems." A sample of animation of potential around a threeD polygon. "This would have been great for designing a vacuum tube. It's too bad they didn't have Macs and Mathematica." (!)
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:34:28 PM
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Discuss More devs
| "Next up, Palm." Tom Bradley, COO of Palm to show off new Palm Desktop beta. The engineer from Palm is very engaging, much like a pine board. Instant Palm Desktop from the Dock menu, drag and drop VCard and VCal from Palm Desktop to a file (scattered applause). "How do we sync in OS X?" Hotsync demo. No word about infrared sync. "You can now download the public beta" (scattered giggles from the crowd, since the server's only been allowing a handful of people on at a time.
Now Apple's Mike Evangelist about Final Cut Pro 3.0. (What a great name! The 80s and 90s were about weird job titles, the 00s will be about ideal last names for business!) Demo of Final Cut Pro. Realtime effects engine, color correction (oohs and ahs. I gotta say, I've never done digital video and the workflow is boring the hell out of me, but I can appreciate the complexity of what they're doing as a programmer.)
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:28:50 PM
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Discuss Adobe's news
| Maine: "1 down, 49 to go.... We know that Texas is going to be a challenge, but we're working on it." Now Mac OS X: Same screen shots we've seen since since 10.1. A new UNIX Based badge. "We've seen more and more Unix programmers become Mac programmers, and more and more Mac programmers become Unix programmers." (I can attest to that.) Last three months a focus on getting developers to ship apps, and "the floodgates have opened." 1500 apps in October, 2500 apps in January (after 10.1 came out). Microsoft Office for Mac OS X (polite applause--then Steve says "and I just wanted to give them a round of applause.") What's up with Adobe? Shantanu Narayen, executive VP of Adobe comes on stage. "All of our applications are going to take advantage of the Mac platform." This morning we announced After Effects 5.5 is now shipping for OS X. Russell Brown: Illustrator 10, InDesign 2.0 (native Photoshop files with transparency, autowrap around photos, export to XML), GoLive 6.0... waiting for..."Why don't we take a look at Photoshop. It's real, it's almost here..." Lots of automated stuff with AppleScript. Spellchecking in Photoshop of editable text. InDesign 2.0 is now release candidate. "I think we're the poster child of applications for OS X."
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:20:50 PM
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Discuss First: the state of the mac
| Here comes Steve. People in the store are applauding. "We have some great stuff to announce today, so let's get started." He starts with the update: iPod: Between November 10 and December 31, 125,000 iPods sold. And they're building more. Retail stores (the crowd here applauds). 40% of the customers buying CPUs in Apple stores don't already have a Mac. 40,000 people at MacWorld. Last month Apple retail stores had 800,000 visitors (over 27 stores). "Last update: the great state of Maine." (Every 7th and 8th grade student and teacher gets a networked wireless iBook.)
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:09:22 PM
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Discuss Waiting for the tree to shake
| The screen just lit up but no audio yet--oh, there we go. Music: "Runnin' Down a Dream" from Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever album; "Shakin' the Tree" (the Peter Gabriel version)... suddenly I'm not clear whether this is from the video feed or whether the guy in the store is playing it from iTunes. There must be eighty or a hundred people packed into the theatre here in McLean. I'd like to pause and thank Apple's enlightened policy of putting unrestricted Airport access in all of their stores. Closeup on a guy's woodgrain custom PowerBook in the audience; a couple of water bottles next to an optical mouse and flat panel screen on stage. There's an old iMac at the center podium, away from all the flat panel machines (probably to be used for the obligatory Photoshop shootout). Gee, an old iMac--wonder wy they chose that to be center stage. (Foreshadowing with hardware placement, a new trend at MacWorld keynotes.)
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:04:24 PM
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Discuss And the next winner...
Discuss Waiting for Steve
| I'm blogging from the Apple Store in McLean, Virginia, waiting for Steve Jobs' announcement about the new product lineup. They've pulled up a bunch of extra chairs for all the Apple fans. There are three other PowerBooks (another Pismo, a Titanium, and an iBook) all surfing away while we wait. I'm going to try to realtime blog the announcement--we'll see if my machine keeps up. What did I do on my road trip? Sat on my butt and watched a satellite transmission from San Francisco.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 11:34:32 AM
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Discuss Road journal: My bistro's fires have gone cold
| Today's update is posted, complete with pig's feet, no chicken feet, and bad rhyming dictionaries. Tomorrow I go to the Tyson's Apple Store to see what they have that's so much bigger than the rumors.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/7/02; 12:01:19 AM
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Discuss Congratulations, Wes
Discuss The manor life
| I just realized I described the "Cheeselord" part of Cheeselord Manor, but not the Manor part. The house that Skip and George own is best described as having a crumbling gentility. It's situated on a corner lot in Northwest DC, measures about 20 x 60 on each floor, and has three floors, a finished basement, and a tower garret room. The "crumbling" part is due to the old roof, which Skip and George recently replaced, though they haven't had the chance to fix all the interior damage yet.
The house was built in 1912 (as Skip puts it, the year the Titanic sank), and used to be offices for a nonprofit organization. These days, the front room sees a lot of Cheeselord rehearsals, complete with an upright piano that may be older than the house is and wood floors that have a tendency to slope in unpredictable directions (the last is notable as the Cheeselords have been self described as a "drinking group with a singing problem").
Skip and George have known each other for years since Georgetown. Skip directs a diagnostic lab around the corner, used to be a monk, and sings countertenor; George has more muscles than I know what to do with and a deep bass voice, and composes music when he's not doing medical things. I met the guys in the Cathedral Choral Society when Skip invited me to come over for dinner one night while they sightread the Tallis Lamentations of Jeremiah. As an old Renaissance music buff, I eagerly accepted, little knowing I'd spend some really amazing years with the group. We did a lot of music, from early medieval chant and conductus through Renaissance and Early American to late twentieth century masters like Arvo Päaut;rt and John Tavener (and of course George). Today I'm singing with them at the group's second home, the Franciscan Monastery in Northeast DC, which is best known for its replicated catacombs under a fairly magnificent sanctuary. I can't wait.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/6/02; 8:58:36 AM
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Discuss Now playing
Discuss Long day's journey into DC
| I would say I'm tired, but that hardly seems adequate. It's been a long day, and a good one. I left my inlaws' place in New Jersey this morning around 10 am and started driving south on the Turnpike toward Washington. On the way, I decided to call my mother at my grandfather's in Leola, PA; the family Christmas party was to be on Sunday and I wanted to make sure she got in OK. "Oh," she said, "it's actually today, from 12 to 6." I looked at where I was and decided to forgo an afternoon in DC -- and spent a lovely time with my relatives in the church basement, catching up.
I'm now at Cheeselords Manor, where my friends Skip and George live. I used to sing with them in a twelve voice men's Renaissance ensemble called the Suspicious Cheese Lords (it's badly translated from the title of a Tallis motet, Suscipe Quaeso Domine). I'll be guesting with them tomorrow morning at DC's Franciscan Monastery. I feel humbled after running through the music--it's been too long since I sang.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/6/02; 12:38:22 AM
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Discuss Unexpected snag
| I'm going to have to delay the release of Manila Envelope. When I used it yesterday morning it was working, and now the preferences have broken. This, I guess, is a danger of using someone else's code without fully understanding it. I'll have to do some digging through Cocoa to figure out what's going on.
In the meantime, I'm hitting the road after a great night's sleep at my in-laws in New Jersey. Next post will be from Washington, DC.
-- toj8j@alumni.virginia.edu @ 1/5/02; 9:42:45 AM
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Discuss
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