Notes on the 2005 WWDC Keynote

Musical selections: Some hip-hop track, Vertigo by U2, Technologic by Daft Punk, Speed of Sound by Coldplay, the track from the old Macworld iPod ads.

Video coverage of the attendees shows someone with a Windows tablet (slight booing), someone holding up a laptop that says “JIMMY!” on the screen (cheering), someone holding up an iSight to record (laughter), jugglers (what the hell?), Woz (applause).

10:01 and the “program about to begin” sign shows up. 10:03, copyright notice with “Product specifications are subject to change without notice.”

Steve is out, NO JEANS! “Today’s an important day.”

Conference stats

• 3,800+ attendees, largest in the last decade
• 45 countries, including China and India
• 110 lab sessions, 39 hands-on sessions
• 95 presentation sessions
• 500+ Apple engineers on-site
• 400+ Design Award entries
• 500,000 ADC members

Retail update

• 109 stores around the world
• 1 million visitors per week
• $500M in third party products in the last year
• Shows the London store, says it’s “phenominal”
• Video shown at a real estate convention made by the retail team. (Music: Rubberneckin’ Oakenfold Remix.)
• $2 billion in sales by the fourth year
• Average earnings of $4000 per square foot

iPod/iTMS update

• Know you’ve entered popular culture when you’re on the cover of the New Yorker.
• 16 million iPods sold at the end of last quarter total.
• 76% of the entire MP3 market (including flash and hd-based).
• 430 million songs sold on iTMS to date.
• iTMS owns 82% of the marketshare for online music sales in May 2005.
• Podcasting coming in iTunes 4.9
  • Steve elaborates on the “Wayne’s World for radio”; he meant you can do it without a lot of capital.
  • Calls it the “hottest thing in radio”.
  • Gives a list of the major companies that have jumped on Podcasting.
  • You *can* type URLs into iTunes 4.9
  • New Podcast item in the source list.
  • Quick and easy way to grab new podcasts.
  • Apple is going to be doing podcasts of new music weekly. As you scrub through the podcast, the artwork changes – big applause. Shows chapter functionality too.
  • Expects this to take podcasting mainstream.

Mac general update

• Growth rates, year-over-year: PC growth rate has gone from 18% to 13%, Mac growth rate has gone from 8% to 42%.
• Today: QT7 Windows Preview release.
• Over a billion QT downloads over its lifetime.
• Tiger is the “best release we’ve ever shipped”.
• This week, Apple will deliver the 2 millionth copy of Tiger (includes retail/maintenance/new Macs).
• Dashboard widget demo
  • Uses Business Week widget to look up top stories about Apple to laughter.
  • Gets another Longhorn dig in with the countdown widget.
• Tiger represents 16% of OS X user base. Panther is 49%, Jaguar is 25%, 10.0/1 are 10%. Expects Tiger to be 50% for this time next year.
• Next release of OS X will be Leopard. No focus at the conference today. Intend to release it at the end of 2006/early 2007, right around the Longhorn release.

Transitions

• There is a TON of muttering under breaths.
• Mac in its history has had two major transitions.
  • 680×0 to Power PPC
  • Classic to OS X, set up for the next 20 years
• Time for the third transition
• It’s true (small intel style e)!
• PowerPC to Intel processors starts now for developers and for customers in 2006-2007.
• “Why are we doing this?”
  • We want to be making the best computer for our customers looking forward.
  • Brings up the G5 laptop and the 3.0 GHz Tower, but these aren’t the most important reasons.
  • Looking ahead, while we have great products right now, we have ideas of future products and we can’t make them with PPC
  • Power consumption is a big key to this motivation (gives an integer comparison chart).
• Next year, at this time, Macs shipping with Intel processors
• In 2007, at this time, transition will be mostly complete, totally done by the end of 2007.
• Two major challenges in this transition.
  • First: Making OS X “sing” on Intel
  • OS X has been leading a secret double life for the last 5 years.
    • #1 rule: Designs for OS X must be processor independent
    • #2 rule: Every project must run on Intel and PowerPC
    • EVERY release of OS X for the last 5 years has been compiled for Intel and PowerPC, confirming rumors.
    • Demo system he’s been using has been runing on this morning is Intel (Pentium 4, 3.6 GHz)
    • It’s singing, it’s really indistinguishable from G5 chips.
    • Very far along, but not done, going to put this in developer hands.
  • Second: Your apps
    • Four types of apps
      • Widgets/scripts/Java – just work
      • Cocoa apps: “Small tweak (few days) and recompile”
      • Carbon / Xcode – “Tweak (few weeks) and recompile”
      • Carbon / Metrowerks – “Switch to Xcode, tweak (few weeks), recompile.”
    • Top 100 developers, over half are using Xcode, 25% are in the process of switching.
    • This is “nothing” like Carbonization.
    • Trots out Mathematica who he called last Wednesday to port over to Intel.
      • Theo Grey out to talk about the process.
      • Took two hours to get running on Intel.
      • “Twenty lines of source code from a dead cold start”.
      • “YMMV”
    • Xcode 2.1 out today
      • When you build, check a box for Intel or PowerPC.
      • Universal Binary, runs on both PPC and Intel.
      • Both processors supported for a “very long time”.
    • Not every app is going to be universal on Day 1.
    • Technology called Rosetta.
      • Translates PowerPC to Intel
      • Runs existing apps
      • Dynamic binary translator
      • Transparent to users, nothing like Classic
      • Lightweight, no big memory footprint
      • “Fast (enough)”
      • Demo: Word opens fine. Excel opens fine. Quicken runs fine. Photoshop works fine, although it’s a little slow on load – fine on file open after it’s loaded. Photoshop plugins work fine.
  • Developer Transition Kit
    • 3.6 GHz Pentium 4
    • OS X for Intel 10.4.1
    • Xcode 2.1
    • Universal Binary Porting Guide
    • Development platform only, NOT A PRODUCT
    • Have to return by end of 2006
    • Select and Premier ADC members only
    • ***$999***
    • Shipping in two weeks
• From Microsoft: Roz Ho, General Manager of MBU
  • Not a great speaker.
  • Final touches on updates for Exchange users
  • Releasing a new version of MSN Messanger in the next few months
  • Team has been working closely with Apple on the Intel thing
  • Planning on releasing universal binaries
  • No actual solid announcement, just “looking forward to working together into the future”.
• From Adobe: Bruce Chizen, CEO
  • “Absolutely committed to putting apps running natively on new Intel boxes.”
  • “We will be the first with this transition, as we were for OS X.”
  • “Found something pretty amazing: They’re kind of like us.”
• Paul Otellini, President and CEO of Intel
  • “We are so excited at Intel to have been given the opportunity to work with Apple to bring you really great products.”
  • The story:
    • Intel founded in 1968 in Mountain View.
    • 1976, Apple founded 5 miles away.
    • Bob and Andy Grove were early investors in Apple.
    • 1976, Apple went with MOS, IBM went with Intel.
    • 1993, Apple goes with PPC, Intel launches Pentium.
    • 1996, Apple sets fire to Intel’s bunny man.
    • Shows commerical just for kicks, much cheering.
    • 2005, “The most innovative computer company and the world’s most innovative chip company finally team up.” Big applause.

Where does this leave us?

• Apple is strong.
• Mac is strong.
• Great time to start building for the future.
• We know transitions.
• We’re getting ready.
• Time for you to get ready, too.
• 90+ of the sessions include content about Universal versions.
• 100+ dev transition systems in 7 labs this week.
• “Soul of the Mac is it’s operating system, and we’re not standing still.”