All Things Digital

As the anniversary of the iPhone’s market debut approaches, the Mac faithful are quickly succumbing to Apple (AAPL) Rumor Seasonal Affective Disorder, an ailment most often associated with the lead-up to Macworld.

Fueling that trend today is a memo, purportedly leaked from inside AT&T (T), instructing employees not to schedule any vacation between June 15 and July 12 to ensure sufficient staffing for “an exciting Summer Promotional Launch.” This, of course, is being taken as proof positive that the 3G iPhone will arrive at market sometime during that timeframe. And for good reason, AT&T issued a similar mandate last year prior to the iPhone’s official debut.

Meanwhile, Vodafone (VOD) and Telecom Italia (TI-A) said today that they’d both won contracts to bring the iPhone to Italy this year, the first time Apple has allowed two mobile carriers to distribute the device in a single country.

An interesting bit of news and one that lends some validity to recent reports that Apple is stepping back from the exclusive iPhone distribution arrangements it’s been inking to spur iPhone growth abroad. “Apple’s either turned a corner that they’ve had to turn, or that they’ve chosen to,” Technology Business Research’s Ezra Gottheil said of the Vodafone and Telecom Italia deals. “I don’t know if they prefer the exclusivity, and the revenue sharing that goes along with it, or just prefer to sell iPhones and grow their share of the [handset] market.”

Note: Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski is off sick today. This post is being filed from notes taken at the Macworld keynote at San Francisco’s Moscone Center by Associate Editor John Sullivan. Check back later for Paczkowski’s take on the proceedings.

After a week of rumor buildup and speculation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote seemed almost subdued. He gave the crowd what it expected in terms of new iPhone apps and additional iTunes features, and then finished with the announcement it had been primed for: the MacBook Air, the world’s thinnest laptop computer.

Jobs began his keynote a few minutes past 9 a.m. For the barely contained crowd (Moscone West was packed), the aura of anticipation was heightened by rock and hip-hop music blaring over the speakers. After the lights came down, the crowd hooted and yelped. Then, after a Mac Guy/PC Guy video (about what a terrible year it was for PC guy, who finishes by telling Mac Guy he’s “gonna copy everything you did in 2007″), Jobs took the stage in his uniform black turtleneck and blue jeans, declaring: “Clearly something is in the air today.”

After noting that 2007 was an “incredible” year, an “extraordinary” year, capped by the “revolutionary” iPhone, Jobs announces that he will address four things:

1. Leopard:

   This was the most successful release of Mac OS X, Jobs notes, with 5 million units sold. He quotes reviews from Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal (and co-executive editor of this site), David Pogue from the New York Times and Ed Baig of USA Today.

   As for Time Machine: For backing up files, it works great, he says. Today, he’s announcing a companion product: a backup appliance called Time Capsule. Plug it in, turn it on, enable Time Capsule on all your machines: one with 500 gigabytes ($299) and another with one terabyte ($499). “We want people backing up their content,” he says. “[This] is a perfect companion to Leopard.”

2. iPhone:

   “Got some great news for you,” Jobs announces. “Today is the 200th day the iPhone is on sale. Sales of 4 million so far. What does this mean for the smart-phone market?” He quotes research: RIM had most sales (39%); Apple had 19.5%; Palm 18%. First 90 days, iPhone equaled Palm, Motorola and Nokia sales combined, Jobs says.

   SDK for the iPhone is coming in late February, Jobs continues, but: “We wanted to give something today.” He lists “great new features”: maps with location; Webclips to customize home screen; SMS messaging to multiple people; chapters capability for video; and support for Lyric.

   Map app looks much more localized, customizable; drop a pin, move a pin. Developed in conjunction with Google, Jobs says.

   SMS more than one person: With the new app, you can message multiple recipients–one click and you can send multiple messages.

   Webclips: We worked with Google on this app, Jobs notes again. The icons can be added to screen of iPhone. Jobs demos a “jiggle” function to edit Webclips and rearrange them. This feature can add up to nine home screens to the iPhone.

   How do we make maps work? Jobs asks: Skyhook Wireless, which mapped Wi-Fi hotspots and located 23 million of them. “Isn’t that cool? It’s really cool,” Jobs enthuses. Triangulation is the key, he says, noting that’s what Google is doing.

   “All of this is available today as a free update to all iPhone users,” he proclaims, to applause.

   Then, almost as an afterthought: iPod Touch. “We’ve decided to add five apps”: maps with Wi-Fi location, mail, stocks, notes and weather–all of which will be built in to new models, with a upgrade available to existing users for $20.

3. iTunes:

   “We sold our four billionth song this month,” Jobs notes, adding that on Christmas Day, iTunes sold 20 million songs. It has sold 125 million TV shows and 7 million movies.

   But, he adds, we think there’s a better way to deliver movies: iTunes movie rentals. Not like music, which you buy to listen to a thousand times. You watch a movie once. Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lionsgate, New Line are all on board, plus (big applause): 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Universal and Sony. “We have every major studio supporting us: really, really great films…We’re gonna launch with 1,000 films by the end of February.” And you can watch them anywhere, Jobs notes: Mac, PC, iPhone–anywhere with broadband. When you rent, you get a 30-day window to watch a movie, with a 24-hour start/stop time frame. Plus, he notes, you can transfer them around your devices, too. Cost: $2.99 for library titles, $3.99 for new releases.

   Jobs repeats point that all movies can be moved to a different device: e.g., iPod or PC. But what about flat-screen TV? “All of us have tried,” Jobs says of that hurdle, “and we’ve all missed.” But now, he adds, we’re back with Apple TV, Take 2: No computer, but it still syncs with TV.

   The iTunes movies can also be rented in high definition with Dolby 5.1 sound. You can get podcasts, photos from Flickr and .Mac. Finally, Jobs mentions a YouTube connection: 50 million videos. So you can buy TV shows and music and play this iTunes content on TV too.

   The HD-quality option is $1 more, Jobs says: $4.99 for new releases. (Demo: Jobs shows free preview function for “Blades of Glory,” as well as an almost instantaneous download and play of movie). Full DVD quality. Then, he gives an HD demo of “Live Free or Die Hard”: “Very strong,” Jobs opines.

   TV shows: Over 600 shows, he notes, at $1.99 per episode. All can sync with PC or Mac.

   Podcasts: lot of HD podcasts, very cool. “HD content streaming free.” Shows “incredible” clip from Teton.

   For Apple TV: free software upgrade for current owners. But because “We want to make Apple TV even more accessible,” starting today, Jobs says, the new price is $229 (from $299).

   “I think we’ve got it all together,” Jobs says, noting Apple has a great working relationship with Fox. He then introduces Jim Gianopulos, chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox Filmed Entertainment: “When you get down to it, there are two things,” Gianopulos says. “Make great movies, and give them to audience in as many ways as they want.” People want choice, he adds, viewing options, access, control and availability.

   “This is the coolest thing we ever heard,” Gianopulos says. “Music, then iPod. Phone, then iPhone. Apple does things in innovative ways. We’ve been working on DVD…[his Blu-ray mention draws applause]…But we also don’t want to deny the viewer the option of having a copy”–a physical copy of the movie. He shows first one, a take-off on “Star Wars.” “It’s an exciting beginning with Apple,” he concludes.

4. MacBook Air.

   Jobs is back: “There’s something in the air,” he repeats. “As you know, Apple makes the best notebooks on the planet. Today, we’re introducing a third kind of notebook: MacBook Air.” After comparing all subnotebooks, he announces: “There was room for improvement.”

   So, MacBook Air stats: .76 of an inch at thickest part to .16 of an inch at thinnest. “We’re talking thin here; let me show it to you now.” He picks up a manila envelope and produces the aluminum device; crowd oohs and ahs at its size. Yet it has a full 13.3-inch display; “gorgeous” Jobs says. It also has a built-in camera; full-size back-lit keyboard; multi-touch gesture function–in short, Jobs says, “We’ve taken things we’ve learned from iPhone and now they’re in our computers.”

   How did Apple do it? Three things: battery; 1.8-inch drive; 80GB hard-disk drive (or 64 SSD, as an option). The laptop’s board is the size of a pencil. “An amazing feat of engineering,” Jobs notes. “And we didn’t compromise on performance: speedy processor: Intel Core 2 duo.” Jobs mentions Apple’s great relationship with Intel; “We asked them to consider smaller packaging on their chip: They came up with the same chip in a package that is 60 percent smaller, and that’s why we were able to build the MacBook Air,” Jobs remarks.

   Then Intel CEO Paul Otellini comes onstage and delivers his take on how the two companies collaborated on meeting the challenge. In short, a commitment to innovation drove the effort.

   Bottom line: After more discussion of the MacBook Air’s features, Jobs mentions price: All these features–along with a battery that gives five hours per recharge–for $1,799. Audible “wow” from the audience.

   One other side of MacBook Air, Jobs adds: environmentally conscious: aluminum case; arsenic-free glass; mercury-free and bromide-free components, plus less packaging.

So, Jobs concludes, “The thinnest notebook in the world joins MacBook and MacBook Pro, the best in the industry.”

With just days to go before Steve Jobs takes the stage in San Francisco for his annual Macworld Expo keynote, the banners are being hoisted at Moscone Center, the site of next week’s expo. And, as often happens, their ambiguous messages are causing feverish speculation among the Mac faithful. The text on this year’s banners: “There’s something in the air.”

Now, to what could these banners possibly be referring? Streaming iTunes movie rentals to the Apple TV? A genetically modified iVirus? The iSmell? A featherlight subnotebook? Or something else entirely? Say a WiMax-enabled MacBook Pro?

In the final paragraph of his February 2007 essay, “Thoughts On Music,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that should the top four music labels allow their music to be sold online without DRM (digital rights management) technology, it would “create a truly interoperable music marketplace”–one that Apple would embrace “wholeheartedly.”

Well, it’s taken nearly a year, but the marketplace to which Jobs referred is nearly here. Only it’s not at Apple’s iTunes store. It’s at Amazon.

Yesterday afternoon Sony BMG said it will begin selling DRM-free music through Amazon.com MP3 at the end of this month. That makes it the last of the “Big Four” music labels to abandon DRM and begin distributing its catalog through Amazon. “This is such an exciting day for us and our customers,” Bill Carr, vice president for digital music at Amazon, told the New York Times. “All four major labels will be part of our service. It means our customers will really have access to all the biggest artists in the world.”

Which is obviously great news for Amazon’s fledgling music service and for the major music companies as well. What better way to rein in Apple’s dominant iTunes store than by empowering its worthiest adversary–if only for a moment. Because chances are, Apple was planning on taking iTunes totally DRM-free at Macworld next week anyway. Which may make this a bit of a non-announcement, at least as far as Apple is concerned. Said Pali Capital analyst Richard Greenfield: “My guess is that Apple doesn’t care. The reality is, everyone will now start downloading their songs more cheaply someplace else and using them on their iPods.”

When Apple uncrates a Mac Pro that delivers “up to twice the performance of its predecessor” the week before Macworld, you know the company must be planning to roll out something damn impressive during CEO Steve Jobs’s keynote address next week.

This morning Apple announced upgrades to its Mac Pro desktops and Xserve servers. Powering the new machines: one or two of the new quad-core 45 nanometer Penryn-family processors Intel announced at CES yesterday. “The new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we’ve ever made,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of product marketing. Interestingly, the company’s new Xserve is, according to the press release, Apple’s “most powerful server ever.”

Odd that Apple would announce some of its fastest and most powerful machines the week before Macworld San Francisco. Perhaps Jobs wanted to steal a little bit of buzz from CES, as he did last year with the announcement of the iPhone. In any event, the debut of these new products would seem to make it more likely that Apple will indeed announce updated MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops next week.

Well, not exactly. But the debut of Intel’s Penryn laptop processors at the Consumer Electronics Show today likely means there are some big changes in store for Apple’s product line, and we’ll almost undoubtedly see a few of them at Macworld next week.

Intel uncrated 16 of the new processors, all of them smaller, denser and faster than their predecessors, thanks to the company’s 45-nanometer manufacturing process. Among Intel’s Penryn offerings: chips ranging in performance from 2.10GHz with the Core 2 Duo T8100 processor to 2.80GHz with the Core 2 Extreme X9000.

Popular Mechanics is frantically turning the crank on the Apple rumor mill, isn’t it? In the annual guessing-game leading up to the Macworld Expo, the publication speculates that CEO Steve Jobs will announce a breakthrough laptop-tablet device at this year’s keynote, one quite a bit different from the gigantism-afflicted iPhone tablets imagined by others.

” … Any Apple tablet would have to be, first and foremost, a laptop–not an über-iPhone,” writes Popular Mechanics’ Glenn Derene. “… [It should] have a full keyboard, and since the keyboard generally dictates the size of the screen, I’d propose a 13-in. widescreen. … It could, and should, be 2.5 pounds or less. To achieve that, the tablet should offload heavy components such as the optical drive, making do with, say, a 32 GB solid-state drive rather than a hard-disk drive. … That would let it run a full Leopard OS while delivering long battery life. … [And it] should ship with a desktop dock. … Much more than a simple port replicator, this dock would house a DVD burner (maybe even an HD-DVD/Blu-ray combo drive) and a 500 GB 2.5-in. hard-disk drive that could automatically sync with and back up the SSD onboard the MacBook Plus. The dock would bump up performance with a graphics card that could take over from the MacBook Plus’s motherboard GPU, plus some extra RAM and instructions to the CPU to kick up its clock speed.”

An imaginative little bit of fantasy, this, and one that makes for great reading. That said, if the Apple Industrial Design Group were ever to propose a device like the one pictured above to CEO Steve Jobs, he’d probably hurl them one-by-one from the roof of Apple HQ.

I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE THE CEASE-AND-DESIST

CrunchGear has published a photo (or perhaps Photoshop) of the subnotebook that Apple is reportedly planning to launch at Macworld ‘08. The machine–if it is indeed real–is thin as all get-out, but apparently quite well-endowed in the trackpad department.

As lawsuits go, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Klausner Technologies filed a $360 million patent-infringement suit against Apple Monday claiming iPhone’s Visual Voicemail, a signature feature of the device, violates a few Klausner patents (so much for those vaunted “200 iPhone patents”). This on the very day that IDG World Expo announced that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote address at Macworld Conference & Expo 2008.

Surely a coincidence. But no doubt an uncomfortable one for Apple. Perish the thought of Jobs pitching a defeaturing of the iPhone during his Macworld keynote. … “We’ve designed something truly wonderful …. Aural Voicemail. Boom?” Best to sweep this one from the decks before January, yeah?

Anyway, Klausner–a patent holding outfit founded by Judah Klausner, who claims to have invented the PDA and electronic organizer–alleges the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail feature violates two of its patents (U.S. Patents 5,572,576 and 5,283,818) and demands $360 million in damages and future royalties. Sadly for Apple it may well get them. Klausner has won two previous infringement lawsuits over the same patents, wringing settlement agreements out of AOL and Vonage both in the past year.

And Apple once licensed some of the intellectual property at issue here for use in the Newton. Apple’s accountants are probably already working out the math on this one. As are AT&T, Comcast and eBay, which were all slapped with similar suits.

Contrary to Microsoft statements issued, oh, just about six weeks ago, Office 2008 for Mac will not ship by the end of the year. Instead, the first major release of the productivity suite since 2004 will arrive at market in mid-January 2008. “There was no one thing that caused the push—it was more of a perfect storm,” Craig Eisler, general manager of Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, told Ars Technica. “The switch to Intel processors, the switch to different tools in the development stream, the switch in formats with Office–all of it presented different roadblocks for the team, and we wanted to make sure we could address all of those issues.”

And don’t forget company tradition. Microsoft postponed its initial shipment deadlines for Windows Vista and Office 2007, as well.

“As tough as it is, I firmly believe that this slip is the right call for MacBU,” Eisler wrote in a post to Mac Mojo. “Delivering Office at the right quality level is super important to the entire team and to Microsoft’s long-standing commitment to the Mac platform, and it was clear from our June and July quality checkpoints that no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t release our product in time for the Christmas season with the kind of quality we wanted.”

So Microsoft will debut it right around the time of the Macworld Expo, Apple’s big conference and trade show, which is pretty much like Christmas for the Mac faithful anyway.