In "Behind the Magic Curtain," former Apple employee Mike Evangelist says that a Steve Jobs Macworld Expo keynote may appear to be "just a guy in a black shirt and jeans talking about some new technology products. But it is in fact an incredibly complex and sophisticated blend of sales pitch, product demonstration, and corporate cheerleading, with a dash of religious revival thrown in for good measure."
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs delivers his Macworld keynote address, it is some of the best theatre you will ever see. This year, in a little over an hour and a half, he reported on Apple sales statistics, introduced the many changes in iLife '06, rushed past the lack of much in the way of improvements to the iWork suite, and introduced the new Intel-based iMac. Almost as an afterthought. he let the audience know that there was one more thing. Nearly 90 minutes into his talk he just casually mentions the PowerBook is being replaced by the Intel-powered MacBook Pro. Pure theatre.
Jobs leads off most keynotes with a look at how the Apple retail stores and various product lines are doing. Macworld newbies may find this odd. Instead of bringing out the new toys and whipping the crowd into a frenzy, Jobs begins by talking about the number of people who have walked through the doors of the 135 Apple retail stores. And the audience applauds enthusiastically. "Behind the Magic Curtain" quotes Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing as saying, "Those 6,000 Mac fans out there in the hall aren't against you, they're the best friends you can have."
There were 26 million visitors to the stores last quarter, responsible for $1 billion in revenue during the holiday quarter. Jobs announced that overall sales for Apple for the quarter was a record-breaking $5.7 billion. The crowd applauded. Not in that "whew, we made it through another tough time" sort of way, but in a "rock on, Steve, we're proud to be part of this" way. It is an example of what Kathy Sierra has been writing about in Creating Passionate Users.
|
Related Reading 
Running Mac OS X Tiger |
There was no announcement of the rumored media centers or Apple-branded television sets, but Jobs next turned to iPods and iTunes. During this last quarter, Apple sold 14 million iPods. In fact, 32 million of the 42 million iPods sold to date were sold during 2005. Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep have added iPod integration as an option, and Apple is predicting that 40 percent of all cars sold this year will have this option. Apple is also selling a remote and FM tuner for new iPods for $49. In addition, Apple has added collections from Saturday Night Live to their iTunes Music Store video offerings. iTunes was updated several times last year to add support for podcasting and video. Jobs next turned his attention to the other iApps that have been upgraded and boxed together as iLife '06.
It's hard to evaluate speed increases in products during a demo. Particularly, as we later discovered, because Jobs was demoing the new version of iPhoto on an Intel-based iMac. What you could see from the show floor were the enhancements to the editing capabilities. You can edit pictures in full screen mode. The controls above and below appear when you need them and then tuck away out of sight when you don't. In the last iPhoto release, Apple made it pretty easy to make basic adjustments to your pictures with a palette containing slider controls. With this release, you now have eight different popular effects that you can add to your picture, or later undo if you don't like the result.
Every year, my mom takes her favorite pictures from the past year and prints out a calendar featuring her grandchildren. Birthdays are typed in, and sometimes holidays are noted as well. The new version of iPhoto will allow her to put out a much-higher quality calendar. The pictures can be arranged the same way you place pictures into a printable book. You can also import birthdates from AddressBook, calendars from iCal, and holidays for different nationalities and religions. You can drag photos onto specific days to further personalize the calendar. Jobs also showed off the new greeting cards that you can personalize with your own pictures and send off to be printed.
Calendars and greeting cards are great traditional ways to share your pictures, but the new version of iPhoto also offers you the ability to publish your pictures electronically. Photocasting requires that the person doing the sharing have a .Mac account. However, the people you are sharing with don't need to have a .Mac account or even a Mac. You create a new folder, drag pictures you want to share into that folder, and then share the pictures. You can require authentication if you want to restrict the access to your photos, but you are essentially advertising an RSS feed. As you add or change the pictures in the folder, you can push these changes out to any other subscribers.
|
You can now more easily produce an enhanced podcast using GarageBand. Apple has added a podcast studio to make it easier for you to create your own better sounding podcasts. Jobs ran a one-minute podcast spoofing an online rumor site. He broke the news of the upcoming release of a (fake) eight-pound iPod. He then dragged art to various places in the timeline so that as his story ran, the illustrations popped up at the right time. He did not show off the new feature designed to enhance your voice after recording a podcast. He did, however, add music to his recording and showed off the ducking effect. Just before the spoken word began, the volume of the music decreased so that it didn't compete with the narration.
In addition to the podcast artwork track, GarageBand has added more than 200 royalty-free sound effects and more than 100 royalty-free jingles. If you want to interview someone who isn't local, it is now easy to record from iChat's audio conferencing right into GarageBand's podcast studio.
You can publish your podcast using .Mac and the new member of iLife '06, iWeb. The iWeb application makes it easy for you to build websites that can be hosted on your .Mac home page or, with a bit of work, on a non-.Mac website. You can post a blog, picture pages, a podcast, or a link to your photocasts. For those who want an easy-to-use client for creating a working website using one of Apple's templates, iWeb is a great solution. If you have more sophisticated needs (such as allowing comments on your blogs), it may not be for you. This fits in with the rest of the iLife suite and targets the same sort of consumer who wants to work with digital media in a way that is easy and attractive.
Do you remember the Toasted Bunnies commercial that Apple ran comparing the Pentium II to the G3? A firefighter helped extinguish someone supposedly in one of the famous Intel bunny suits while the voiceover apologized that the new G3 had toasted the Pentium II. If you're Intel, that ad might not have been so funny back then. But now Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini can laugh about it. As smoke poured out from under a curtain on stage, Otellini, dressed in an Intel bunny suit, joined Steve Jobs on stage and presented him with a pressing of Intel chips. Jobs had promised that the first Intel-based Macs would be delivered by June 2006, and Otellini was there to announce that Intel had dedicated over 1,000 people to the task and delivered what Apple wanted in under a year.
To the audience's surprise, Jobs announced that the first Mac to include the dual-core Intel processor was the iMac. From the outside, it looks identical to the iMacs that Apple is currently shipping. In addition, the pricing remains the same. According to Jobs, what changes is the performance. Jobs said the new iMacs were two to three times faster. The Intel Core Duo chip has two processors on one chip, each of which is faster than the G5.
Otellini onstage in the bunny suit is just one indication that Intel is ready to have some fun with the Apple partnership. Apple's website asks, "What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it's ever done in a PC." A companion television commercial shows a chip being freed from its dull existence inside PC after PC, as it now gets to live its life inside a Mac.
Jobs then proceeded to wrap up the morning keynote. He described Rosetta, which will be used for a while in the new Intel Macs to enable programs that were compiled for the PowerPC to run. Jobs demonstrated Photoshop working on the Intel Mac and then invited Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit general manager Roz Ho to the stage. Ho announced that Microsoft is on track to bring out universal binaries (versions compiled to run natively on both Intel and PowerPC chips) of Office and Messenger for the Mac. More importantly, Ho announced that Microsoft is committed to shipping new versions of Office for the Mac for at least five years. This continues to be a crucial application to have on the Mac if Apple wants to convince more Windows users to switch. The audience appreciated the importance of the announcement and applauded loudly.
The signature "one more thing" part of Steve Jobs keynote was unexpected. Rumors of an Intel-based notebook had been widely published, but the rumors indicated it would be an iBook. Forums were full of complaints of what this would do to the professional line. Whether the rumor sites had been misled or just got it wrong, Jobs finished the morning by announcing the successor to the PowerBook. The new name is the MacBook Pro, and 15-inch models will be available in February. It will feature the same chip as the Intel iMac, which will make it four to five times faster than the current G4 PowerBooks. It also features a built-in iSight and an infrared port in the front so that you can use a remote control. The power cord is now connected to the machine using a magnet so that if someone stumbles over your power cord, they won't tend to damage your machine.
So, in his Tuesday morning keynote, Steve Jobs announced that Apple's revenues were better than ever. He covered major additions to two of the iApps and the introduction of a new one. The entire iLife suite continues to come bundled with new Macs for free and is available for $79 ($99 for a family pack). He also covered minor changes to several other applications. He introduced an Intel-based Macintosh six months ahead of schedule together with an update to Mac OS X (10.4.4), and showed off the new iMac available today and the new MacBook Pro available in February. And yet, as I walked out of the morning keynote there were people grumbling about the things they'd expected, based on the rumor sites, that hadn't been announced. Apple is preparing to turn 30. It still feels like a young company, full of ideas. As I listen to the keynote assessments to my right and my left I smile. It just feeds the momentum of trying to outguess Jobs' next keynote address.
Daniel H. Steinberg is the editor for the new series of Mac Developer titles for the Pragmatic Programmers. He writes feature articles for Apple's ADC web site and is a regular contributor to Mac Devcenter. He has presented at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, MacWorld, MacHack and other Mac developer conferences.
Return to the Mac DevCenter
Copyright © 2009 O'Reilly Media, Inc.