Macworld Keynote 2007

Read about it in realtime. Thanks to roving reporter Ryan Block.

• Maybe 4,000 camped out since 21:00 yesterday evening.
• Otellini and Quanta CEO arrive. Apple online store goes down.
• Jobs family in attendance. Press trampled in rush to lifts.
• Gnarls Barkley, Coldplay, Gorillaz: same old lameTunes.
• Start at 17:15 UTC.
• 'We're going to make some history together today.'
• 'I want to thank our users very much.' Hehe.
• 'More than half the Macs sold in the US are to switchers.'
• 'Over the next several months we're going to roll out some awesome stuff for the Mac.'
• 'We have sold over two billion songs on iTunes.' Oh hooray.
• 'We are selling over 5 million songs a day now. That's 58 songs every second. The last time we talked we were the 5th largest music retailer in the US. We have now passed Amazon, we sell more music than Amazon and we are now #4.'
• 'I'm very pleased to report we have sold 50 million TV shows.'
• 'In the first four months of selling movies we have sold 1.3 million movies on iTunes.'
• 'And today we have a new partner selling movies on iTunes. That partner is Paramount.'
• 'We are moving up to over 250 movies offered on iTunes.'
• Ryan Block: 'Ohhhh Steve!' Har.
• tv. Beer belly Steve.
• More tv stuff. Someone set the alarm clock.
• 'Now let's go take a look at TV shows here. Again, it's incredibly cool, let's check out Heroes.' Let's not. Zzzzz.
• Swedes have a word for this: 'prylbögar'.
• 'I'll just shuffle some songs to show you what it's like playing some music.' Painful.
• 'Now let's go to photos. These are high def. We can see your photos right on your TV. Here's an example of a photo album I made.' OK I'll talk! I'll give you a list of all our agents! Just stop! Please stop!
• Phil 'You Obese Americans Ruining Your iPods' Schiller. His iPod is busted?
• 'Thank you Phil! That is tv.' GAWD.
• 'We'll be shipping them in February. We'll be taking order starting today.' Of course you will.
• 'We think this is really going to be something special.'
• 'This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. One is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple has been very fortunate that it's been able to introduce a few of these into the world. In 1984 we introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple, it changed the whole industry.' A 'few of these'? You named one.
• 'Well today, we're introducing three revolutionary new products.'
• 'The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.'
• 'The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone.'
• 'And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.' Wa? He must mean Break-Out for the iPhone.
• 'An iPod, a phone, an Internet mobile communicator. An iPod, a phone, an Internet mobile communicator. These are not three separate devices!' Yup - you read it here first. With Break-Out too. Pong coming in February.
• 'And we are calling it iPhone.' Audience and Cisco both taken completely by surprise.
• 'We want to make a leapfrog product, smart and easy to use. This is what iPhone is.'
• 'The problem is really in the bottom 40% - keyboards that are there whether you need them or not. They have control buttons that are fixed in plastic. Every app wants a different button. You can't add new buttons. How do you solve this problem? We solved this problem. We solved it in computers 20 years ago. A bitmap screen that can display anything we want - with a pointing device.'
• 'We have invented a new technology called Multi-Touch.'
• 'It works like magic. You don't need a stylus. Far more accurate than any interface ever shipped. It ignores touches. Multi-finger gestures. And boy have we patented it.'
• 'Here's the home screen. Simple icons. Push this icon. Boom. I'm in the iPod. How do i scroll through my list of artists? I just take my finger and I just scroll.'
• Beatles music playing.
• 'I've also got audiobooks. I've got videos. I've got TV shows and movies. This is an episode from the Office.' US remake probably.
• One hour's almost gone. Still waiting for the Big Surprise.
• 'Is this cool?' Yeah it's cool, Steve. Best to humour him.
• 'We've also got some stuff you can't see. Three advanced sensors. It's got a proximity sensor. Bring the iPhone to your ear and your display shuts off and your touch screen shuts down. Ambient light sensor. Adjusts brightness. Saves power. Third thing is an accelerometer. It can tell whether you're in landscape or portrait.'
• 'We're going to build on top of that with software. Software on mobile phones is like baby software. Today we're going to show you a software breakthrough. Software that's five years ahead of what's on any other phone.'
• 'iPhone runs OS X.'
• 'Why would we want to run such a sophisticated OS on a mobile device? It's got everything we need. Mulittasking, networking, power management, graphics, security, video, graphics, audio core animation.'
• So that's the iPhone. Pretty cool, huh?'
• 'The killer app is making calls.'
• 'It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones.' For fanboys yeah.
• 'Sync your iPhone with your PC or Mac. Visual voicemail - wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to listen to five of them to list to the sixth? Just like email you can go directly to the voicemails that interest you. iPhone is a quad-band GSM + EDGE phone. We have WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0.' Bill Gates heaves a sigh of relief.
• 'So let's go to our phone first. The phone icon in the lower left corner. Boom. I'm in the phone.'
• 'I can't tell you how thrilled I am to make the first public phone call with iPhone.' It does look fucking amazing.
• Phil Schiller according to plan. Turned into conference call.
• 'Jony, do you have anything to say on the first phone call? It's not too shabby, is it?'
• 'Phil, thanks very much. I gotta get back to the keynote now.' Now it becomes apparent how brilliant this thing is. Every fucker in the world is going to want to have one. Everybody.
• 'Oh there's a voicemail by Al Gore.' Did he step down?
• Switches to SMS keyboard, full QWERT. 'I can have multiple SMS conversations. Here's the conversation I've been carrying on. I've got this little keyboard that prevents error, it's really fast to type on, faster than the little plastic keyboards on all those smartphones.'
• 'The third app I want to show you is Photos. We also have the coolest photo management ever. Certainly on a mobile device, but I think ever.
• 'So photos, SMS, and the phone app - that is part of our phone package for iPhone. Really great call management, scroll through contacts with your finger, all the information at your fingertips. Favorites, last century, calendar, SMS texting, incredible photo app, the ability to take any picture and make it your wallpaper. I think you'll agree we've reinvented the phone.' Exactly one hour has gone by.
• 'I can just take my fingers and I can move them together and further apart, and make the photo bigger or smaller.' A new Winnie!
• 'Now let's take a look at an Internet communications device. We've got some real breakthroughs here. We've got rich HTML emails on iPhone.' GAWD. March of the lemmings.
• It works with any IMAP or POP3 email service. We wanted the best web browser on a phone, so we picked the best one in the world: Safari.' Stand up and take a bow, David.
• 'We have Safari running on iPhone. It's the first fully usable browser on a cellphone. We have Google Maps. We have widgets. It communicates with the Internet over WiFi and EDGE. You don't have to do anything. It connects to the WiFi seamlessly.' What's this going to cost? $1000? Probably. Probably more.
• 'It connects to any POP3 or IMAP email - Yahoo Mail, MS Exchange, Mac Mail. POP3: Gmail, AOL mail, and most ISPs. Let's highlight one. Yahoo mail. Today we're announcing Yahoo will offer free push-IMAP email to iPhone customers. This isn't just IMAP, this is push-email, the same as a BlackBerry.' $2000. $2500.
• 'I'd like to show you mail. Google Maps. I've got my inbox here. This is running live on Yahoo IMAP email. I've got inline photos. Rich text email. Let's look at another one. Again inline photos, rich text. Shopping list, rich text. Pretty cool.' Yeah, pretty cool Steve. You wally.
• 'Now I want to show you something incredible. I want to show you Safari running on a mobile device. I'm going to load in the New York Times. Rather than just give you the WAP version, we're showing you the whole New York Times website. I can put this into landscape mode and there it is, I can scroll up and down here.' Magnifying glasses cost an extra $1000.
• Hussein news item on screen. Lovely.
• 'I can double-tap and it'll zoom in. I can make this text bigger if I want to. And there it is. Isn't this cool?' Yes Steve, it is very cool. OK, you can have one to play with. All day.
• 'Let's go to Amazon. I like looking at what DVDs are selling. I like especially when Disney DVDs are on top.' You nonce. Slow page load.
• 'I hope you never really know how incredible this is.' Oh surely no worries for most.
• Another bloody half hour of this. GAWD. People everywhere itching to make PHONE CALLS.
• 'Now to conclude with the Internet device section, I want to show you Google Maps on iPhone. It comes up and I'm going to go to Moscone West. And here we are. Boom. I'm going to want a cup of coffee afterwards, so I'm going to search for Starbucks.' Calls Starbucks. 'Yes, I'd like to order 4000 lattes to go please. Sorry! Wrong number! Thank you!' Hangs up.
• 'Right on my phone! Look at this. The Eiffel tower! Isn't that incredible?'
• 'It's my pleaseure now to introduce Dr Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO.'
• 'I've had the privilege of joining the board and there's a lot of relationships. If we merge the companies we can call it Applegoo. But I'm not a marketing guy. You can actually merge without merging. Each company should do the absolutely best thing they can do every time, and he's shown it today.'
• 'We can take the enormous brain trust of the Apple team and the open protocols of companies like Google and put them in an environment for end users. From a Google perspective we've pushed very hard to partner with Apple and working with many many different data services. Steve showed a little bit. It comes together seamlessly. This is the first of a whole new generation. Steve, my congratulations to you, this product is going to be hot.' Yeah Steve did it all by himself. Billy Shears nowhere to be seen.
• Jerry Yang on stage. Time to throw tomatoes. Yang's the one who sent his fellow countryman ten years up the river. For that Yang should spend twenty years in a sewage canal.
• Presentation of Yang omitted because he's so fucking disgusting and despicable.
• Jobs back talking accessories. iPhone t-shirts. Stick it in your ear receiver. Looks weird. Jetsons. Sci-fi movie shit.
• Over 200 patents in iPhone.
• 'We've advanced the state of the art in every aspect of design. It's the ultimate digital device. So what should we price it at?' Ah here it comes. $10,000? Here comes the pitch.
• 'For a 4GB model we're pricing it at $499. No premium whatsoever.' Ah yeah. Different models. Of course.
• 'We're going to have an 8GB model for just $599.' Of course you are.
• 'When's it going to be available? We're shipping them in June. We're announcing it today because we have to go get FCC approval. We thought it'd be better to introduce this today rather than let the FCC introduce this. Europe in the 4th quarter of this year, Asia in 2008. We've chosen Cingular.' Yes we know.
• 'They're going to be our exclusive partner in the US. It's a unique partnership though. We're going to be doing innovation together. We worked on visual voicemail, the first fruit of this collaboration. We'll be selling iPhone through our own stores and Cingular stores.' The secret of success is keeping a secret. Just long enough.
• 'It's my pleasure to introduce the CEO of Cingular, Stan Sigman.' The 4,000 lattes will be arriving soon.
• 'We entered into contractual agreement without ever even seeing the phone. That's because of the confidence I have of Steve to deliver on his vision.' Bleh.
• 'It's a real honor for Cingular to be partnering with Apple. It's AT&T. Days ago Cingular became a part of the new AT&T.' OS X and the beige box closer than ever. For comfort.
• 'We're announcing a partnership that takes the mobile phone experience to a new level by bringing together the best network with the best device. Networks are the foundation of what Cingular and AT&T do.' OK OK already.
• 'When it comes to networks AT&T wrote the book.' Yeah operating systems too you nonces.
• 'We are changing the way companies work together. Apple and Cingular have a multiyear exclusive partnership. This is not an MVNO. Ours is a unique relationship that lets Apple be Apple and lets Cingular be Cingular.' Get him off stage!
• 'As Stan said, we started working together about two years ago, and we come from two different worlds.' No shit. GAWD is it good he's gone.
• 'We love these guys.' Yeah right you bullshit artist.
• Equipment malfunction. Childhood story about Woz. Better than Gates just going glazed eyed sitting there without a clue. 'We'd go into a dorm at Berkeley. We'd screw up the TV while people are watching Star Trek.' Yeah Steve.
• 957 million cells in use today. About the same as PCs. iPhone goal is 10 million or ~1% in 2008.
• 'So today we've added to the Mac and the iPod, we've added tv, and now iPhone. And you know, the Mac is the only one you really think of as a computer, and we've thought about this and we thought - you know - maybe our name should reflect this better than it does.'
• [Here it comes.]
• 'From this day forward we're going to be known as Apple Inc. We've dropped the 'Computer' from our name.'
• Anyone else feel faint?
• 'You know, I didn't sleep a wink last night, I was so excited about today.' Yeah now no one else will sleep tonight.
• 'There's an old Wayne Gretsky quote I love. I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it's been. That's what we try to do at Apple. Thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank you. Can all the folks here who worked on this product please stand up? Let's give them a round of applause.' Strains of the second movement of Eroica heard in the background.
• 'I also can't leave without thanking our families. They haven't seen a lot of us in the last six months. Without their support we couldn't do what we do. You don't know how much we need you and appreciate you. So thank you.' Sweet. Laurene must love it.
• 'We've got a really special treat today. We don't have a lot of traditions at Apple besides making great products. One of them is that John Mayer has helped us at every Macworld over the years. It's our pleasure to welcome John Mayer.'
• Fini at last. Two hours. Gutted. Empty. Anyone want a job in consumer electronics?
• Are Google still hiring? They're a computer company - aren't they?