Despite its relatively tame product announcements and the absence of Steve Jobs, Apple’s final Macworld keynote wasn’t without a highpoint or two: changes in pricing and digital rights management for the iTunes store, a new 17-inch MacBook Pro with an eight-hour battery life, and a surprise appearance by crooner Tony Bennett, among them. After the jump, the event in pictures courtesy of ATD’s crack photojournalist, Adam Tow.
Looks like today’s keynote will include a “One More Thing” moment after all, even without Steve Jobs to deliver it. And it will focus on iTunes. Three big updates to the iconic software, today. Plus, Tony Bennett to close out the keynote with two of his most familiar–and given the venue, appropriate–songs.
Next up, the new and expected 17-inch MacBook Pro. Before introducing it, Schiller notes that the MacBook has been the No. 1 notebook computer in the states.
The new machine is largely as predicted. It boasts Apple’s new unibody chassis and a glass touch trackpad. At 6.6 pounds, it’s the world’s lightest notebook. It has a hi-res backlit display. “The best display we’ve ever shipped in a notebook,” says Schiller, with a 60 percent greater color gamut than other machines.
Number two on Phil Schiller’s list of three announcements: iWork ’09. The next iteration of Keynote, Apple’s presentation application, offers some new object transition features: object zoom, a swing transition (Schiller demos it with a Bush-to-Obama slide that gets a laugh from the audience). There are also some new text transitions and chart animations. Finally, Apple’s offering a Keynote Remote application. It’s an iPhone app, of course.
Phil Schiller returns to the stage to explain Garageband ’09. Our team was challenged to help people learn to play a musical instrument and they came through, says Schiller. Garageband now offers a feature called “Learn to Play” which offers not just nine basic lessons for guitar and piano, but “Artist Lessons” from the likes of John Fogerty, Norah Jones and Sting.
Next up on the Macworld agenda: iMovie. The software has been given not just a refresh, but a full rewrite. We’ve added so much to iMovie this year, says Schiller, that iMovie will be the consumer video editing software to have. And that may turn out to be so.
An appreciative Phil Schiller welcomes the crowd and thanks everyone for showing up. He says it’s an incredibly exciting time for Apple, and offers a quick overview of Apple’s new retail stores. Says Schiller: This year’s Macworld will be all about the Mac. I’ve got three new things to tell you about. Subject No. 1 is iPhoto.
With the misinformation surrounding Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s health finally refuted, Phil Schiller’s Macworld keynote address today will likely be quite a bit less somber than it was shaping up to be. Certainly, the Macworld audience will be in a more jovial mood now that the morbid undercurrent that might otherwise have darkened the event has been dispersed. Schiller too. Now he need not worry about the audience’s preoccupation with Jobs’s health, just about filling the Apple CEO’s considerable keynote shoes.
With Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide product marketing, delivering the Macworld keynote today, analyst expectations for big product announcements are running very, very low.
With just days to go before the 25th Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco kicks off Tuesday morning, speculation about what Apple may or may not unveil during senior vice president Philip Schiller’s keynote address is mounting. Among the rumored possibilities: a preview of Snow Leopard, a long-overdue update to the Mac Mini, new iMacs and perhaps an appearance by CEO Steve Jobs himself.
Told that Macworld Expo 2009 will be Apple’s last, and the first that CEO Steve Jobs does not keynote, investors behaved much as you’d imagine, dragging the company’s shares into the mud in after-hours trading. Fueling the panic: obvious concerns about Jobs’s well-being. And, of course, speculation that Macworld is likely to disappoint devotees hoping for the introduction of some insanely great new product. But would Apple really send Senior VP Phil Schiller out onto the Macworld stage without a cool new product to introduce?
Dissapointing news for the Mac faithful and anyone who’s ever seen Apple CEO Steve Jobs deliver his annual Macworld keynote address. Macworld Expo 2009 will be the first such event that Jobs will not keynote and the last the company will attend.
In a short video, senior designer Jon Ives and other members of Apple’s industrial design team explain the new unibody enclosure. Machining enables a level of precision unheard of in the industry, says Ives. In many ways, these notebooks are more beautiful on the inside than they are on the outside.
There’s lots of emphasis at this unveiling on environmental concerns, reducing the footprint for manufacturing the new notebooks.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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