Veerle's blog

The keynote was attended by more then 7000 people. When Phill Shiller came on stage he said “Apple Expo is going to be amazing”. He also talked about Steve that he is recovering very well and that he will be back at Cupertino in September. Apparently many Apple folks are thinking along the lines of September can’t come soon enough.

Music

Phill started talking about music by saying that the iPod has 58% market share in the US. He also showed the new Apple iPod commercial “Sterio Rock” on screen. Apple has sold some 5 million songs in Europe in the first eight weeks, they also claim to have sold more then 4 million of iPods worldwide. It still looks like the iTunes Music store will be available in all other countries throughout Europe in October. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Mac OS X

Mr. Schiller announced that there were more than 12,000 native Mac OS X apps on the market and invited several software companies on stage to do some demos. One of those new apps is BBEdit 8. It has a completely new tab and windowing management, both are welcome because BBEdit was overloaded in my opinion.

Phill also showed a demo of Motion, Motion lets you explore new creative territory using self-propelled behavior animation, character-by-character title animation and a powerful new interface and it integrates seamlessly with Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro 3. I’ve already ordered this software, it’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with it as you can see in this demo from the NAB.

Tiger aka 10.4

As was to be expected Phill also talked about Tiger. More precisely about Spotlight, Apple’s search technology built into Tiger, it is “years ahead of Longhorn” he said. As you know Microsoft announced last Friday that it was scrapping its spiffy new WinFS file system for Longhorn, a file system that would have made Longhorn’s searching capabilities quite powerful. During the Spotlight demonstration, he “found” a document called “New Products Demo.” No doubt this referred to the new iMac where everybody was waiting for. iChat was also on the “to do” list and he showed a demo of the new iChat AV that will ship with Tiger and that uses the new H.264 video codec. Quality of the video chat was amazing. Somebody in the audience said ” We want Steve” and I also thought that Steve would show up in that iChat but he didn’t. The iChat demo ended with Bertrand Serlet video conferencing in. The crowd loved his brief conversation in French btw.

Hardware

First some figures, Apple has sold 7.5 million iMacs, which works out to 2.38 per minute over six years. That was the start of the iMac G5 presentation where everybody has been waiting for. All in one elegance, extreme simplicity and the perfect machine for the iLife suite. Everyone is going to be asking “where does the computer go?

You can unscrew three screws, and the entire back comes off. The crowd loved it! The G5 module, when looking at the back, is on the right side. There are three fans in the unit, and it is “quiet as a whisper.” The iMac G5 tucks away all the modern amenities in its two-inch thin body, such as a slot-loading SuperDrive or Combo drive. The keyboard will slide underneath the display when you are not using it. The iMac is available in 17- and 20-inch widescreen models. You can choose a 1.6 or 1.8GHz G5 processor that’s ready to run modern 64-bit applications under the secure and stable Mac OS X operating system. For more information and specs you can visit the Apple iMac website. The only downside to this iMac is the fact that Apple only puts 256MB Ram in it. I personally believe such a move should be a thing of the past. The minimum should at least be 512MB.