Open Thread: Macworld Keynote reactions

Everyone, here is the transcript from my live report. Now it is your turn, sound off on the comments on the good, bad, and ugly on today’s keynote.

1029 Ending with a special treat! What is it. Randy Newman is going to come perform. Looks like thats it for announcements. Randy is going to play now, thanks for listening in folks.

1028: Now going over what has been announced. The macs from last week, Time Capsule, Update to the iPhone and iPod Touch, iTunes movie rentals, new Apple TV, Macbook Air. All great stuff!

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10:23 5 Hours of battery life with Airport turned on. 3 pounds, super-thin, 13.3 inch fullsize display, full size keyboard, multitouch gestures, isight camera built in, 1.6 ghz 2 duo, 2 GB memory standard, 80GB Hard drive, 802.11n wifi, bluetooth, magsafe, all for $1799. Begin shipping in two week. Now talking about environmental initiatives. Fully aluminum case. First display that is mecury-free and uses aresinic-free. PVC free and BFR free on the circuit board. Retail packaging is 56 percent less volume.

10:15 Steve asks how did we fit a Mac in here? Showing the inside. 1.8 inch hard drives, same as used in iPod. 80GB or a 64 GB solid state HD. Performance has not been compromised. Intel Core 2 Duo processor. 1.6 GHZ or upgradge to 1.8 GHZ. CEO of Intel is up there talking about the challenge of building the processor. It has a magsafe connector. A flip down door, USB 2, Micro-DVI and a headphone jack. Built in the best wireles, 802.11N, Bluetooth 2.1 and EDR. There is no optical drive. You can buy an optional super-drive for $99. Steve thinks people won’t need a drive. Don’t need them for movies because of itunes. You can use an iPod for music, for Backups you can use TimeMachine. You can also install software wirelessly. There is something called Remote disk, when you go to the finder in the Macbook Air you will have easy sharing with other macs via CD sharing.

10:07 Now onto the 4th thing. Now is addressing, there is something in the air. Steve is going over the Macbook, and Macbook Pro, and now introducing the Macbook Air!It is the world’s thinnest notebook. Steve shows the Sony notebooks as an example of thin. They generally weigh about 3 pounds, they are about .8-1.2inches wide. The display is 11 or 12 inch display. And the keyboard is usually miniature. And the processor are slower. Now going over the thinness of the Macbook Air. It goes from .76 inches to .16 inches!! The thickest part of the Macbook air is thinner than the thinnest part of the sony. LOL, steve says it fits in an interoffice envelope, and he shows it in one. This thing is thin! Full size keyboard, fullsize display. It is now the world’s thinnest notebook. Magnetic latch. 13.3 widescreen display! It is an LED backlight display. There is a built-in isight camera. Full-size keyboard. Ambiant light sensor on the keyboard too. Large trackpad, they have also built-in multi-gesture support for the trackpad. There are all kinds of preferences for gestures. Sort of a hybrid of iPhone gestures, very very interesting. Pinch zoom just like on iPhone! But all through the keypad.

10:10 Now going over iTunes movie rentals again. Now introducing Jim Gianolpulos, the Chairman and CEO of Fox, the first studio to sign-up with Apple. Now talking about DVD and Blu-Ray content. Fox has announced that there is a digital copy of movies on DVDs that allows you to move it to portable media, including on DVDs. Very very cool.

955: Now showing how you can get to dotmac web gallerys right with Apple TV via a new interface. Not only audio, but also videos made in iMovie. All this is done without a computer. Now showing Flickr, there is now an interesting integration with Flickr. Can search friends, and see their slide shows. Some demo problems with Flickr….Steve handles it fine, of course. Apple TV is a free software upgrade!! Awesome. Now also announcing a price reduction of Apple TV from $299 to $229. Everything will be shipping (free software update) and new Apple TV in 2 weeks.

952: Steve is now showing how you can search iTunes music, buy it, or view videos. Now going to podcasts and showing podcasts that are in HD. I actually didn’t know there were HD video podcasts, pretty cool!

946: Now demoing Apple TV which now has a new interface. The new interface is very simply. Now going to show the HD quality. Live Free or Die Hard. Of course I have quesitons, is it 720p? What about 1080p

942: Now about to drop the bomb on what about the TV? Apple has tried, Amazon, msft, vudu, netflix (this is Steve talking). He is saying we all missed. Steve is saying he tried with Apple TV, but its not what people wants. Apple TV Take 2. No computer now required with Apple TV 2. Direct from widescreen you can rent movies on your Apple TV. You can rent them in HD quality with Dolby 5:1!!! You can get podcasts, audio, video, photos from .mac and flickr right from your Apple TV. You can buy tv shows and music right from Apple TV. HD movies cost 1 dollar more to build. Right now there are 100 titles, but it is going to build up fast. Now he is going to demo Apple TV 2.

941: Everything is integrated into the iTunes UI in a briliant fashion. Can go back and forth. It launches today! Free software update for iTunes, iPods and iPhones happening today. USA only today, international later this year.

935: Now onto iTunes. Now sold 4 Billion songs. On xmas this year 20 million songs were sold, a record. 125 million TV shows were sold, 7 million movies were sold. Steve thinks there is a better way to deliver movie content, iTunes Movie Rentals. Apple is finally getting it! So the iTunes store will now offer movie rentals. Touchstone, miramax, newline, lions gate, 20th century fox, disney, paramount, sony, and universal are all participating!! Wow that is huge. Even Sony. Every major studio is supporting this effort. 1000 films by the end of February. They will released 30 days after DVDs. Can watch on Macs, PCs, all current iPod and iPhone. Watch instantely. You have 30 days to start and then 24 hours to finish. You can transfer the movie from one device to another seemlessly. A library title is $2.99, a new release, $3.99. Very very aggressive pricing!

Now going over the iPod Touch. They have decided to add Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes and Weather. This is kind of a no brainer, I mean why wasn’t in there in the beginning?! It will be on new iPod touchs. Get ready to rant folks, current users have to pay $20 to upgrade!!! This will be the new wtf Apple rant of the next few weeks.

9:31 How does the iPhone map piece work? With a company called Skyhook wireless that maps hotspots throughout the US and Canada. So Apple then combines that data with what Google does from triangulating cell towers and combines the information.

All the iPhone stuff will be available today as a free iPhone update. Not sure what all those hackers are gonna do out there!
924: iPhone now has Maps with location. Webclips. Can customize the home screens. You can SMS multiple people at once. Videos on iPhone now has Chapters support for videos. Steve is now demoing the locate feature. Now showing how you can send multiple SMS’s to more than one person at once, pretty cool feature. Now showing webclips. Going to Google “because they have a lot of cool apps that work with the iPhone”. There is now an add to homescreen which allows you to now add a webpage link to the home screen! Sweet. Now loading the NYtimes. Webclips sort of work like dashboard clips, so not only are they bookmkars to a website, but to a particular area within a website. So Steve is showing you how you can make a webclip of the technology section of the NYtimes. Now showing how you can literally drag and drop icons around and organize them the way you want.

920: The second thing Steve wants to share about the iPhone. It is the 200th day since the iPhone went on sale. Apple has sold 4 million iPhones. 20,000 iPhone every day. Apple’s first quarter results were 19.5 perfect marketshare. Only RIM was higher.

918: Introducing Time Capsule, a backup appliance. It has an Airport Extreme basestation with a hard drive. You can now backup a notebook wirelessly, all the machines in a house to one Time Capsule. Two versions, one with 500GB for $299 and a terabyte version for $499. Shipping in February. Awesome price points, Steve! It is the perfect companion product to Time Machine. Steve is running an ad now.

917: Microsoft will be shipping Office 2008. Its the last big app to go native on Intel. Now going over Time Machine.

9:15: 5 millions copies of Leopard have sold. Leopard now makes up to 20 percent of the OS X marketshare, the fastest adoption ever.

9:14 Starting off with a Mac/PC ad, everyone is cheering like mad! Steve is now on stage, doing a recap of 2007 now before he gets started.

9:09 OK, lets go through the big rumors. iPhone 2.0? I say no. A lot of people forget that this time a year ago the iPhone wasn’t even announced let alone shipping! I think the predictions for some sort of light form factor Macbook portable are spot on. I’ve been clamouring for this for a long time and it just makes sense for Apple to release a high-margain piece of hardware. What about the whole Air thing? I actually thing it is a theme that will tie a bunch of things togeather. Air=A super light-weight portable. Air=The ability to order things over the air using an iPhone (with Starbucks being the first to roll this out. I also think this could be the beginning of the iTunes account working as some sort of Paypal account. Pay for that double-Latte from your iTunes account! Air=downloadable video delivered throughout the house.

9:05 Just hung out with the President of BBedit software, the software I am using to blog here. For those who care basically I write notes within BBedit in an html document. BBedit has the ability to connect directly to an FTP server. I just hit save and it saves it to a custom domain Enginehosting setup at live.applematters.com. Since its just an html page the dedicated server should handle things fine. Cross your fingers!

8:58 I’m in. Kind of a weird process waiting in the speakers lounge. I haven’t really had any breakfast but I’m in! Not quite sure why but things feel a lot more disorganized this year. It is 9:00am and most people still haven’t taken their seats. A lot of media here this year, feels like more than usual.

7:31: About to move to another room here as part of the staging. Check back in soon

7:14: Air, what the hell does that mean! Some kind of bottled Apple oxygen? Have some other ideas, check out the poll at iPhoneMatters

7:06: Since I am speaking at Macworld this year I have the priviledge of being in the Speakers lounge, well away from the massive throngs on Mac users. Over the years I have attended Macworld as a member of the public (when, to be honest, the lines weren’t that crazy), as a member of the press for Apple Matters, and last year as a member of the public. Last year Chris Seibold and I got in line at, I think, around 4am. There is something very authentic about waiting in line at 4am just to hear Steve Jobs speak. Then again there is something very nice sitting in a speakers lounge and waiting starting at 7am.

7:00: First of all I want to make a shoutout to Chris Seibold and Gregory Ng both who have been with at various Macworld throughout the years. Chris can’t be hear because he is finishing up what will probably be the best Mac book ever, The Big Book of Apple Hacks for O’Reilly Media which is due out any day. Greg Ng can’t be here because he is tied up with work back in Boston.