DrunkenBlog

MacWorld 2005 Keynote: Wag the Dog

I meant to have this out late on the night of the keynote, but circumstances, like the keynote not streaming for me, conspired against me. I really did want to watch the actual keynote to let the RDF do its magic and hopefully round out some more rough edges in my mind. That sort of happened, yet sort of didn't.

I finally got it to stream, but I will say that while this wasn't the worst experience I've had with streaming a keynote, it's the most annoying in recent years. Once it was up, it was jerky, and the audio would lose sync with the video way too often for my tastes. Nothing would fix it, not even changing machines and locations or platforms.

I got 19 '-5408 Time Out' errors, which isn't exactly a great lead-in... but my running commentary while watching it is a tradition now. Otherwise I would have given up. Seriously, it was that annoying.

Steve Jobs comes out, looking great. I have to say, I hadn't really seen him since he went through his cancer surgery, so it was just nice to see him looking fit and healthy. Hi, how are ya, then gets right to it with the Apple Stores.

Mentions there are now 101 Apple retail stores around the world. Shows off the London Apple Store, and I have to say this thing looks absolutely beautiful. Chicago has two of these: one in Woodfield Mall, which is nice, but it's a mall. The downtown store is gorgeous, especially when seen from above in the other buildings. Up till now, My favorites were:

• Toyko
• Chicago (downtown)
• New York City

The London Apple store has bumped them all down on the list. It just looks lovely. They really went above and beyond to work it into the surrounding architecture while giving it their own feel in some of these places. I'm going to shut up about this now, but damn. At some point, I have a feeling there is going to be a coffee table book with pictures of the Apple Stores. Actually, get right on that Apple. Seriously.

We're treated to some more rah-rah:

• The iMac G5 is the company's best-selling computer, which garners some easy applause. I'm not sure exactly what this means, but it would take too much thought at the moment.
• Mentions Panther has 12,000 applications available for it
• Mac OS X has 14 million active users now

Jobs mentions Tiger is on-schedule to ship in the first half of this year... there's dead silence. "Everything is going great, we're on schedule for sometime in this six-month window" doesn't seem to be what people were looking for. I'm wondering what people know about the state of Tiger that we don't know.

He goes on to give a quick rundown of some of the features that will be in Mac OS 10.4, most of which you've probably heard before from the 2004 WWDC, nothing new is really mentioned, but he gives some similar demos in a bit. However, one thing is new is this is the first time I've actually heard anyone from Apple specifically say the new synching touted in Tiger will be specifically tied to having a .Mac account. To hell with that..

I'll be the first to admit I'm not a big fan of how Apple handed .Mac; if you don't recall, it was an initiative Apple pushed heavily for awhile. Like Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. you were encouraged to sign up for a free .Mac account, which got you an email and and some space and a bunch of other features... like iDisk.

This was pushed to everyone and their mother, and lots of people took them up on it, because at the time it was nice to have an email that wasn't tied to your ISP, and a lot of people just liked having an email like 'drunkenbatman@mac.com'. Apple decided to turn it into a pay service for $99 a year, which was a blow for people who had used it everywhere on the web. All the extras, OK, but that email thing burned a lot of people who ended up ponying up for .Mac just because it was less hassle. There was and is a lot of bad blood here.

Apple introduced some syncing features to Mac OS X, which were really nice, but were tied to having a .Mac account. The functionality is great, and was tied to your iDisk. Data goes up to it and down to whatever machine you want it to. It's really nice to have your bookmarks, emails, preferences, etc. synched between your computers. It's functionality a lot of people want, and lots of developers want to offer, and it does belong in the operating system. But they key is that it's tied to .Mac and that damnable iDisk which is, for all intents and purposes, a simple webdav server.

There are some major problems with .Mac - it's basically a really crappy service with zero tech support. It really hasn't kept up with what the competition is doing. The problems with .Mac have been documented just about everywhere, so I won't go into them in detail, but it's fair to say it's not a shining example of Apple quality and its slowness is approaching legendary. Past that initial rush, it hasn't been super successful, either.

Synching data really is a growing problem for your average user. As computers have come down in price and become more affordable, more houses have one. As they've come down in quality, it's harder and harder to rely on having just one. Developers really do want this functionality, but up till now the functionality built into the OS has been limited to Apple apps because they kept the APIs close to their chest. The big thing with Tiger is that the APIs will now be opened up to third party developers, meaning just about any app can now sync its data between computers.

But only if you pay $99 per year for .Mac, which, even if it didn't suck as a service, means you're paying for features you have to pay more to use. I'm sure Apple thinks this is a downright machiavellian move on their part: get more developers to build it into the apps, and more people will sign up for .Mac for synching, which is another cool $99 in recurring revenue as well as an opening for more services. It's just lame, and doesn't have to be this way. It's Microsoft-ish tactic, but not in a good way.

And it really doesn't have to be this way. Supporting rendezvous for synching would take care of 75% of people out there, and allowing someone to enter in their own webdav server for this functionality in the System Preference Pane would take care of all the rest. Those who wanted the easy way would just buy .Mac every year.

I'm assuming this means we'll see a third-party standard pop up, hopefully open source, to fill the gap. Which is a shame, because it's not necessary, and requiring developers to do things twice just to try to make .Mac statistics something to show off at the keynote in 2006 is just crappy. Get to work, third parties.

Jobs then goes on to talk about Spotlight, their new search functionality and set of global APIs built into the OS for it. This basically consists of an indexing engine which loads into a global database, APIs developers can access to talk to it, and APIs that allow developers to build the same functionality into their apps with a database of their own. Sweet stuff.

Jobs then proceeds to call out the other players, saying others have recently shipped some "Spotlight wannabes" (ouch for both of them, I had a weird mental tangent wondering how often Jobs actually says 'wannabes') for desktop searching, and names Google, MSN, etc. He says they're great, but they are inferior because they aren't built into the operating system...

This is a problem area. Search isn't really that sexay, it's just functionality you use and sort of expect to be there and it's amusing to watch the lengths Jobs is going to to get people excited about it. The things that make SpotLight sexay aren't things consumers care about too much. However, it's a big deal to developers. From a technical POV, something like Google Desktop Search kicks ass and takes names, and it does a great job of indexing your hard drive, but third parties can't tie into it. With Spotlight, in many places they can, although it won't be as easy for things that already have to have a database format.

There's another bit that he goes into, which is that because it's built into the OS, the file system can let it know that something has changed and it needs to be reindexed. Ever notice just how horrid the Finder is at knowing something has changed and that it needs to update its display? There's some new stuff in Tiger, brought over from BSD, that allows the file system to tell the OS that stuff is going on... he has a point here, but I'm not sure about making it into some uber-feature.

The problem is highlighted really well when he starts showing how Mail in Tiger will have these 'smart searches' you can save to your sidebar for custom views. I've heard Mac people really gush about this... and well, I've used this for a long time in Outlook on Windows. The difference between the two is that the Outlook guys had to whip up their own solution and build it in, Mac apps can all leverage it.

It's hard to get worked up about it if you touch anything other than a Mac, but it's good to keep the latter bits in mind: search is gonna be pervasive. Things that shouldn't have it probably will, just because they can and it'll be a new bullet point on the next version. I do wonder what the hit of all this constant indexing is going to do to slower Mac computers, especially laptops. Having your portable spin down its hard drive in OS X is already more a suggestion than a command...

...Uh oh. While giving the SpotLight demo, Jobs wasn't able to find what he wanted. He switched gears really well, but then a few minutes later while explaining during the SpotLight demo it looks like he accidently got into the new 'Slideshow' functionality and can't get out. Mentions "he's hit a little bug", then mentions "this is why we have backups" and it looks like he flips a switch on a KVM switch and starts the demo anew on a fresh G5. Crowd goes wild. He really does cover well.

Then we're treated to the same demos from last year... smart searches in the Finder, System Preferences (this is a good thing - I remember specifically being lost trying to find out how to change the clock off of military time... it was under 'international'... sometimes things are in weird places in OS X, so yay for this). Then we're back to Mail, and he mentions how people get lots of photos in their email, and how it could be nice to view them all...

There's a slideshow button that ties into a service in the OS and automatically starts showing them on the screen. Nice little overlaid controls, and other apps make use of it. Unfortunately while showing the little control that imports the photo automatically into iPhoto, it doesn't look like it actually happened... but not sure how many people noticed as he rattled something off about "um, it's supposed to" and quickly put it away.

Wasn't really expecting these glitches, but it's fun to watch him cover - did I mention he's good at it? Probably would have been more entertaining if there'd be a late night host along, though.

We're treated to a little rah-rah now, with some more stats:

• 330 million copies of Quicktime downloaded. He tacked on "Quicktime 6 has been a great success for us" but I couldn't tell if he just wanted to leave the impression, or if that 330 number is over the entire life of Quicktime... it was vague.
• 98% of the downloads are from Windows users (again, odd to mention)
• Goes into a bunch of exciting features that will be in Quicktime 7, however this was again... somewhat odd, as MPEG-4 is brought up a lot, with the moniker "full MPEG-4" support. Let's hope this means ASP support.
• Mentions how H.264 is the 'foundation' of Quicktime 7. Same types of demos we've seen before, but even worse... "It can scale from this to this" which basically involved him growing the Window. I'm a huge believer in H.264, but this was a pretty lame demo, all things considered.
• Showed off the new-onscreen controls, similar to the 'slideshow' functionality demoed earlier. IE, you can be in full screen and there'll be some pause/play/etc buttons at the bottom you can use instead of the controller. Ok.

This one starts off a little strange... he mentions Expose, and mentions how just about everyone uses it. Yea, no they don't. Some use it, some find it to be invaluable, but I'd wager the majority just forget it's there... but I digress. Jobs mentions that the purpose of Dashboard is to allow you to 'get in, find what you need through widgets, then get out'. Sounds OK in theory, but what if you need to be referencing things that aren't 'in' the dashboard environment?

This is sort of a strange deal, as Apple's Dashboard is very similar to what Microsoft is doing for Longhorn, but with the idea that the 'widgets' are cordoned off in their own little environment, whereas with Longhorn they're just a different type of app you can run. The only really difference is that you're using an XML-ish deal in Longhorn to describe the interface, and you're using a hacked CSS/XHTML deal in OS X. Both can latch onto whatever you want as a back-end, whether it be a service over the net like pulling in stock data, or even say, a Cocoa app. Well, there are differences, but they're not relevant to this.

Basically, the difference is that in one you are pressing a button or going to the dashboard environment to use the widget calculator, whereas in Windows your XAML calculator can be sitting right next to your email. Personally I can see times where both would be nice... I'm just not sure about this.

Jobs start to show a bunch of the different widgets, and they all look completely different. All of them. I can't even tell they're part of the same OS. There is no real rhyme or reason to how they work or don't work, it's basically just a free-for-all. When Apple's apps are that different, and you add in 3rd parties... I am starting to think Apple has just gotten tired of updating the HIG guidelines.

During the demo he also showed how you could access more widgets and bring them on screen from where they are stored: a sort of 'shelf' that pushes the dock up and sits under it while you're in the dashboard environment. What. The. Hell. I can't in any way see how this is going to be a good thing. This is just weird. The dock might suck, but you at least know where the dock is.

There are some more demos with widgets, and he gets in a good joke about how AAPL is doing so well that day, but that luckily there is still some more of the keynote. Good laugh is had by all. Things start drifting into bizarro-world when Jobs is going on and on about their conversion calculator, as though it's a brand new feature heretofore never seen by man... I was starting to tune out here so maybe there was something amazing and I missed it.

Another thing I noticed was that there was a Dashboard icon in the dock which takes you to the 'environment'. First time I'd actually seen that there would be a dock icon. I'm really hoping this grows on me, right now the whole thing just seems weird.

Did you see the demo last year? Then you saw this one. Short blow-by-blow:

• Support for up to 10 people for audio-conferencing
• Jobs says it is the "Industry-first multi-party video conferencing solution..." for up to four people at once. This one just threw me straight out of the RDF like a glass of cold water on the face. Doesn't seem to add up, but perhaps my brain is lying to me and it is the first multi-party VC solution...
• Does the same video conferencing demo as before, bringing some people in, some jokes, etc. Like I said, just a rehash of last year's demo. People seem to be enjoying it, but at the same time ready to move on.
• Job's on stage has a great presence. Job's seemingly disembodied head (black turtlenecks are bad for this) in a tiny window is creepy. Note to iChat users: learn from this.

Jobs reiterates that they're on track for the first half of this year, and then tacks on "...long before Longhorn". Crowd loved that one. This was about the end for Tiger.

It's now said that 2005 is the 'year of HD'. Forgive me, but I have a feeling this is going to be the year of HD like that other year was the year of the flat panel... and they had to reintroduce the CRT. This is just so barely starting to touch the consumer in terms playback, let alone creation. Nevertheless...

Jobs mentions that Final Cut Pro is the most popular HD editing product in the world. Have no reason to doubt it at all, but then we're past that and into the new Final Cut Express:

• Final Cut Express is now Final Cut Express HD, which, you guessed it, means it now has HD support.
• Final Cut Express now has the functionality of the 'Soundtrack' app rolled in. If you hadn't followed, Soundtrack had been quietly discontinued, presumably because of lackluster sales. It's nice to see the tech living on...
• There's integration with motion, meaning you can move back and forth between the apps.
• $299 full price, $99 upgrade, available in February

I have to say, this just smacks of the weirdness to me. It's just not adding up at all. HD is just starting to hit, but that's primarily in playback, and there is a world of difference between playback and creation. Even with standard video, video cameras aren't the cheapest thing in the world, and resources to really have fun with video already put the hurt on a computer's resources.

HD is just massive, and the cameras for it cost thousands upon thousands upon thousands and are at the highest end of the spectrum, let along the computers to really work with it. You want a nice display to display it, meaning you're not doing this on a 15" flat panel.

You have that pricey camera. You have that super pricey computer to do anything... and you're going to balk at buying Final Cut Pro to work with HD? The same with Motion-integration; it's just at the very high end of the scale, to where if you need to be using Motion chances are you need to be using Final Cut Pro. If I had to guess, this is a case where 90% of the functionality came for free due to Quicktime, etc. so why not tack it on and make the upgrade seem bigger than it is...

The audience just seemed dead to this, but again, Jobs covered so well it's hard not to be impression. He waited for a reaction, quickly realized it wasn't coming, and moved on. Barely missed a beat.

It's all about iLife at this point, and Jobs mentions that iLife '05 comes with major upgrades to iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband, and iTunes. I don't really enjoy seeing these demos over and over year after year, and I'm tempted to put it in the background and just back up if I hear some applause... but the streaming is just sucking so might as well listen.

Rattles of some of the new features:

• Better organizing and searching
• Support for more formats (RAW is included! Hopefully it's good support, this will make some people's day)
• Performance isn't mentioned, which I find worrying... especially with RAW support coming in. It's gotten better with the last version, but iPhoto can still make a G5 feel like a Pentium Pro.
• There seem to be some nice interface improvements, like a scrollable list of the album while you're editing so you don't have to go back and forth.
• More powerful editing controls that exist in a floating pallate. I swear to gawd I think I saw a histogram. No wonder Adobe was annoyed. :) More on this shortly.
• Spotlight searching. It's stuck in the bottom-right corner. I'm really not looking forward to having search boxes every which place in apps. If searching is going to be everywhere, optimal placement needs to be specified in the HIG so people have an automatic clue of where to go, and Apple needs to be a forerunner here. Remember! Learn the OS paradigms, not the app. It used to be an important concept.
• Steve Jobs just loves saying Ken Burns. Someone should look into kickbacks. Excluding adjectives like "cool", it's probably the most common phrase used from keynote to keynote. The good thing about not actually being there is I can, on the spur of the moment, announce that I have to take a shot whenever Jobs says Ken Burns in any context.
• Steve goes on to say how a big focus are the new photobooks you can buy, along with slideshows. Did I mention how amazing he is at covering up a lack of applause? I've done my share of public speaking, and I like to think I'm getting better, but damn does he make me feel inadequate.
• They're cutting the price of ordering printed photos in half, to $0.19 per print.
• Something really weird is going on with these damnable picture books. It feels like one third of the entire damn keynote is being devoted to them. I'm thinking there is something going on here about them, some back story, that I'm missing. Either way, they come in a few new sizes, a few new themes, and are about 20 pages.
• At this point I'm entirely burned out on picture books, and trying to work in two windows to write up some thoughts for some stuff earlier while I listen... let us pray he's gotten it out of his system and next year will be picture-book free.

One thing that really hit me over the head was the 'floating window of editing controls' Apple has introduced to iPhoto. This just looks awful. Terrible. I can't imagine what they are thinking, it bears zero relation to the look of the app. This is the exact kind of thing we bash on Windows users for, let alone Linux, and when it is this damn obvious someone needs to figure out a better way. I honestly can't even tell that's an OS X app.

As Walter would say:

"This is not 'Nam, Smoky. This is bowling. There are rules."

One of the great sticking points Mac users used to bash Windows for was revolving around it's way of MDI, or 'multiple document interface', versus the Mac's document-centric interface. IE, if you're working with Excel in Windows, you have one larger Excel window with its menu items at the top and it can contain a whole bunch of other windows. On the Mac, each excel document is its own free-floating window.

Mac users have been fairly quiet while much of this started to go away, at least when it comes to Apple-created applications. More and more, the fact that the menu item isn't attached matters less and less because they just choose not to make use of it, or multiple windows, everything just exists in one big window. No worries, obviously people aren't bothered by it or they'd be bitching.

But a thing that has started to grate, ever since Metal started to rear it's ugly head, was consistency. That's what makes the Mac; you weren't learning how each app worked, once you learned one, you knew what to expect everywhere else. Now, if you click the red button in that metal window, does it close the window or quit the app? It's starting to grate, and people are starting to make noise.

And now we have what I just saw in iPhoto, which basically means Apple has gotten tired of paying someone to write the HIG guidelines and it's a free-for-all. If the paradigm you're trying to force the app into is breaking as you add more to it, you don't reorient around a new paradigm... you just start going nuts. Imagine things like this in any app, willy-nilly... or your entire desktop starting to look like Dashboard - it'll look great in a demo until you try to use it to get shite done, and then you're just getting annoyed. Look to Kai's Power Tools for an example.

What. The. Fuck. Maybe I just need this explained to me. Slowly. This is really messing with my head, to the point where I've put down the beer and switched to Makers Mark.

The second app featured was iMovie, which went a little further down the rabbit hole:

• 'Dramatically' faster performance. That always helps... but again, since it was mentioned here and not with iPhoto...
• More effects
• More transitions
• Mentions MPEG-4 again... wasn't this a big deal two MacWorld's ago? I wish he'd flesh out what he's talking about more...
• 'Magic iMovie' which sounds sort of neat - press a button, and your clips are automatically downloaded, slapped together with transitions, and given a title.
• Shows a video of someone's wedding, and says "Ken Burns Effect" at least one more time *takes a shot*. Have to say, someone had a beautiful wedding cake though.
• HD support

Ok, the HD thing was really starting to wig me out at this point. It's just not making sense... you're not going to be doing HD on an eMac, iMac, iBook, and 99% of the time, not a Powerbook. Most probably wouldn't be using a lowly iMac G5 for HD editing and creation... you're going to be doing it on a G5 tower, and the fact that iMovie has HD support probably isn't going to be making you drool.

You're not going to be burning an HD-DVD to send to your friend right now. By the time most of the audience for iMovie is really ready to be rocking with HD, we'll be on iLife '06 or '07, so what will that be the year of?

None of this is making any sense to me, and Jobs going on about this brand-new "first prosumer camera that can do HD affordably" and mentioning that the camera costs $3,500 isn't helping.

The president of Sony America comes out, and things just get so, so weird. He's obviously a nice and incredibly enthusiastic guy, but seems to just have very little to actually say. He's infectious while saying nothing though. I wish I could press a button for a bobble-head doll just while watching him.

Erm, he's just lost his place and started to stammer. Jobs is coming to the rescue... there is a really disturbing screenshot of Jobs' crotch on the big screen at the moment... the guy won't leave! And the crotch is just saying there. I'm hoping this is just happening on the webcast. He did just say they're trying to make the cameras smaller and cheaper. He came a long way just to drop that... this is just weird.

Wow, he just said "Oh and one more thing!" which has to be annoying Jobs. That's like someone using a famous quote in a speech before you give yours, damn. Ok, all he had to say was that he's sure the crowd will love Sony's booth outside. Someone will have to fill me in on whether it was cool booth. I hope someone bought this guy some drinks, he's rounded the horn from rabbit hole to cool as hell. Infectious, indeed.

Hmm, ok... Sony part is over. Sometime in some book someone is going to have to explain what the hell this part was supposed to be about and what led to it. Either way, this guy has made the keynote for me so far.

This is starting to grate a bit... major features:

• A bunch of new themes
• 'Drop zones', which, if I'm following correctly, are areas of the built-in themes and interface which you can drop your clips on directly to have them be integrated. Some neat demos showing this off, but once you know what you're doing having to wait for stuff to scroll by to drop your clips onto it would get kind of annoying I'm thinking... still, neat tech.
• Audience seems about as ready to move on as I am
• One of the themes just had Bow Wow's "I Want Candy" playing in the background and gets big points just for it, at least from me. Woo, it got my interest at least. Only way to top this now is "Just stopped in to see what my condition is in", but considering its a baby theme I'm not holding out hope.
• Yep, denied.
• Now supports all the DVD writable formats...
• Audience is really ready to move on.

Jobs closes with "I can tell you when they are your own movies, it's pretty amazing...". Ouch. Guess there just weren't a lot of iDVD users in the crowd, or what was there was nice but nothing to write home about unless you're DrunkenBlog...

Jobs starts off reminding the audience that they have "Jam Packs" for sale, which sets a strange tone... are they not selling well? Mentions a new one with orchestral instruments is being released. Other points:

• Since it was introduced a year ago, it's been "huge for them". Hmm.
• GarageBand now has 8-track recording. This is really sweet.
• It now has real-time music notation. This really perked my ears up, I know some people who do music notation, primarily through a piano, and no offense but all the packages for OS X kinda suck now even after they weren't available for years. Must look into this.
• Pitch and Timing fixes.
• Working with recorded tracks is more flexible
• You can now create your own loops to work with
• They listed a vocal transformer as a major feature in the upgrade. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or not... as if this is what I'm thinking it is, it was pretty much in freeware apps 10 years ago.

We're then treated to a demo to an artist I know little about but who seems fairly homogenized in general... they're using a woodblock loop instead of cowbell. Dropping points... and then we get to see a demo of some of the auto-notation stuff through the keyboard, and it looks very impressive. Seriously, just looks pretty sweet.

Jobs is singing along to the guy they brought out and bobbing his head. It's sorta wigging me out, like seeing some well-known yet abstracted figure walk into the stall next to you. Yes, you're pretty sure they all do it, but you don't really think about it until you see it.

I'm able to start to get a better look at this interface, and it is just degrading from version to version. I always assumed the first was just a rush-out, and the next would make it into a Mac app... if you weren't shown the rest of the screen, you'd have no damn clue this was a Mac app. This is getting sadder and sadder.

Jobs mentions that iLife '05 as a whole will be $79, and on sale January 22nd, and that's it for iLife. Didn't mention iTunes...

Jobs starts off explaining why AppleWorks sucks so hard, in nicer language, and then goes on to say iWork has been created from the ground up to take advantage of OS X and iLife. If i'm understanding correctly, it's easier to just start over than try to shoehorn Carbon apps into something cool. Unfortunately, Apple is the only big company doing these...

Mentioned some of the new features in Keynote 2:

• 10 new themes
• Animated text
• Animated builds, IE, stuff you can export to play independently
• Presenter display, which will be huge for hardcore PPT people. Hardcore presenters I know just love this functionality, so it's cool that Keynote has it.
• Interactive slideshows
• Kiosk functionality
• Export to Flash, Quicktime, PDF

No real time was spent here, but I am going to assume the keynote itself is a demo of it since I've seen some stuff I haven't seen before.

Jobs calls it "word processing with a sense of style" and it looks very, very slick. IIRC, NeXT used to have an app called the exact same thing that did the exact same thing, so I'm wondering if they retooled it. Most of what I remember was that it was expensive and slow. Hopefully it's now not slow, and I guess we'll find out if it's expensive.

Phil Schiller is brought out to demo. I'm kind of worried about him, he seems to have put on some weight... looks like the stock options are being good to him. And I can't quite tell, but he seems an inch or two away from a full-on mullet hairstyle. But I digress.

• Phil talks about what it supports... advanced typography, multiple columns, styles, footnotes, tables of contents, tables and charts, and spell checking. Seriously, they just listed spell checking. Come on guys, this is looking good... why reach so hard?
• 40 Apple-designed templates, just add your own text and photos.
• Phil is really rocking this presentation. I've seen him before, and he just really sucked... you couldn't wait for Steve to take the stage back. He's been taking lessons somewhere - he's energetic and enthusiastic and smooth and just seems to be having fun. I'm starting to wonder if his presentation skills are inversely proportional to his current weight... at this rate, at around 300lbs Steve Jobs can retire and no one will notice.
• Phil is showing pulling out images from iPhoto and dropping them in with text flowing... this looks really slick. Phil seems really excited about the food pictures.
• More text-flowing demos and such, including columns... I'm wondering why there isn't more applause here.
• Jobs mentions that the same team responsible for Keynote development did Pages, which made me wonder who will be working on Pages while they are back working on Keynote...
• Compatible with Appleworks formats and Word, and outputs to PDF.
• $70, not expensive! Shipping January 22nd

This is a hard one for me. On the one hand, Pages looks really neat. On the other hand, for a whole variety of reasons I am wondering if it'll really make a difference... the thing that sticks out at me the most is "Where is the app called Tables?".

Due to how MS software is so bundled (don't even start, iWork is just as much the same deal), Without a kick-ass spreadsheet solution it's nice but... Still, I'm looking forward to playing with Pages, and really hope the .doc export is everything it promises. That could make some of my day much, much nicer.

Oh, so much is said in a name. At this point, the iPod is so wagging the dog of the Mac market. Years from now, business students are going to be evaluating the situation Apple is in with the iPod, much as they do with the early Apple/Windows contracts. It's a fascinating situation, which can be illustrated by my watching the news the other night while they had a guest show hot gadgets for Christmas.

Obviously the iPod was mentioned as a hot item, and the anchor said "Oh, I know! I was at the iPod store and it was packed". For all intents and purposes, people are just forgetting Apple even makes computers. This is well illustrated when Apple is advertising the iMac G5 in time with the tagline 'From the creators of the iPod'. Wall Street sorta stopped caring awhile ago. When you basically stop selling desktop computers for an entire quarter, during the busiest buying season of one of your core markets, and your stock price barely moves, you have a problem.

Remember, the halo-effect just hasn't really happened... Apple has seen some growth, but at less than a third of the PC industry in general. The fastest growing segment of the market is the cheap market now, and Apple literally said they were choosing not to compete in it. Of course the problem with that was that the $399 PCs had no such qualms about competing with Apple's products...

So, out comes the mini-Mac (after a terrible joke about virginia tech), the computer to start raking in some share. It looks really sweet and really confusing at the time. First, the points Jobs is going over:

• Tiny as hell. Seriously, very small. 6.5" square by 2" tall. Right now, I'm sure a company is making a stand to have it sit on its side on your desk.
• Slot-loading combo optical drive... no superdrive, but it's a $100 option
• Says it's quiet. I am hoping this turns out to be the case... the iMac G5, set at full performance, can get noisy.
• USB 2
• Ethernet (10/100)
• DVI and VGA out (yay! part of me thought this was going to be DVI-only)
• Modem
• Firewire
• BYODKM (bring your own display, keyboard and mouse)
• Security slot (I actually looked for this - it'd be important for schools)
• Comes with 10.3, iLife '05, and Appleworks... but no iWork
• $499 and $599, cheapest computer Apple has ever offered
• More expensive model has more hard drive space and a slightly faster CPU.

My first reaction to the mini-Mac was "Awwwww", but it was fairly short-lived. My second reaction after a quick glance at the specs was "They just had to get cute and miss the entire damn point", which is why I'm both really happy to see the mini and really disappointed at the same time. Apple was striking out left on this, but this feels more like a double than a home run.

I hope it sells, but...

• This isn't a technological marvel. It's the exact same technology rehashed yet again, and Apple's industrial design team must be starting to get bored. Technically, it's basically an eMac with the screen and fat thrown away. When you look at an eMac, and realize just how much space the CRT takes up... the specs, by and large, match up exactly.
• The ideal person to be picking this up is going to be someone who has an iPod, or wants one, or is interested in the Mac, but doesn't want to drop a ton of cash. I'm going to have to imagine many of them have iPods, and they're going to want to plug them in. D'oh! All the ports are on the back. It's one of the most common grips about Macs I ever hear, and while Apple seemed to sort of pick up on the fact that they are just inconvenient to plug stuff into (they put some ports on the front of the G5, and moved the ports of their portables to the side)... they just keep doing it.
• As-is, it makes a fairly crappy iLife hub, and it doesn't have to. I can forgive the fairly skimpy storage, there's a firewire port after all. The problem I have is with the wireless options. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth don't ship with it, but can be added later... but not by you. Have to take it in and pay to have them added by an Apple-authorized technician. This goes back to a long-running rant I have about Airport Express. Want to know what's really cool about Airport Express? It's the first time Apple has used an integrated wireless chipset on a board.
  
  Apple pioneered Wi-Fi, and then has basically done nothing while everyone and their mother started adding it to the logic board and in the process dropped the cost to a fraction of what it is with a card. Having Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the motherboard really changes the dynamic of what the machine can be useful for and, with a little innovation, wouldn't cost much. As it is, having to add separate modules and cards does. Crap-tastic.
• It's already underpowered for today's tasks, let alone tomorrows. The video card will do Quartz Extreme, but not some of the neat stuff in Tiger. That's actually forgivable, as is the CPU, but the RAM really isn't. 256 Megs of RAM is just a travesty for OS X, let alone the iApps. Adding insult to injury, the user can't even add it themselves, they have to upgrade it through the Apple Store ($425 to upgrade to 1gig) or have an Apple-authorized technician install it. There are so many ways to work around this problem (slots? modules?) that this was just incredibly disappointing. Apple is just so missing the point here, and it's not something I can forgive and overlook.

The mini-Mac just feels a bit like a lame duck, almost as though Apple knows they have to do something but isn't quite sure what... so they're shooting from the hip and keep trying to do business as usual wherever possible. They had the potential for something big here, and I'm excited about it... but that RAM thing just pisses me off.

At some point Apple went from trying to put as much technology as they could at a given price point into giving you the least amount of technology. I can see the promise in the mini, and in that sense I'm excited, but this is just sort of the neutered version they put out to have a sense of safety.

I'm ready to see Apple work without a net again and really try to tear it up. Just to clarify, I mean the above in the sense of technology, not litigation.

Ah, it looks like Jobs isn't done with iTunes after all... some statistics:

• 230 million songs sold to date
• 1.25 million songs are being sold per year, which means they're on a tear towards half a billion songs per year
• The market is growing, but they still have a 70% share of the (legal!) digital music business
• iTunes Music Stores currently servicing 15 countries, which together take care of 70% of the market
• They sold 1 million pre-paid cards for the Music Store over the holidays
• Um, they retooled the 'essentials' section of the Music Store.

This stuff is always nice to hear, and there were some nice graphs... but looks like he's not spending too much time on it. Must remember to send a thank-you note on that one.

Jobs rattled off some more stats on the iPods, which were again fun to hear, but at some point they're probably going to have to start a separate conference just for iTunes/iPods.

• They sold 733k iPods for the 2003 holiday quarter.
• They sold 4.5 million in the 2004 holiday quarter, for a 500% year over year growth rate. Nothing more specific, but if they aren't breaking this out in their financials I guess it's too much to expect here.
• 10 million iPods have been sold total, with 8.2 million being sold in 2004. Rock on Apple.
• 10 millionths iPod was sold on December 16th, 2004, and instead of selling it Jobs kept it and held it up for all to see. It still looked white, looks like it hasn't been bronzed yet.
• On the Amazon.com best-seller list for electronics, the 20gig iPod was number one, the silver iPod mini was number two, and the prepaid iTunes card was number four.
• A whole bunch of car stuff, which I'm sort of tuning out... lots of manufacturers are adding in adapters for 2005. At least 6 were mentioned, including something called 'Scion', which I've never heard of, but which seems like a terrible name for a car company/product.
• No specifics on the U2 iPod.
• No mention of the iPod photo for the most part... since it's new, if it was doing well I'm sure they'd want to mention it... so I'm going to assume it's not doing so well.

Seems to be winding down with the iPod stuff, mostly just more rah-rah stuff about seeing some cars on the showroom floor...

I heard him mention the word cell phones, which had my undivided attention and if you read the blog you'll have an idea of why. This was over really, really fast.

• Looks like there's not an Apple phone, it's just a Motorola cell phone with an iPod photo-ish interface on the screen.
• The phone in question looks decidedly ugly as sin.
• Doesn't look like he's going to demo how it works, which is too bad... and this again goes back to the damn mini-Mac, and why couldn't they have included Bluetooth on the motherboard...
• This is just dying for some reason, if I was encoding this video I'd be adding cricket noises. And a Ken Burns Effect. (*takes a shot*, and yes, I know I said it and not Jobs, but this section of the keynote demands some liquid courage)

There wasn't any demo of the technology, which really would have been cool, just a picture of the phone and the screen. Ah, well.

I have to admit, his trademark line had a bit of thunder stolen from it, I liked the other guy's delivery a little better. Whatever Jobs is getting to, he's not getting to it right away, it's more iPod statistics...

• Last year, flash-based players had 60% of the market, while Apple owned the other 30%.
• Apple introduced the mini to shave off the top of high end of the flash market, and ripped it in half... meaning the flash-based market is now 30%
• Apple wants the rest of it *dum dum dum*

I'm thinking the setup to this could have been handled better, for some reason I'm imagining Jobs twirling his imaginary mustache while Dudley Dooright is tied to the railroad tracks. He's also mentioning how the current flash-player market is fragmented, and they all have "small screens and tortured user interfaces".

This name is going to go out of style so, so quickly. Probably because it's too similar to 'hustle', but if it becomes popular it's just as likely to be called a 'shuffle' with the iPod dropped altogether.

Anyways, Jobs introduced their new flash-based player, the iPod shuffle. Second to the Sony guy coming out, this is easily the best part of the keynote. Jobs is acting like 'shuffle functionality' was some brand new gift to the world by the iPod, and that it was just the most amazing thing in the world... beyond amusing. He's still selling shuffle functionality... come on, come on, mention that it cures cancer and provides clean water in underdeveloped countries... ah, he's moving on.

• Weighs the same as four quarters
• Smaller than many packs of gum
• Bears a disturbing resemblance to a tampon, especially around someone's neck.
• The audience just seems completely dead... this doesn't seem to be going well at all.
• Interface basically consists of a tiny LED, play, pause, volume, and next and previous song.
• You can have your music automatically shuffled or flip a switch and listen to a playlist you import to it. This is a good thing, and wasn't immediately obvious to me by the name... but why not some buttons down the front for say so you can listen to more than one playlist? This could be an exercise in frustration.
• USB2 port integrated... this is reminding me so much of the USB data keys my geek friends carry around everywhere...
• 12 hour battery life. Nice.
• Neck strap which I am really wishing wasn't white, but is very very white. There seems to be headphone cord all over the place while doing this... that is just going to get in the way. Mmm. Doesn't appear to be any Bluetooth love, unfortunately.
• 'Autofill' functionality in iTunes which will pick songs in order, or random, or from your favorites, and automatically builds a playlist that will fit the space on your iPod shuffle.
• Can also be used for USB storage... shows a really neat looking interface for specifying how much can be used for music and how much for data. I know people that buy these all the time just for data, so this is really very cool.
• 512 megabytes, 120 songs for $99 (finally getting some audience love)
• Jobs says "they're really serious about this", which I guess is a nod towards the unspoken fear in the crowd that they'd make something very nice and totally miss the point... please, please get serious about the mini-Mac.
• 1gig, 240 songs for $149
• I'm unclear, but I'm assuming the song capacity assumes 128k AAC-encoded files.
• Shipping from the factory immediately
• Apple has whipped up a bunch of accessories for it to kick it off, including an arm band, dock, sports case, and a battery extender for 20 hours of battery life. All are $29, all ship in four weeks. No iPod shuffle socks were mentioned.
• Just got treated to the new iPod shuffle TV ad... looks pretty sweet. Green is big for this. I just love these iPod ads, with the exception of the U2 ad, they were just a brilliant idea and haven't gotten old yet.

I'm really digging the shuffle for some reason; it's not perfect, but it's caught my attention. I'd probably already have one or two on order if I hadn't given my leftover Christmas money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Jobs gives a quick wrap up, ending with wanting to thank the families and spouses of the Apple employees who work at Apple. Classy. The John Mayer guy is coming out and playing a song... at least I caught his name this time, he's the same guy who was helping with Garage Band. I don't know, I guess I should know who this guy is. Which is fine, it's not like I can expect Apple to whip out Frank Blank... but I'm tuning out at this point. He's not bad or anything, just not my deal.

Last year while I was doing my running commentary while watching it was almost physically painful. I have to say this was one hell of an improvement over last year in just about every way. Oddly enough, the iPod shuffle was the absolute highlight for me, but just about everyone I've talked to has been iffy on it (including people I would have thought would be right in the target market), so I hope it finds its space.

The cynic in me wants to say this wasn't close to a home run... but the fanboy in me wants to say Apple is loading the bases. Like always, chances are it's somewhere in the middle.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    January 13, 2005, at 02:43 AM