Live: Philip Schiller keynote at Macworld 2009
This page is the live, real-time coverage of the Phil Schiller keynote at Macworld Expo 2009. It is presented in reverse chronological order. Read from the bottom up if you prefer to start from the beginning.
See other live coverage from CNET News, Engadget and Techmeme. See live photo gallery of event too.
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10:31 a.m. PST: Schiller kicks last Macworld keynote to Tony Bennett. "The best is yet to come." Bennett performs stage right on a slide-out stage.
10:25 a.m. PST: "One last thing," says Schiller. iTunes time. 75 million credit cards account on file, 6 billion songs sold, No. 1 channel in the U.S....Three things new. Price (three tiers starting in April--99 cents, 69 cents and $1.29). What is this Taco Bell. iTunes Plus is the second thing with 256 Kbps encoding and 8 million songs DRM free starting today. Big applause. 10 million songs DRM free by end of quarter (bigger applause). iTunes now also allows purchase over 3G--not just Wi-Fi. Same price and selection. iTunes over 3G starts today.
10:22 a.m. PST: Here's the line on the 17 inch MacBook Pro:
- $2799 2.66 C2D, 4GB, 2 GPUs, 320GB HDD;
- Starts shipping in late January;
- Environmental report card: EPEAT Gold 2009
10:20 a.m. PST: So what exactly do I do after 1,000 recharge cycles. Leave it to Apple to spin a fixed battery. Pass the Kool-Aid. Schiller says the battery lifespan is five years. Schiller gets applause for battery but it's 5 out of 10 on the applause-o-meter. Schiller says there will be less batteries thrown away.
10:09 a.m. PST: Some clarity on iWork pricing. For now it's a free beta but will be a new fee-based service at some point. No word on iPhone editing.
- Doc sharing even with people without iWork (which is a lot of users);
- Email recipient notification;
- Autocomplete address book;
- Leaving notes in a document.
We don't know the price yet. C'mon Phil is this part of MobileMe?
10 a.m. PST: Schiller goes into Pages, the word processor. It obscures the rest of your desktop to block distractions and offers something called Dynamic Outlining. Mail Merge with Numbers (the spreadsheet). There's support for formulas and bibliographies. Overall there are 40 new templates. Schiller also demos Numbers, the spreadsheet--more formulas, charts and functions (yawn). I think I hear crickets chirping. Nothing like a spreadsheet to lose the audience. Let's face it Numbers is pretty dry. Templates are beautiful though.
9:55 a.m. PST: Schiller goes onto the next big topic--iWork 09. Schiller is using Keynote to present. It has a magic move transition between slides. This Magic Move thing is the first part of the demo. The second item is ObJect Transitions. Schiller transitions from Bush to Obama for some cheap applause. Chart Animations is another feature. There's etched metal, wood, concrete, brushed canvas and Venetian among others. The real kicker: You can use your iPhone as a remote to control your presentations with a flick. It'll only cost you 99 cents Schiller quips.
9:50 a.m. PST: GarageBand gets loud applause--6 out of 10. iLife will run you $79 for upgrade and $99 for family pack.
9:41 a.m. PST: iMovie demo wraps up. Schiller: "I'm so impressed that I edited that myself (laughs)."
9:33 a.m. PST: The biggest feature of the iMovie demo is a drag and drop interface that is very easy. There's a decent amount of cheering for the new features. Overall though, the crowd is pretty quiet. Polite applause for the software features.
9:30 a.m. PST: Schiller now goes into iMovie 09, which now allows you to see edits up close and provides a precision editor. There's a timeline that has and expanded view. When video is dragged into the timeline contextual menus pop up when you drag and drop clips. There is also auto video stabilization. Time for live demo of iMovie from Randy Ubillos, the developer and chief architect of iMovie.
9:25 a.m. PST. Schiller does a demo of Faces--you can create a smart album called "our family." Add to the family and the faces constantly update. Schiller then adds location based information to iPhoto.
9:20 a.m. PST: iPhoto is also getting a slideshow theme feature. Uses Facial recognition to position pictures in the center of the frame. Shadow feature draws oohs and ahs from the crowd. Pretty slick. Naturally all of this syncs to the iPhone. There's also a new Travel Books theme. Schiller says you can use geotag data to add maps to your books. All done automatically. Schiller goes into a live demo of iPhoto 09.
9:15 a.m. PST: More on iPhoto. iPhoto is taking a serious leap ahead of Aperture9:11 a.m. PST: This Faces feature is pretty cool. It can find a person's snap shot and detect faces across multiple photos to confirm it's "Liz." It learns as you go along. Places is the next feature. Places brings up a map with pushpins and reads embedded geotags in your photos. iPhotos then decodes the geotags and gives it a proper place based on lat/long. From there you add locations to your database of photos. Neat stuff.
9:08 a.m. PST: Schiller says there are 9.7 million Macs sold in fiscal 08. Says: "I assume you want to hear about new things today." He has three things. A new version of iLife, a new iPhoto, where you can look at photos by event and a new feature called Faces.
9:05 a.m. PST: Schiller is on stage. Blue oxford and jeans. Talks about the stores, notably the ones in Beijing and Munich as well as Syndney. 3.4 million people a week visit the Apple stores.
9:03 a.m. PST: A few VIPs spotted. Al Gore, Tim Cook and Bertrand spotted.
8:59 a.m. PST: Silence all cell phones. No VIPs to be found. Welcome to Macworld 09. We're almost underway.
8:57 a.m. PST: I'm sitting in a middle seat in the first section of seats from the sage. Press to the left (and most of them are on MacBooks). VIPs to the right. There's no sign of Steve Jobs in the VIP seats. Looking for Google execs... Fake Wi-Fi networks abound. My favorite: "Look under your seat."
8:54 a.m. PST: IDG employees look at the fact that I didn't get trampled and refrain: "We're better organized this year." I kinda doubt it. More music playing. Looks like we'll start on time.
8:52 a.m. PST: I didn't get trampled and no one ran to the seats. In and seated. While there are a lot of people it's much more civil in the crowd this year.
8:41 a.m. PST: Waiting to get into the event. Buzz was lacking and there wasn't as much pushing, which I guess is a good thing.
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