I attended the annual Macworld convention in San Francisco today for the fourth time — and took 27 photos so far.
The only sour note of the day came in the morning, when Apple’s PR execs prevented Henrik, Carla and me from handing out 800 Ourmedia flyers to Macworld attendees in front of the Moscone Center. I need to look up the law on prohibitions against distributing literature on public property. For anyone interested in learning more about videoblogging and citizens media, I urge you to attend our presentations at 3 pm and 4:30 pm Thursday at the Sony Metreon, a half block from Moscone. There’s also a blogger dinner at 6:30 pm Thursday. Details here.
Now, on to the keynote: Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave one of his trademark performances. Unlike past years, about 90 percent of the conjecture in the press and in the blogosphere turned out to be flat wrong. I think it’s no coincidence that the reliability of rumors took a severe nose-dive a half-year after Apple began a witch hunt to identify the source of internal leaks to a Mac rumors site.
Jobs, at least, put a humorous spin on events, showing off a new podcasting feature. He created a 30-second podcast during his presentation, beginning it this way: “Hi, I’m Steve, welcome to my weekly podcast, Super Secret Apple Rumors.” Turned out to be a photo podcast, with images sprinkled in throughout. Podcasting and RSS turned out to be recurring themes throughout Jobs’ keynote.
Here were some other tidbits worth passing along, in order of importance from this writer’s perspective:
The Apple-Intel marriage
The biggest news surely was the announcement that Apple’s switchover to Intel chips and processors is happening sooner than almost anyone expected. The first Intel chipsets will go not into a laptop line, as I would have imagined, but into the iMac. You can order it starting today.
The kicker, though, is the benchmark speeds, which will blow your socks off. The Intel Core Duo dual-processor chips run two to three times faster than the highest-speed Power PC chips that now power Apple’s desktop computers and — get this — four to five times faster than the fastest current Powerbook laptops.
Holy cripes! I’m glad I put off buying a new Apple notebook until the Intel processor took hold
Inheritor of the Powerbook throne
Jobs announced a new laptop that apparently will replace the Powerbook line. I need to get a MacBook Pro, which wil debut with an Intel dual-processor chip. It’ll have a 15.4-inch screen that’s as bright as Apple’s Cinema display and — thunderous applause! — it has iSight built into it. “It’s videoconferencing to go,” Jobs said.
Two modes: $1,999 with 667Mhz, 512MB memory, 1.67Ghz Intel Core Duo processor, 80 gigabyte hard drive; and $2,499 with a faster processor and 100GB hard drive. It ships in Febuary, and the Apple Store will begin taking orders today.
Metrics
– 850 million iTunes songs sold
– 14 million iPods sold during the 4th Q 2005
– iTunes commands an 83% market share in the sale of digital music (wow!)
– Since iTunes began selling digital video (better known as television reruns, at least in Apple’s world) on Oct. 12, it has sold 8 million downloads
– There are now over 1,500 widgets for Mac OS X.
– 1 million subscribers to .Mac
iLife enhancements
As usual, Jobs announced quite a few enhancements to the iLife suite, with iLife ’06 going on sale today for $79. Most notably:
– There’s a new addition to the iLife suite: iWeb (the rumor sites got that one right). It’s designed to “share our digital photos and movies and podcasts” and other stuff. Gosh, sounds a lot like Ourmedia. Some really nice Apple-designed templates that you can run your site, blog or podcast on (if you use Jobs’ expansive definition of podcast). Nice feature: You can do Web-based slide shows (using Ajax) that the newest versions of IE, Firefox and Safari all support.
One drawback, but it’s a big one: You need a .Mac account.
– iPhoto now can hold 250,000 photos, and seems to navigate and manage tens of thousands without the sluggishness of earlier versions.
– Coolest new feature: photocasting. It’s podcasting for photos — or, in reality, RSS for grandpa and grandma, a slick feature that lets Mac users upload photos to .Mac (something I’ve never done — $99 a year is a tad pricey for my wallet when I can instead store any media on Ourmedia for free), and anyone (not just Mac users) can subscribe to your photos by clicking a Subscribe button. Nice.
– Garageband will feature podcast artwork, 200-plus royalty-free sound effects, 100-plus royalty-free jingles, a speech enhancer, and an easier way to use iChat for remote interviews.
The word “podcast” kept popping up in Jobs’ talk. He said Apple’s new Podcast Studio feature “will be the best way in the world to create podcasts.” Probably the easiest, at any rate.
– New features coming to iMovie HD and iDVD, too.
Odds and ends
– Apple will be selling a radio tuner for the iPod for $49. Jobs mentioned it only in passing, unless I heard this wrong.
– Check out MagSafe — a magnetic power cord. Brilliant!
– Roz Ho, general manager of the Macintosh business unit at Microsoft, committed in writing to developing and extending Office for the Mac for at least the next five years.
And a final note: Apple will turn 30 on April 1. What a ride it’s been!
More coverage on CNET News.com and at Engadget and by bloggers via Technorati.
Technorati tags: Macworld, Macworld 2006, Macbook, Steve Jobs, citizen journalism
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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