Apple Play by Play

Print Action, Feb 2005 by Rojas, Peter

As hundreds of fanatics wait for what they hope will be the greatest speech ever, Peter Rojas patiently sits with his laptop ready to send a live wireless report about Steve Jobs' MacWorld keynote. This is the stuff bloggers dream about. Rojas is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Engadget.com, a technology weblog with a monthly readership of over 1.5 million, making it one of the most widely read and influential technology websites on the internet.

His technology and business coverage has appeared in such publications as Wired, The New York Times, Business 2.0, Popular Science, The Village Voice, The Guardian, Money, Fortune, Salon, and Food and Wine. What follows are excerpts from Rojas' off-the-cuff, minute-by-minute analysis of what Jobs had to say. Remember, this is the company that brought you the Mac. Products like the iPod may seem like gadgets, but they are adored by a new generation of digital media consumers and this stuff is changing the communications playing field. (The full blog can be found at engadget.com.)

It's the moment you've been waiting for: they're running a few minutes late, but it looks like the big, big, big keynote is about to get underway. We have a couple of reporters here, and barring any unforeseen technical snafus (the WiFi sitch is a mess, apparently), we'll be bringing you live updates from Steve Jobs' keynote as they happen. Keep refreshing to get the latest.

OS

9:11 am: Steve Jobs arrives on stage, starts talking up HD projection. He's showing off their new Apple store in London. It's their largest store to date, and the second grossing store they have world-wide.

9:14: Recapping the year, the iMac G5 launch. "The most beautiful desktop computer." The best selling Mac they have.

9:15: Mac OS X update. "The world's most-advanced operating system, 12,000 native apps, 14-million users." Tiger is on schedule to ship first half of this year with 200 new features. Any process will be able to address 64 bits of memory.

9:16: New Tiger features. Automator, collects and accomplishes routine tasks. Most important new feature is Spotlight, desktop search allows you to find anything. Photos, PDFs, docs, integrated into OS and applications.

9:17: Microsoft will be building support for Spotlight into its Mac apps.

9:21: Spotlight just instantly searched 250,000 files, can sort by people.

9:23: Steve just crashed Spotlight photo viewer! "Well, that's why we have backup systems here." Force quit and recovered.

iEverything

9:34: Lots of yuks at stock ticker showing Apple and Pixar up and Microsoft down.

9:38: iChat, up to 10 people in one audio chat. Multiparty video, up to 4 people in one video chat using H.264.

9:43: HD. [Jobs] declares 2005 the year for high-definition video. Final Cut Pro the most popular HD video app. Introducing Final Cut Express HD. Adds powerful HDV editing. LiveType for animated titles, integration with iMovie titles. Soundtrack for custom music. Seamless iMovie file import. $299 in February or $99 upgrade for FCE current owners.

9:44: iLife 05. "We are leading the digital media revolution." New cartoony logo, iPhoto has better organizing and searching. New photo editor. Calendar view. New search tool. Supports MPEG4 movies for import from, say, Sony cameras. Supports RAW image files from high-end digital SLR cameras.

9:46: Editor adds controls for brightness, contrast, histogram, saturation, sharpness, straighten, temperature, tint. And a straighten feature. Beefed up slideshow and new way to make books. Also adds a thumbnail list across the top so you don't have to go back to "organize" just to edit another photo.

10:03: Kunitake Ando, president of Sony, just walked on stage. Ando giving Jobs props: "Great admiration and respect for Apple products." Jobs is filming Ando on Sony HDV camcorder.

10:06: Ando says, "Just keep introducing great software" and "Stay off the PC!"

10:07: Ando says, looking forward, that he expects Sony to bring features of FX1 [camcorder] into smaller and lighter cameras. seems like he's definitely overstaying his welcome.

10:08: Jobs saying that maybe some day they'll work with Sony on "computers and music, too."

Little Mac work

10:21: iWork. Successor to AppleWorks. Now we're getting into stuff people were being sued over.

10:25: Brand-new app called Pages. Word processing with an incredible sense of style. Supports styles, multi-columns, advanced typography, 40 templates. Each template comes with a number of pages so not every page in a template layout has to look the same.

10:27: Phil Schiller [Apple's vice president of worldwide marketing] takes the stage. Phil picks a template. Don't start on a "scary blank white page." Can access media browser. Auto resizes photos. Pages has incredible live update of all sorts of elements: picture drop zones in templates, text wrap around graphics, etc. Can do charts, table objects.

10:30: Pages does a lot of automatic re-formatting and re-sizing, so when one variable is changed (i.e. switch from 3 columns to 2) other stuff is resized to fit. Compatible with Word files!