I'm in San Francisco at Apple WWDC06 this morning, and will be posting live notes here. –XJ
9:13 — Scoped out a few square inches of squatting turf near the media entrance on third floor. Open laptop. Waiting for doors to open. Tom Neumayr, iPod product manager at Apple, warns me about a "giant whooshing sound" and subsequent aftershock when hordes of developers pour in to grab seats. Engadget and Gizmodo dudes are around, too, and they're already posting with tons of pics: Eng, Giz.
9:31 — a few rows up, Steve Jobs chatting with Applefolk. He's wearing… wait for it!… a black long-sleeved tee, and jeans.
9:45 — The Whoosh.
10:00 — WWDC-tailored video clip of Mac/PC guys. "PC" tells all developers present at WWDC to go home, get in touch with their inner poets, please stop developing.
Jobs: Over 4200 registered attendees today. Lots of developers here — 1 developer for ever four attendees. Glass-walled Apple store in NYC one of over 100, 17 million visitors in stores last quarter. Those buying Macs, 50% are new to Mac. 3/4 of macs shipped last quarter were intel-based. 12% marketshare for notebooks, doubled from January to June, 2006.
10:04 — Jobs: "The Power Mac is going to fade into history."
10:09 — Phil Schiller: Brand new Mac Pro. Quad Xeon 64-bit workstation. Starts shipping today.
Will be based on intel Xeon chipset. Also known as woodcrest. Core 2 micro-architecture. up to 3ghz, 4mb shared 12 cache, all dual core. For high-end customers who want it, 64-bit. Big performance per watt. Every Mac Pro will have two of them — quad Xeons. (much orgasmic ooooohing in audience). 2.1x faster than quad g5. Twice as fast as the machine it replaces. 1.6x faster on specfp floating point. Xcode runs 1.8 times faster on new Mac Pro. Dual 1.33 Ghz front-side buses, delivering 21 GB/s. Memory: up to 16GB memory. Twice as wide as powermac g5 and faster. Less cooling systems, we gain lots of space, so four hard drive bays can fit. (entire audience just came, more orgasmic screams). More front I/O, too. Four PCI express slots. Doublewide graphics slot.
Inside the box, all is new. New drive carrier so you can insert up to four drives, they snap right in place, no tools required. (applause). Price comparison to similarly configured Dell workstation (Dell Precision 690): Mac Pro comes out to about $1K cheaper. Price for Mac Pro is….. $2499.
(Live notes continue)…
From January 10-August 7, the transition was completed in 210 days.
Xserve: new one coming out today. Like MacPro, built on intel Xeons, two of them have quad performance. Running at 2.0 GHz, 2.66 GHz, 3.0GHz. On specint goes from 21 to 115, 5x faster. On floating point 20 to 76, 3x faster. Redundant power, lights out management. 1,036,800 possible configurations. With quad 2.0 ghz xeon, 1gb 667mhz ddr2 ECC memory, 80GB SATA drive module, lightsout manamgement, built-in graphics: $2,999. We will release new Xserve in October.
10:22 — Steve Jobs: We now have 19 million Mac OSX users. Last release of OSX, Tiger, best-selling Mac software ever. 86 million lines of source codes ported to run on entirely different architecture with zero hiccups. Now over 3K universal apps shipping. OK, now let's trash Microsoft, and for that I introduce Bertrand Serlet.
10:24 — Bertrand Serlet. Two years ago when we released Tiger, we decided to make fun of MSFT… hung banner that read, "Redmond, start your photocopiers." We were joking but they took us seriously, Vista UI looks identical. Even the logo looks like Mac — nice Aqua bubble around Windows logo. But underneath it all… still Windows (collective sneer rises from audience as Bertrand advances to next slide of Windows code).
10:29 — Jobs: MSFT spends 5MM each year on R&D, but all they do is copy Google and Apple. We're working on next major release of OSX, called Leopard. Top-sekrit features we're not showing today, but I want you to know they're there.
10:30 — Scott: First big thing, Leopard supports 64bit apps. MacPros we're shipping today ship with support for Unix. Leopard takes that giant leap forward. Extends 64bit up to Carbon and Cocoa, also. Can run 32-bit and 64-bit apps side by side. None are translated or emulated, they all run natively. Full 64-bit support, top to bottom.
Next big thing, Time Machine. Talks about family photo album — would never want to lose any of them. What's the solution, prevent loss from hard drive failure? Back it up. But I admit that even I don't back up regularly. Only 26% of our users are backing up their files regularly. Of them, most are probably dragging and dropping files intermittently, not comprehensive backup. Only 4% really back up automatically. Time Machine will automatically back up your Mac. If you change a file, it will be backed up automatically. Back up OS, software updates, files, everything. So we can restore everything. Buy new hard drive, put in machine, be back where you were. Restore à la carte. Back up to hard drive or server. Plug in hard drive, it will configure automatically, start backing up.
Coolest thing about Time Machine is new way of backing up and restoring files. Allows you to go back to inadvertently saved-over documents. Or go back in time to earlier versions of a document. (starts demo). Time Machine looks like lots of "Finder" windows against a starry universe with a timeline on far right. Zoom back in time to primordial ooze of whatever you were working on. Select the version you want to regress to, click "restore," then you're done. (much woooooing in audience). Time Machine works with more apps than Finder. You can look through Address book and undelete a contact you've hosed. Now, he'll demo iPhoto, going back in time to find a lost "roll" of shots… (ohno! iPhoto won't open, Scott must Quit, then Force Quit, then repeat, then opens iPhoto, and uses Time Machine to go back and find photos).
10:42: Third feature of Leopard — deliver complete package of apps together. Fourth: Spaces. New way of working on your Mac. If you run a lot of apps at once… few apps required for a given task — give them a space to be in. Another task has another space with its set of apps. Shift between them in an intuitive manner. (start demo). Jobs opens Mail, Safari. Most of time working, he spends in these two. But he's making a website. And a podcast… he clicks to another space, where iTunes and Garage Band are loaded. Another space has Final Cut open… jump to clusters of apps by task. Look at all of your spaces at once, if you like. Drag and drop apps from one space to another if you want.
10:47 — Scott: Spotlight will be even better in Leopard. Use it now to search other Macs on your network. Remotely search them. If you have permission to see files, you can search them. Search servers, too. In office, if you have workgroup server with shared assets, search it and find what you're looking for. Advanced search offered, too. Boolean, etc. Spotlight will serve as app launcher, too. Adding recent items to spotlight, too.
Next big feature: Core Animation. We previously released Core Audio, Image, and Core Video functionality, now adding Core Animation. Allows you to do scenes of layers. Text, images, vide, openGL, whatever. For each layer, specify start state, goal state, keyframes between. Core Animation manages sequence between those states.
10:53 — Steve Jobs again. Universal Access — people with special needs. Major enhancements in Leopard. Braille support, Voice Over advances, Closed captioning support, faster and better navigation. (starts VoiceOver demo). First, Tiger Voice: text-to-speech bot reads some boilerplate copy in female voice, sounds kludgy. Then, Vista Voice reads same text, sounds weird again. Leopard Voice (male) sounds more natural, less robotty. Leopard fast voice is an insane 10-espresso-fast voice, but very understandable even at high "skimming" speed.
10:57 — Jobs: major enhancements to Mail in Leopard. Adding Stationary (embedded photos, cutesy fonts, html templates). Adding notes (if you send emails to yourself as a note, you can now have a special mailbox for these coagulates all of them by type, so you don't have to smush them in your main in-box with other types of inbound emails). Adding "to do's" . Again, you can view all of your to-do's in a special subfolder of inbox.) Tag a mail to make it a to-do. All apps can tie into it, one systemwide to-do service that keeps track of everthing.
11:06 — Dashboard. More than 2500 widgets available for Dashboard. Leopard enables more in two ways.
For developers: Dashcode helps you design, develop, debug. Canned widgets, source library, javascript source editor and debugger.
For endusers: Webclip. Select item from internet (Dilbert comic strip shown), clip it, drag to dashboard, and you can have a widget that will show you every day's new edition of a comic strip, for instance. Or, an eBay auction: select, apply a theme (torn edges), then transform into widget — it's live, so you can still navigate through the webpage in its clipped widget form. Or NYT Bestseller list. Or webcams. Have a widget of a webcam on your dashboard. Throughout day, you work, then bring up dashboard and you see a live webcam feed you've selected (much applause, much catching of breath).
11:14 — Jobs: lots of iChat advancements, including tabbed chat. Videoconferencing will also now include PhotoBooth effects. And iChat theater — show slideshows as you talk through the slides on video. And backdrops. (starts demo). Backdrops can include video — demo with Phil Schiller shows chat session happening with lots of crazy video backdrops, including webcam of Times Square, undersea anemones, and a rollercoaster. (much gaaaaaaah in audience).
11:23 — Jobs: iCal goes multi-user…
(END)
