DrunkenBlog

WWDC 2005 Think-Along

Small problem regarding the last post: I'd thrown my cap over the wall regarding the WWDC keynote, which meant I had to climb over and get it, but in watching the keynote there isn't a whole lot to talk about outside of the PowerPC to Intel switch post I'm working on, but I did jot down some thoughts while I was watching.

I've been fairly glutted by notes from people attending (which all piled in late, as apparently the network at WWDC was offline constantly), so I almost didn't need to watch it. It also didn't help that I have an unwatched Doctor Who episode sitting around, but I'd thrown the cap over the wall.

Steve comes out, gets sidetracked by a guy shouting out his undying love for him. Repeats "It's an important day" which means that yep, these are pretty heavily scripted even though he comes off very natural while doing it. He's looking heavily metrosexual as usual, but in a happy way. And no, I don't know what that means either except it may be time for him to evolve a bit. There's the beginnings of caricature, which I guess isn't all that bad: A Steve Jobs costume would make for a cheap Halloween.

Jobs spends awhile selling WWDC numbers about presentations, which is a little weird as everyone attending should know most of this stuff. Does say:

• 3,800 attending, says its the largest in the last decade and possibly the largest ever, but we'll assume its the largest in the last decade because saying it was the largest attendance in history would be a good feather in the momentum cap and I'm sure it was checked out. Good wording from marketing.

• Mention that they've got 500 engineers on site, which from what I've heard was welcome but there can always be more; especially people that can tell you what you really need to know.

• Mentions ~400 Apple design award entries.

• 500,000 registered members of the dev community apple developer connection members. I hate these kinds of statistics, because there are lies, damn lies and statistics, and ones like this are inherently misleading and implies the have that number signing up to develop in your head, when you have to register at ADC just to download an update to GCC and such.

Pretty much ubiquitous stats on the Apple Stores are trotted out again, which they have been since they have been introduced:

• 109 apple stores around the world, with 1 million visitors per week.

• Jobs says they sold $500M worth of third party products. Audience seems a little quiet, and if they're like me they'd be really interested in seeing what was actually sold. The Apple Stores are (as Jobs says) probably the best personal computer buying experience around, but they're a little weird, and it's not an accident that many of my luddite friends have taken to calling it the iPod Store. Most of the attention is played to the iPod parts, with people wandering over to look at the Mac hardware and some electronics; the software sections are generally fairly empty unless someone is making a call and needs some space.

• Jobs shows off the same stores we saw at the last show, especially the London store, and I can't really blame him because it's just beautiful. Most of the larger stores are beautiful, but that London one is really in its own league. Just beautiful.

• Shows a video on how they locate real estate for the apple stores that was 'shown at a real restate convention', or something like that, but it's basically a commercial that has Elvis's 'Stop, look and listen' playing in the background. It's unknown if they took the time to license it this time, and the fact that it even came to mind shows just how much I wish I could push all this copyright and other junk I've picked up over the last year out of my head.

  There's nothing wrong with the video, but why the hell are we seeing this? This is for the press, not developers, and just feels like filler. It's dead air, not worth missing Doctor Who for, and there are so many better ways to fill air in a room of developers.

Interesting:

• We know there are 109 Apple Stores across the world.

• It's mentioned there are over 100 USA locations, which could well just be 101

• We know about half of Apple's business is in the USA (50%), yet at least 92%+ of its Apple Stores are located in the USA.

• I'm pretty sure I saw a shot of the map of Japan with 3 red dots, and we know there's one in London, which means there are 4 Apple Stores spread out over the rest of the world (or less, I'm too bored right now to really go looking).

Jobs did mention that there were some people from China there, and it's something they have to be looking at in a very hardcore way as much of the real growth in the future just isn't here in the USA, yet Apple doesn't really have much in the way of distribution outside the USA.

The Mac Mini came out with a bang, but almost all new Apple products do, even The Cube, as the faithful and early Apple adopters jump in line, and you really only get a sense of how well an Apple product is hitting after a few quarters. The flat panel iMac was not a runaway success, but if you looked at the first sold-out numbers you might be forgiven for thinking it would be. Same for the PowerMac G5, etc.

I'm more interested in seeing what happens with its numbers as it breathes a bit, but if it continues to do well I wouldn't be surprised if you saw an agreement with someone like HP to use their worldwide channels in some of these overseas markets Apple is fairly dead in. Hell, your PowerMac is manufactured in China, so it'd be a little weird if they don't have some big push coming here.

Jobs starts going in about the iPod, which is expected, because of course all developers want to hear about are iPod numbers. Its why they flew here from China, and why they're spending $1,500 on a ticket to the inner sanctum. Maybe once they're all developing mini-Java games for it ala cellphones, but christ I'm so sick of big chunks of these things being about the iPod, and it's probably time for their to just be an iPod World soon.

Statistics rattled off:

• As of March, they've sold 16 million iPods in total

• Currently have a 76% markshare

• All your mp3 are belong to us

Hrm, Jobs is actually wrapping this up pretty quick, but is a welcome surprise, except now I'm wondering why he's showing the numbers he is and not showing the numbers he isn't. I.E., the iPod Color and Shuffle have been out for awhile now, and if there were things to crow about regarding sales I'd be surprised if he wouldn't whip them out. I may just be becoming paranoid, though. My mind is wondering to what Rose might be wearing this episode...

Spoke too soon, he's just transitioned into iTunes so we're not done with this yet. More stats:

• 430 Million songs sold and downloaded over the course of the iTMS's life

• iTunes marketshare at 82%, which is interesting. I was under the impression that Apple's share was growing as the market was growing, but that Walmart especially had started to take a bite, that Real's Rhapsody had at least gotten a spike from their various efforts, and that Napster was doing some business. Note to brain: look into this.

Jobs switches over into this new phenomenon called podcasting which is 'exploding'. No, it's not.

Look, no one wants to discount podcasting, which is a term that is actually being slapped onto a bunch of different things because people think the term podcasting makes them cooler than they'd be without the moniker, but it's not exploding and is really not doing much of anything except being pushed by some people who want it to explode.

It's still fairly new, and discounting any new technology is silly -- it should be allowed to breathe -- but every once in awhile something comes along that cool people think should take over the world, and they say it will, and then it moves around a bit on the force of their personality but never really gets anywhere outside of a core audience.

Hrm, Jobs just made a joke about people referring to podcasting as 'Wayne's World for radio', which is a cute jab at a quote he gave not to long ago regarding it, which is amusing as some of the Wayne's World stuff is the only thing about it that interests me. Satellite Radio is adding something like 300,000 subscribers per month, while Jobs says there are 8,000 podcasts out there you can listen to. I'm hoping someone is looking at integrating Satellite Radio into the iPod in a big, big way.

I just saw Rush Limbaugh's name on the screen at WWDC. Considering the politics involved in most of the Apple crew, including Mr. Man, they must really be willing to take one for the team to push the idea of podcasting as phenomenon. I don't know, perhaps I just haven't been exposed to the right podcasts.

Now he's demonstrating that iTunes will have podcast support and a directory service for it, which is interesting. It may not take long at all for them to go to the radio stations and cap them in on FairPlay to secure their 'free downloadable broadcasts', which would be distressing but if I were in their shoes it would have crossed my mind.

Now he's actually demonstrating listening to a gawd-damned podcast for the audience, because I'm sure none of the developers, tech journalists and others have ever heard of it and were aching to have it demonstrated for them. Filler. Annoying and boring.

Woah, Jobs just got some applause for showing podcast album artwork, which is still one of the weirder things about iTunes and its ilk that I was trying to explain to someone the other day: everyone is a weirdo in that they care about certain things way more than the average individual, and some people care about seeing a little thumbnail of an album's cover way more than everyone else. It's something I've never understood, as when I listen to a CD I don't sit there with the album in my hand -- I'm usually doing other things -- and when I listen to music on the computer I don't sit there looking at the computer's music player while it does its thing.

So weird, but it should be allowed for, as I'm sure there are things I care about way more than others do. Jobs wraps up saying they're going to be taking podcasting into the mainstream, and its an example of blah blah blah blah. I was going to give them mad props for keeping the iTunes stuff cursory, but there just have to be better things to spend this much time on and that Dr. Who episode is taunting me.

Here, we go, more stats. Jobs shows off a chart showing the PC industry doing not-so-well over the last 5 quarters with a growth rate hovering between 12 and 19%, while Apple's bounces from ~5% to ~12% to 5% and then spikes to 40%, claiming that everything is rocking like Moses because for the last quarter Apple had a growth rate of 3x the rate of the rest of the industry.

Must. Not. Strangle. Or. Go. All. Tufte.

What pisses me off so much about stats like this is just how deceiving they are without the real context in which they're occurring, and I know plenty of Mac users who -- 3 years from now -- will have watched WWDC and be spouting the 40% growth rate number. This implies that 2 million people snatched up 10.4, but its really a combination of people who bought it, people who had bought Macs and were able to trade up to 10.4 within a time period, and things like the Mac Mini and other Macs shipping with 10.4 installed.

While I don't think 10.4 is falling on its sword, my impression hasn't been that it's been a phenomenon either, and someone better with statistics could weight the numbers better. I.E., you have to take things into account like:

1. The dev cycle between 10.3 and 10.4 was much larger (50%+?) than previous releases, meaning people are more likely to get on the treadmill than not, and there are that many more people around to upgrade.

2. 10.4 helps a lot of people, but it really, really helps out G5 users who have been patiently waiting for a build of OS X that's supposed to unlock much of the hardware they bought.

In other words, if 10.4 sold the same amount of copies that 10.3 did when it was introduced, it would be a very very poor showing, but the fact that it's beat the number doesn't necessarily mean its time to break out the party hats. Judging by my logs, users have switched over to 10.4 in about the same numbers as they did to 10.3, perhaps a bit more, so I'm not quite breaking out the party hats but it could have been worse considering what they're many of the 200 features they're marketing as reasons to upgrade.

Jobs basically points out the 3 main features most consumers will be basing their upgrade decision on:

• Enhanced iChat AV multiconferencing

• Dashboard

• Automator

• Spotlight

• New Mail client

Well, I guess you can throw some of the other iLife stuff in there too, but most of it didn't get that much of an enhancement and there'll be a paid upgrade coming for all of them soon enough. I know, if you're like me, you're wondering whether or not iCal will be rolled into a revved version of iWork soon.

Goes on to say qt 7.x is coming for windows as a preview release... Says its the best release they've ever shipped, and the critics agree, shows some quotes from various journalists. Apple loves Walt Mossberg lately.

Really, this is watching paint dry territory. It's not like they'd ever say their new release is worse than the last release or one that came before, or that they'd ever bring out a review saying such, so I'm going to assume they're primarily talking to the press watching and not the developers. Finishes by saying there are now 40 spotlight actions and 400 dashboard widgets...

No mention of .Mac at all, and I'm guessing if this was going really well they'd be talking about it. You know, I'm not really negative about Apple at all, and this is probably the only area I can think of where I actually want them to fail. Bloodily, with the shame of their greed greasing the sword on its way out. Apple loves to talk about things that are going well, and not talk about things that aren't, so perhaps its a positive indicator.

Then again, we have a habit of seeing what we want to see so maybe they're selling more subscriptions than XBox Live.

Everyone I know says they can see how Dashboard could be really useful, but when you actually look at how much they use it, it's almost nil. Nine times out of 10, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense: if you want to look at something on wikipedia, its a click to open Safari, a click to go the title bar and start typing the url until it autofills, and then typing your search and hitting return.

The clicks involved in doing it via Dashboard aren't less, except its generally slower to launch the environment and you don't have that actual information next to whatever you're actually working on. This like expose, which do help UI, go out the Window. Having these mini-apps regulated to their own space does make the Dock less cluttered, but that's a problem with the Dock and the OS in general.

Jobs demonstrates a few more of these, like a small glorified RSS widget for CNN and BusinessWeek and such. And one for Yahoo, etc. These things won't last, because it's a crummy way to get the information; having 5 little widgets pulling in feeds from different places is just stupid when you could have one RSS app pulling them all in. And for the places where it is neat to be able to whip up a light app in CSS and JavaScript, having it relegated from where you are doing all your other work means it'll rarely get used once the shiny has worn off.

The implimentation and thought behind Dashboard is so bad it's just annoying, and I without some major changes it's just going to become a toy tech with a small rabid fan base. I paused the stream here for more coffee, because I needed a break when I realized the man was going to be educating me on Wikipedia.

Note to self: QuickTime and MPEG-4 streams can get a little wonky once they've been paused and restarted. Jobs does mention there'll be a dashboard release site so people can find all these customized RSS widgets.

Jobs gives some share statistics from OS X:

• 10.4 16%
• 10.3 49%
• 10.2 29%
• early version'laggards' 10%

Pretty cool, and I fear for anyone still using 10.1 and below at this point, let alone how Apple is actually finding out about it. 10.2 is fairly understandable, although in that large of a share its a little disconcerting; the base is certainly fragmented a bit due to how often the releases were coming.

Jobs goes on to say 10.4 will be half of the os x userbase in a year, which is a pretty worthy goal and isn't something guaranteed although higher unit shipments of the Mini (even if its fewer profits, because unit sales of their other machines aren't doing well) will certainly help. After the orgy of release is done, hopefully developers really incorporating 10.4 tech into their apps in a hardcore way will help keep the momentum up.

He then goes on to say they've released 5 major releases in the last 5 years, while microsoft released WindowsXP in the same timframe. I'm not even going to touch this, as one of those releases would crash every time I tried to transfer anything of substantial size via firewire, another would crash when I plugged in headphones...

10.5 will be out at the end of 2006, early 2007. The name is kinda cool, and the shot of the cat 'around the corner' is nice bit of subconscious marketing.

Not a whole lot to talk about here, I'll just save it. The old NeXT fat binaries are now 'fat' binaries, and Cocoa developers are feeling OK while some of the people really tied to Carbon are freaked out. This probably won't be as bad as it could be, but there is going to be some major carnage in areas.

This part was really well done, with Jobs pringing up some points about GHz and really focusing on the wattage, and the Intel guy's presentation was really well done. The whole point is to get you thinking of Apple and Intel as natural bedfellows, with this really just being a natural evolution in the Mac's development, instead of having to kick over the table because the game was not going there way in a big way.

Is very careful to point out that their PowerPC products right now are great, so don't stop buying them. Please.

Theo Gray from Wolfram Research comes out and talks about the ease with which they got Mathematica up and running as an x86 build. He's kicking ass and taking names, doing a good job of showing the angst so the developers in the audience who are freaking out can identify with him, then putting them at ease with how it went. Very, very well done, but you have to watch some of what he's saying really closely.

Mathematica is a very complex app for sure, but in many ways they've done a lot of the hard work in abstracting much of that complexity from the metal already. Don't kid yourself, Carbon developers are going to get screwed. People tied to Metrowerks because they need to really be cross-platform or have older code bases which just demand it are getting doubly screwed.

I think I just saw a shot of Woz in the audience, I need to have a talk with that man about that shirt.

Jobs finishes by saying developers will be very plesantly surprised by the tools to port their software to x86, which is something I'm going to have to do some pumping on as I'm curious as to what's really there that wasn't there back in the NeXT days. Oh, and Jobs has been running the demo on a 3.x GHz Pentium 4.

My inbox is getting hammered on this one because people know I was looking into Transitive back in 'The Pits of CherryOS' and well, not much more to say here over what I said then.

It does look as though this will be very much a 68k to PPC emulation versus a Classic emulation scheme, which is a big win for users but do not, do not go expecting PPC Photoshop to be running at 80% of your native x86's speed. No matter what some of Transitive's marketing materials claim. Still, it's very cool that they're going for the seamless emulation deal, as the 68k to PPC transition conjures some good vibes. Of course, the PPC jump doubled performance, which meant no one actually lost peformance emulating their apps, and that wont be the case here.

Jobs goes on to demonstrate a PowerPC versions of Word and Excel running, which is fine, but I'm too distracted by just how god-awful-ugly the Office icons turned in 2004. I didn't actually mind the old ones, but these just have this teletubby-fisher-price-playdo vibe going on that bugs my eyes.

He loads Photoshop, and we've got some dead air waiting for this to launch, so once it's launched he loads another photo to show 'how fast it is'. Smart cover, lots of people won't remember the long launch time and will just remember that last photo loading nice and snappy, because we Cows have short memory.

Hmm, this is wrapping up pretty quick. Still, and this is perhaps petty of me, I'm just glad the Apple marketing team came up with a decent name for the technology that I can repeat in public without feeling like an idiot. I'm looking at you, Bonjour.

Chunk down $999, and Apple will ship you a G5 box, sans the G5, with:

• A 3.6GHz Pentium 4
• 10.4.1 for Intel
• XCode 2.1 with support for universal binaries
• A porting guide

You have to return them by the end of 2006, so I guess you're basically renting it, and you have to be a select and premier developer in order to get them at all.

From my pinging around with smaller developers, this is a bit of a sore point, as they're basically looking at laying out $1,500 (many smaller developers don't have select or premier memberships) to test their software, but I have lots more pinging to do. My gut says this is an area where they should take a hit and just ship them to anyone paying $500 for a higher-tiered developer account, as it's in Apple's best interest.

Of course, if there are half a million developers like they say they'd have to do this for they'd probably never be profitable again. The good news for the downtrodden is that on Apple's site they're saying if you order now you get a free T-Shirt.

Weird.

A woman from Microsoft's Mac BU comes out, named Roz Ho. Such an unfortunate last name, and I know its wrong of me to notice it, and I'm sure it's never come up in her life before. Still, if my last name was Dick -- instead of just my nickname -- I'd just have to live with the eyebrows going up.

She's going on about the Mac and Microsoft's commitment to making great stuff in the future. I'm sort of tuning out, as this is the sort of stuff that belongs at the end of what we all know she got on stage to say: Microsoft will eventually support universal binaries for x86.

She's coming off as terribly nervous and well, I've never heard of her before but she's acting as though people have heard the various things she's said about the Mac in the past, or something. I wonder what Rose and Doctor Who are up to, IIRC those crazy big and pudgy green aliens are supposed to be back this episode, and I have high hopes as the two with the creepy kid in the gas mask totally wigged me out.

CEO of Adobe comes out, makes some goofy remark about his mom thinking he runs Apple. Sort of getting the impression he wants Mac users to really think Adobe gives a rats ass about them, then goes on to say they're commited to getting their apps to run natively on Intel's chips in Apple's upcoming boxes. He ends with a 'what took you so long' remark to Steve which had more teeth to it than he may have intended, and I'm just getting a weird vibe from this in general.

Adobe's one of the companies to watch regarding this switch, as they're in a really interesting position:

• They've put in a ton of work, some of it financed by Intel, to heavily optimize a lot of their apps for SSE and its much better SSE2, much of which can probably be reused in their Mac products now.
• They've put in a ton of effort to optimize a lot of their apps for Mac technologies like AltiVec, and those are now basically sunk costs. Yes, people will still be using PowerPC machines for awhile, but they'll be buying less and less software.
• They're tied to a massive -- and in some parts ancient and layered -- code base going back over years and years on the Mac, and are heavily tied to Carbon and some of the other cross-platform tools.

How they'll end up dealing with some things should be interesting, and I hope to god they decide its worth the cash to them to really put their best foot forward in translating the apps. I doubt they care that much about Mac Mini sales as compared to the flagging PowerMac and Powerbook sales, which are what many of their Mac customers are really buying.

Paraphrasing Jobs, because I don't have the guts to try to go back and scrub the stream: "We've been working deeply with Intel recently, and we've found out that they're kinda like us. An engineering culture that are passionate about their products, and we're getting along famously. In fact, those two guys backstage in just their underwear? That was us."

Intel guy comes out and does the song and dance, and again this was really well done and I'm sure a marketing guy was helping him craft the message. Kudos to that marketing guy, and for the Intel CEO's delivery. I've got "It's Real" and "Guerrilla Funk" by Paris playing in the background, and it's giving it a bit more oomph -- I'd certainly recommend having it play as he came out next time. Or perhaps "Jungle Love" by Morriss Day and The Time, or "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta" by the Geto Boys. With a bit of a strut. They certainly earned it.

Really, this is a contrived presentation meant to align your head with the idea that Apple going with the PowerPC was really just an abberation of the one true path towards the One True Path of Intel, but its importance can't really be understated and without it I think its helped changed a lot of people's mindsets overnight. Within a few weeks, Mac users will be bashing those regular cheap PC users who choose to use AMD for having inferior technology and aren't willing to pay for the real thing, and much of it will be because they watched the keynote.

Either way, it was nice to reminisce about the Bunny suits again, I think I just saw Woz again in the crowd. With that shirt. I think the guy next to him is Cap'n Crunch, which is amusing if true, and his shirt is loud enough that I can't hear Woz's anymore and it's probably why he thought he could get away with it.

Jobs is careful to mention that there'll still be some PowerPC models coming out, and that they'll be great and do be sure to buy them -- preferably with AppleCare and a subscription to .Mac -- and that the soul of the Mac is its operating system, not the hardware. Oh, and developers, do be sure to get your ass in gear creating Universal Binaries.

Not the best keynote I've ever seen, with the first half just being weird in spots and boring as hell in the others, and it was generally lacking the bizarre charm of MacWorld. If I wasn't such a fast typer and that's all there was, I'd have been pretty damn annoyed that I was bypassing Rose's impish charm to fill my brain with it.

However, the switching to Intel section on was worth putting Doctor Who off a bit. Jobs did great, but if he didn't have the CEO of Intel and the guy from Wolfram doing such a great sell-job, I think the fallout would have been much, much worse. Jobs owes those guys a drink.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    June 10, 2005, at 12:44 AM