LIVEBLOGGING from Macworld 2008: Steve Jobs Keynote

10:11am: SJ pulls it out of a standard inter-office/manila envelope (that small). It’s incredibly thin.

9:55am - "This is streaming off the server -- this is free." Skiing video with totally rawkin music. Stoooooked dude.

9:54am - "Music: again, we've got 6m songs in iTunes, you can buy any of them on your widescreen TV, lets go ahead and search for something here... there they are right there, and there's the music video. Let's go to podcasts here, this is really cool. HD podcasts! We have a lot in HD now, which is really amazing." Veronica Belmont was on screen!


9:52am - "Let's go to genres... G, PG, romance, sci-fi, western... I just want to go ahead and show you search. We're just populating the database, ingesting these movies from the studio and encoding them right now. I want to find Shakespeare in Love, really fast search... and there it is. It's that simple. So now let me go back up... we have over 600 TV shows you can buy for $1.99."
 

9:50am -This is full DVD quality -- it's great. Now I'm gonna play some HD." And, of course, it looks marginally better, as HD should. Live Free or Die Hard. Where's Justin Long at?

9:49am - "So you get the idea..." He's renting the movie, downloading, "it'll tell me when it's ready to play. So I hit the play button and it'll play!" Looks pretty friggin good, even on this absolutely massive screen.

9:48am - Star Trek! I love the old Star Trek movies..." Chuckles. Blades of Glory: "Fun movie -- I can read about the movie, see the actors, directors..." shows recommendations based on what others have viewed.

9:47am - "All these features and an entirely new UI." Demo time! "This is the new UI -- one menu, it couldn't be simpler. Let's go into movies..." Man, this is a sexy interface, no doubt.

9:46am - "And, of course, play iTunes content. So all of this stuff on the new Apple TV. Let me focus on the HD movies for a minute... the library titles are $2.99 and $3.99 -- for just a dollar more rent them in HD, $3.99 and $4.99 -- there are over 100 titles available today.

9:45am - Here's what you can do with Apple TV: rent movies directly on widescreen TV with Apple TV. Rent them in DVD quality, rent them in HD with 5.1" HUGE applause! Screaming.

"Dolby 5.1 surround. The quality is unbelievable. You can also view audio and video podcasts right on ATV, choose from 125k podcasts and see them right on your widescreen. Get photos from your computer... get them also right over the internet from Flickr and .mac." Flickr support, good gawd yall.

"And, of course, YouTube -- we've expanded the selection. There's now over 50m videos from YT, This has worked out so great, our customers love this. Buy TV shows and music right from your TV. And if you're using a computer it'll sync BACK to your computer."

9:44am - "I'd like to say all of us have tried. We have, MSFT, Amazon, TiVo, VuDu, Netflix, Blockbuster -- we've all tried to figure out how to get movies over the net onto the TV. We've ALL missed. No one's succeeded yet. We tried with Apple TV -- it was designed to be an accessory for iTunes and your computer. But that's not what people wanted."

"We learned what people wanted was about movies. Movies. Movies. We weren't delivering that -- we're back with Apple TV Take 2 -- It still syncs to your computer, but no computer is required


9:43am - "It launches today! Free software update for iTunes, iPods, iPhones to support rentals. Rolling it out in the US today, we're dying to get this out internationally. But what about this? What about the flat screen TV? I'd like to watch the movies there too."


9:42am - "Here's how it works -- I'm on iTunes, looking at a movie I want to rent, I hit rent movie, and it adds to my rented movies category in my iTunes library...." Sorry for the technical difficulties everyone! We're at 10x the traffic of our last keynote, but things are coming back online.

9:41am - "Watch instantly! In less than 30s..." it streams. "The rules -- you have 30 days to start watching it, and once you start you have 24 hours to watch and finish it. As many times as you want. You can transfer films to another device in the middle -- transfer to your iPod and watch the rest on the iPod on your flight."

"What's it going to cost? To rent a library title will cost $2.99 -- new release? $3.99" Big applause.

9:40am - "Now, so what's the deal? We're gonna launch with 1k films by the end of February -- 30 days after DVD release. Watch anywhere, PCs, Macs, iPods, iPhone..."

9:39am - "We're gonna have all the great first run films -- REALLY, really great films. I'm sure you saw a lot of these in the theater. We've also got great library titles, Red October, Matrix... lots of library titles, all the great new ones from this last year..."

9:38am - "We've never offered a rental model in music because we don't think people don't want to rent music. But your favorite movie -- most of us watch once, and renting is a great way to do it. It's a great way to do it. We've got participation of great studios. Touchstone, MGM, Miramax,... and these six too. Lions Gate, Fox, WB, Walt Disney, Paramount, Universal, Sony..." Everyone! Huge applause

9:37am - "And we've sold 7m movies, again, more than everyone else put together. But it didn't meet our expectations, I have to tell you. We think there's a better way to deliver movie content through iTunes. So today, we're introducing iTunes Movie Rentals."

9:36am - "Ok, number three. This is a good one, too. Number three is about iTunes."

"I'm really pleased to report that last week we sold our 4 billionth song. 4 billion songs. On Christmas day we set a new record -- 20m songs in one day. Isn't that amazing? That's our new one day record. We've also sold 125m TV shows -- that's WAY more than everyone else put together."

9:35am - "All the same stuff we just heard about on the iPhone -- on the iPod touch. Starting today we're going to build it into every new iPod touch, for existing iPod touch users it's going to be just a $20 upgrade." EXCUSE me?! You have to PAY for this? This is SO weak.

"iPod touch, and the iPhone -- major software updates. And that's the second thing I want to talk about." Big applause.

9:34am - "The iPhone isn't standing still, we keep making it better and better. That's the iPhone. But what about hte iPod touch. What can we do for the touch? We decided to add five apps to the touch. Mail, maps, stocks, notes, and weather!" [About freaking time! - Peter]

9:33am - "They pick up beacons, triangulate the beacons, and tell you where you are -- and Google is doing the same thing triangulating cell towers -- we're using both of them, and it works pretty doggone well. We have this new add to home screen button... add our apps right to the home screen."

Demoing lyrics, chapters, languages, all the new multimedia features on the iPhone. "All of this is vailable today as a free software update for every iPhone." Big applause. v1.1.3!

9:31am - "I can create up to 9 home screens, and I can move between them with the flick of my finger. So how do we do some of this stuff? Let's take maps... how do we do that? Well, we're working with two companies. Google, and Skyhook wireless -- we've driven the US and Canada and mapped WiFi hotspots, they have 23m hotspots in their database."

9:30am - I want to customize my home screen -- I can touch any icon for a couple seconds, and they start to shake!" Chuckles. "They start to get restless!" Icons move around, new pages, dots on the bottom just like the Summerboard hack.

9:29am - The list shows an icon to the group -- "It's pretty nice. So that's sending SMSs to multiple people. Webclips! I'm gonna go to Google because they have really cool apps that work with the iPhone -- now I have a plus button and I can just push this and I can just hit add to home screen."

9:28am - "We love working with Google. So... I want to SMS more than one person at once!" Let's bring up a new message here. I want to send it to Phil and Scott, maybe Tim..." they're all coming up, just like an email to multiple people. Friggin finally. Still no sign of MMS, though.

9:26am - Maps demo now -- page curls up, search and directions buttons now -- if you've seen the 1.1.3 demo vids, this is exactly it. "Schoom. And there we are." as it locates Steve in the Moscone. "I can flip right into directions, and it uses my current location to start..." calcing the route back to Apple HQ.

9:24am - "This is our first 90 days, 4m iPhones to date." Big applause. Steve's obviously looking pretty happy up there. "What everyone's excited about is the SDK we're releasing in late Feb... a chance to write incredible apps on the iPhone. We wanted to give everyone something today, too."

"We've got some great new features today. First: maps with location!"

"You know have the ability to find your current location in maps. Webclips, right on the home screen. Up to 9 total home screen. SMS multiple people at once." Big applause on that one.

"Chapters, subs, langs in videos, lyrics in iPod." Demo time!

9:22am - "So that's TC, a perfect companion to Leopard, and that's the first thing." Applause. Number two! "It's about the iPhone." A hush...

"I've got some great news. Today happens to be exactly the 200th day since the iPhone went on sale. It's been shipping exactly 200 days. I'm extraordinarily pleased to report that we've sold 4m to date." Daaamn, Steve! Applause. "That's 20k iPhones per day, on avg. We're really pleased with this."

"What's this mean in terms of the overall market?" Chart time! It's first Q shipping it garnered 19% market share, Palm 9.8%, RIM 39%, other 20%, Nokia 7%...

Palm, Moto, Nokia together -- "We equalled all them in the first 90 days..."

9:18AM - "These two things together make up Time Capsule -- really nice. You can back up your notebook wirelessly to TC. You can backup ALL the Macs in your house wirelessly to one Time Capsule. It's really wonderful. We're gonna sell it in two versions."

"One with a 500GB drive, one with a 1TB drive inside it -- $299, and $499. Very aggressive prices because we want people backing up! Ships in Feb." Mild applause.

"We've got an ad for Time Machine -- I'd love to run it now." This is the ad released last week.

9:18am - "One of the things being announced today, Microsoft is now shipping Office Mac 2008 -- this is the last big app to go native on Intel. We're finally there, all the big apps are native on Intel. Thank you. Adobe, thank you, Microsoft, thank you. ... he's going over Time Machine, back ups.

"Today we're introducing a companion product to Time Machine -- it's called Time Capsule."

"It's really clever, it's a backup appliance. What it has in it is an Airport Extreme base station and a hard drive -- 802.11n wireless and a server grade hard drive in it."

9:16am - It was an extrarodinary year for Apple, I want to take a moment and say thank you. Thank you, for an extraordinary 2007. Huge applause. I've got four things I'd like to talk about today. The first one: Leopard. I'm thrilled to report that we have delivered over 5 million copies of Leopard in the first 3 months. It's the most successful release of OS X EVER. Almost 20% of the OS X install base has upgraded. Unprecedented. We're really thrilled by this.

Steve's quoting Mossberg, Pogue, Baig... all their positive reviews of Leopard.

9:15am - Welcome to Macworld 2008! There is clearly something in the air today. Before we dive into all that, I just wanted to take a moment to look back to 2007. 2007 was an extraordinary year for Apple. The amazing new iMac, awesome new iPods, and the revolutionary new iPhone.