Steve Jobs announces a new super-thin Macbook Air, new iPhone/iPod Touch features, but one more thing... is no more things.
Steve Jobs announces a new super-thin Macbook Air, new iPhone/iPod Touch features, but one more thing... is no more things.
Steve Jobs announced four major Apple products at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco today, but omitted the generally assumed "one more thing" highlight, opting instead for allowing Oscar-winning composer Randy Newman to tinkle away on the piano.
"2007 was an extraordinary year for Apple" Jobs opened with, before revealing the sales figures for OS X Leopard. "We have delivered over 5 million copies of Leopard", he said. He claimed it to be the most successful release of Mac OS X ever, resulting in almost 20 percent of the Apple install base having shifted over to Leopard.
Jobs then detailed that he wanted to look over four main "things" -- other press conferences would nominally have talked about products, but Apple's style is often informal -- as part of his keynote. Jobs very briefly talked about about Office Mac 2008; we bring this up purely because it's almost certainly the only time you'll hear a crowd of the Apple faithful cheering for Microsoft.
The first of Jobs' four big announcements should come as relief -- of a sort -- for notebook users of Leopard, frustrated by the lack of wireless backup options. Jobs announced a a companion product to Time Machine; Time Capsule -- A full AIrport extreme base station and a hard drive in one. Jobs said it contained a "server grade" hard drive within, in either 500GB or 1TB configurations. Shipping in February, it'll set back Australian consumers $429 and $699 respectively.
Moving onto the iPhone, Jobs revealed that in the first 200 days, Apple had sold over 4 million iPhones -- an average of 20,000 iPhones per day. According to Gartner data that Jobs quoted, Apple had 19.5 percent of the US Smartphone market for the 3rd calendar quarter of 2007 -- as much as Palm, Motorola and Nokia combined, albeit beaten our rather handily by RIM, who had 39 percent. "We think we've done even better in December", Jobs claimed.
This led in to Job's second announcement, with new features for both the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new iPhone features are Maps with location detection, Web Clips as buttons on the home screen -- of which you can now have nine -- the ability to send group SMSes, support for video chaptering and finally lyrics display for songs. Jobs then demonstrated the new features; while the iPhone lacks a dedicated GPS, it uses a combination of Google's location technology using mobile phone towers and data collected on WiFi hotspots by a company called Skyhook Wireless, which, Jobs claimed, has mapped over 23 million WiFi hotspots in the US alone. Europe is apparently next, although predictably no mention was made of Australian WiFi Mapping. All of the new features are available today for iPhone users.
Jobs also announced that the Mail, maps, stocks, notes and weather applications from the iPhone would be made available to owners of the iPod Touch, but there's a catch. Adding them will cost iPod Touch users AU$24.99, whereas iPhone users get the same applications for nothing. The update for the iPod Touch should be available for Australian users tomorrow, according to Apple Australia representatives.
It was the third "thing" that Jobs spent the majority of his time covering, but sadly for Australian users it was by far the least compelling -- at least for the time being. As predicted, Jobs announced the iPod Movie Rental service, with titles available for a standard 30 day (or 24 hours following the first viewing service) for a cost of US$2.99 for older library titles, and $3.99 for new releases.
New releases is relative, however -- titles won't be available until 30 days after their DVD release. Apple does have the benefit of having just about every major Hollywood studio on board -- Touchstone, Miriamax, MGM, Lions Gate, New Line, Fox, WB, Distney, Universal and Sony. HD versions of films will also be made available for a $1 premium over the standard rental cost.
Jobs also relaunched the Apple TV, built mostly around the promise of movie rentals -- or as Jobs put it, they got it wrong, and what consumers want is "Movies, movies, movies". Apple TV can now deal directly with the iTunes rental store -- if you're American -- and a software update will be made freely available to existing Apple TV owners.
Jobs also announced a price cut for the Apple TV, down from US$299 to US$229. At the time of writing, Apple Australia representatives were unable to provide information about any Australian Apple TV price cut.
You can't have a product demonstration without something going wrong, and in the case of the keynote, it was Apple TV's refusal to bring up Flickr photos on demand -- we'll have to take Steve's word that it actually works when you're not in front of an audience of thousands.
As part of the Apple TV announcement, Jobs introduced the chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox, Jim Gianopulos, who wowed the crowd with an iPod-style Homer Simpson slide, with Homer listening to an iPod Donut. No iPod donut announcement was made, sadly. Gianopulos saw a big future in both DVD and online movie rentals, although he did say with a sigh that "the next generation format will be Blu-Ray, it looks like".
 iHomer: uDonut. Me EAT! |
One interesting titbit to come from Gianopulos was that forthcoming Fox DVDs will ship with iPod compatible versions of their content on the disc. The first disc, Family Guy: Blue Harvest (a Star Wars spoof) shipping in the US today, contains an iPod-compatible version of the special episode.
The fourth announcement revealed the mystery behind the "There's something in the Air" placards that are all over most of San Francisco right now -- the much rumoured Macbook Air. A super-thin Notebook for the portable crowd, the Macbook Air weighs in at 3 lbs (1.36kg) and measures a very slender 0.76"-0.16" (1.93-0.40cm). Running on a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo (with an option for 1.8Ghz), 80GB standard hard drive (or 64GB SSD option, which will cost more), 13.3" display and full keyboard, the Air sits between the existing Macbook and Macbook Pro lines.
Jobs compared it in size to a standard mail envelope -- and then drew cheers from the crowd by pulling one out of the same envelope. The unit ships sans an optical drive (Apple will sell an external Superdrive for AU$139), but with remote disc access capabilities that will allow users to share and access nearby network drives -- PC or Mac -- for the purposes of installing software or copying files.
 Exclusive: Ever wondered what Steve Jobs looks like from the back of an auditorium with a cheap digital camera? Well, now you know. Also pictured: The Macbook Air |
Jobs claimed that the Macbook Air would be capable of running for up to five hours while surfing the web or checking email, which is a bold claim if it's actually true. Apple's also taken the gestures that it introduced in the iPhone to the Macbook Air, which can pinch, drag and rotate photos (and presumably other media types) with user-selectable gestures. Apple Australia representatives were not aware of plans to offer the same gesture ability to existing Macbook and Macbook Pro users.
The new models were claimed to be environmentally friendly, with a fully recyclable Aluminium case, mercury and arsenic free glass. The Macbook Air will be available in Australia in February at a base price of $2499 for the base configuration.
Normally in a Macworld Keynote, this is the point where Jobs would drop one of his (in)famous "one more thing" announcement bombshells, but instead, he announced a special two-song performance by Oscar winning composer Randy Newman. The crowd sat anxiously, waiting for that one more thing.. and then Jobs closed the keynote, to the surprise of many.
Alex Kidman travelled to Macworld San Francisco as a guest of Apple.
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