January 15th, 2008
Live: Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld 2008
Bookmark this page for live, real-time coverage of the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld Expo 2008. This page will refresh every 150 seconds once the keynote begins at 9am PST. Scroll directly to the latest update. We’ve also compiled a live gallery of images.
7:53 a.m.: Made it to the West Hall lobby (not inside the theater yet though). EVDO coverage pretty good.
8:03 a.m.: A few sights. The setup is massive ahead of Jobs’ keynote.
And Woz on his Segway.
Headed into the theater.
8:20 a.m.-8:45 a.m. Big crowds. General chaos. Back soon on EVDO (hopefully).
9 a.m. Inside and set up in an aisle seat. Good EVDO signal. Phew.
9:02 a.m. Ed note: Apple store is down with the “we’ll be back soon” message.
9:05: a.m. Crowd music. Yellow - Coldplay. Wishing on a dark star. Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Green Day. Crowd rushed the seats. A lot of jockeying underway. Huge crowd, but not quite the electricity of last year. Can Jobs top 2007? Does he have to?
9:11 a.m Music continues. People still getting seated. Stray thought: Will Twitter crash today?
9:12 a.m. 1 2 3 4 Feist plays. That’s the song form the Apple ads.
9:15 a.m. Lights dimming. Here we go.
9:16 a.m. New get a Mac ad. “Going to copy everything you did in 2007.” Loud roars. Welcome to Macworld 2008. “There’s clearly something in the air today.”
9:17 a.m. Recap of 2007 and an extraordinary year. Touts iMacs, iPod, iPhone, Leopard. Notes 5 million of Leopard were delivered. 19 percent of installed base on Leopard. Well received by developers.
9:19 a.m. Ed note. Reports are Twitter has crashed. That didn’t take long.
9:21 a.m. MS Office 2008 shipping. That’s the last of the big apps to go native on Intel. “In Tiger we have a lot of great features. (Jobs boo boo. It’s LEOPARD!)
New products: Time Capsule; AP Extreme base station and hard drive together with a server grade HDD. Back up all your macs wirelessly. There are two versions of Time Capsule. 500GB at $300 and 1TB at $500 shipping in Feb.
9:22 a.m. MS Office 2008 shipping. That’s the last of the big apps to go native on Intel. “In Tiger we have a lot of great features. (Jobs boo boo. It’s LEOPARD!)
New products: Time Capsule; AP Extreme base station and hard drive together with a server grade HDD. Back up all your macs wirelessly. There are two versions of Time Capsule. 500GB at $300 and 1TB at $500 shipping in Feb.
9:24 a.m. Big iPhone news. It is 200th day since the iPhone went on sale. Apple sold 4 million in 200 days. That’s 20K a day. Touts market share. iPhone has 19.5 percent of smartphone market per Gartner. RIM 39%; Palm 9.8. Moto 9.8% market share equaled Palm Moto and Nokia in first 30 days.
9:26 a.m. Talks SDK. We wanted to give something to everyone today — Maps with Location.
9:27 a.m. Google in the house. Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen in audience.
9:31 a.m. Web clips and demoing the new iPhone maps feature. Multiple recipient SMS. Web Clips remember zoom level. Rearranging icons on the home screen.
9:32 a.m. Ed note: Twitter up again. Seems gasping for air.
9:35 a.m. This could be big (but not that big or it would have come later). Apple has partnership with Google and Skyhook wireless. Skyhook mapped over 24M wifi hotspots. Google triangulates cell towers.
9:40 a.m. Movies now have a chapter index and ability to set language; iPhone side has lyric support; FREE software update today. “What about the iPod touch?” “We decided to add five apps to iPod touch–Mail, Stocks, Note
s, Weather. Same apps as iphone. $20 upgrade for existing users!! WTF! Free with all new touches sold (light boos and hisses).
9:44 a.m. iTunes has sold 4B songs. 20M songs sold on Christmas day, which is a new one day record. Apple also sold 125M TV shows–that’s way more than everyone else. Sold 7M movies.
Here come the iTunes movie rentals. Jobs says people want to OWN music but RENT movies. Nice lineup of partners. Watch out Netflix. Touchstone, Miramax, Metro, Lions Gate, New Line, Fox, WB, Disney, Paramount, Universal, Sony/BMG.
Whoa! 1000 films by end of Feb., 30 days after DVD release. Watch on Macs, PC, iPod, iPhone. Watch instantly in less than 30 seconds. Here are the terms: 30 days to start, 24 hours to finish. Can transfer to another device mid stream. Library title is $2.99 and new release is $3.99. It launches today.
9:47 a.m. International launch of movie rentals later this year. No has succeeded with movie rentals to the TV. “We tried with the Apple TV.” Now it’s Apple TV Take 2. He breaks out a hardware device that needs no computer. It’s HD! With Dolby 5.1. This could work. Also does podcasts, photos from flickr and dot mac. HD movie rentals cost $1 more. There are 100 titles in HD today. (Death silence during the $1 upcharge part.) There’s a recommendation system in rentals. “Others who rented this also rented…” There are also free previews. Jobs demos Blades of Glory in standard definition and latest Die Hard in HD. Full DVD quality.
9:54 a.m. Jobs calls movies very strong. Interesting wrinkle: Apple is encoding movies now. Nice search interface. There’s over 6 million songs in iTunes you can now buy through out widescreen TV.
9:58 a.m. Jobs demoing HD podcasts. And streaming free HD podcast. Also demoing movies from dot-mac streamed to Apple TV Take 2. Looking at Flickr photos and a Flickr’s friends photos (on the Apple TV Take 2). Demo gods acting up. Steve’s got a black page. “Guess Flickr’s not streaming the photos today.”
10:03 a.m. Over 600 TV shows, 125k podcasts, photos from dot-Mac and Flickr. “When they’re serving up photos (laughs).” 50M video streams from YouTube. “I think that it’s a revolution.” FREE software upgrade for every Apple TV, support from every major studio and dropping the price from $299 to $229. Software update and new hardware shipping in 2 weeks. First studio to sign up was 20th Century Fox.
Jim Gianopulos Chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox comes up to give the back story. Talks business models–old, new and evolving. Guess Jobs has mended those Hollywood fences. People want choice, access, convenience and to take it with them…
10:09 a.m. Says Homer’s on board (laughs). “When Steve came to us, it was a no brainer. Music, then ipod. Phone, then iPhone. So Apple does things in an intuitive, insightful way. Working with Apple on DVD too–it will be be around for a while. Looks like it will be Blu-Ray (applause). DVD contains a digital copy that you can move to your iPod or iPhone. It’s debuting today on new Family Guy DVD.
10:16 a.m. “There’s something in the air.” Apple makes the best notebooks on the planet (applause). It’s time for Apple’s third notebook: MacBook Air. World’s thinnest notebook! Mentions Sony TZ series and how Apple looked at all the thin notebooks. Says they all weigh 3 pounds and (most of them have mini keyboards). The competition compromises on thickness, display, keyboard. The MacBook Air is .76 thin to .16 inches thin. It’s so thin it fits in a manilla envelope. It’s the world’s thinnest notebook. The thickest part is thinner than the thinnest part of the sony. 13.3 screen with LED backlit and instant on.
Other specs:
- Built in isight camera;
- Full-size keyboard;
- Black keys on white;
- Backlit keyboard;
- Generous trackpad;
- Multi-touch gestures on he trackpad.
- Rotate a photo;
- Next photo;
- Pinch and zoom;
- 1.8″ ipod drive;
- 80GB HDD;
- 64GB SSD option;
- Intel Core 2 Duo;
- 1.6GHz standard 1.8GHz option.
- “How did we fit a mac in here?”
10:21 a.m. Jobs now talking Intel. Apple asked intel for the same chip in smaller package and Intel reduced it by 60%. Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, invited on stage. The chip is width of a dime and thickness of a nickel. HAs a magsafe connector, smaller 45w power adapter, 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR, but no optical drive. You can get a USB powered SuperDrive for $99. The Air is built to be a wireless device. “Most people won’t want the optical drive.”
10:28 a.m. More Air talk. There’s a new feature in Air: called Remote Disk. Remote Disk shows you all the Macs and PCs in vicinity with special software installed. You can ask to “borrow” its optical drive. A PC can read a Mac installer disk. “We don’t think users are going to miss the optical drive.” It also has 5 hours of battery life–other ultras get an hour and a half. Air is 3 pounds.
- .16-.76 inches thick
- 13.3 display
- 2GB standard
- Price: $1799
- Shipping in two weeks
Shows the ad for it.
10:32 a.m. Jobs talks about progress on environmental issue. Says Air has an all aluminum case (recyclable), first mercury free display, arsenic free glass and packaging is 50% smaller than MacBook. Jobs mentioned a lot more, but there were too many acronyms to track.
10:34 a.m. Jobs says Apple is rolling only 2 weeks into the new year. “We have a special treat today. We wanted someone who could help us bridge the gap between music and movies.” Brings up Randy Newman. He’s an Academy award winner (17 nominations) and has 5 Grammys (13 nominations). Live performance coming…
“Recently when I went to Europe, I realized that they didn’t like us too much.” So I decided to try to do something about it, in 2 minutes and 27 seconds.”
Very political song about current administration. Crowd roars. I thought Jobs was going to bring out Jay-Z.
Newman continues:
“I watch CNBC when I’m composing (with the sound off) because my relatives used to be compulsive gamblers - and it’s the same shit.”
Plays a song from Toy Story. I wrote a love scene (between Buzz and Woody) but they cut it. Laughs.
10:43 a.m. Keynote ends. Signing off.
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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| 01/15/08
