Live from WWDC 2006: Steve Jobs keynote

8:23AM PST - Alright everybody, we're kicking off over here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Be sure to book mark this URL, as even though we're doing a little pre-game coverage now, this is where it's all gonna go down when Steve takes the stage at 10:00AM.

8:25AM - Appleprechauns!

9:11AM - Still waiting! Someone started a group chat at http://www.gabbly.com/https://www.engadget.com/2006/08/07/live-from-wwdc-2006-steve-jobs-keynote/ if you wanna gossip about the Jobsnote before things get rolling.

Oh dearie us, what could it be?

We sent our intern over to look underneath. That's when two armed Jobs guards stuffed him into a hole.

9:25AM - Everyone is crowding up now, we can hear the music. They're letting us in.

9:35AM - Coldplay is on the sound system, lots of journos taking photos, there's a wall of cameras on the left side of the stage. It's the standard Jobsnote setup: Blue curtain to either side of the Apple logo up on stage.

9:42AM - There are a ridiculous number of MacBooks in use in the press section. U2 just came on. We heard a rumor somewhere that Steve digs U2.

9:47AM - The VIP section (which we're definitely not in) is all filled up. Now they're letting the developers in. You know, the people the conference is actually for. There's a big banner overhead that reads, "Hasta la vista, Vista."

9:48AM - As expected, the Apple Store is down.

9:50AM - Just ten minutes to go!

9:53AM - Over the loudspeaker: "Good morning and welcome to WWDC. We ask that you move to the center of each row so that everyone can get a seat. Also at this time as a courtesy to your fellow attendees, please turn off cellphones and other paging devices. Thank you so much."

9:58AM - Some guy a few rows in front of us is showing off a "wrapped" black MacBook with the invisible shield. Shiny!

10:01AM - The lights are dimming! Applause. John Hodgman is on the screen: "I have a personal message from Steve Jobs. Just relax that brain for a while. Let's let the Mac users experience compatibility problems. Tend to your compost pile, your poetry, your art. You can help out on Vista, we can use your help there. Whatever else you've been working on, you can stop now. We went to the Big Island together, lots of karaoke."

10:02AM - Now the "Mac" dude has gotten on screen.

Jobs just took the stage in a blur (har). "Good morning and welcome to WWDC 06. Thank you so much for coming. We have a great week planned for you. We have 4200 attendees. Largest WWDC ever."

10:03AM - "There are folks here from 48 different countries and all of you are part of three quarters of a million registered Mac developers. This week, what do we have in store for you? 140 sessions on just about everything to do with OS X and 100 hands on labs, including some stuff we'll talk about this morning and over a thousand Apple engineers on hand this week. That's a ratio of 1:4 Apple engineers to attendees."

"Today for the presentation, I've asked three colleagues to help me out. Phil Schiller, Bertrand Serlet, and Scott Forstall, VP of platform experience."

10:05AM - "Update on apple retail." Shows the cube on fifth avenue. "You go down this beautiful glass staircase into the store. I really encourage you to go visit the store, one of 157 Apple retail stores. Last quarter alone we hosted 17 million visitors throughout our stores. For those buying a Mac, 50 percent are new to the Mac. We are picking up lots of new customers." (applause)

10:06AM - "In the past 12 months, we've sold half a billion dollars of your products. Last year, we had our best Mac quarter ever. We shipped 1.33 million Macs last quarter. The growth rate was dramatically stronger than the rest of the industry which means we're gaining market share. Three quarters of the Macs we shipped were Intel-based in the second quarter after shipping our first Apple product."

10:08AM - "One of the great products we introduced was our MacBook. Let's look at our notebook market share. In April, we reached 12 percent in June for retail notebook sales. This is the kind of growth we're seeing. "We announced our first intel products in January. This is Intel CEO Paul Otellini handing us our first wafer in January. In the first two quarters, we transitioned almost all of our products over to Intel.. except one. Today, the Power Mac is going to fade into history. Here to tell us what's going to take its place is Phil Schiller."

10:10AM - Phil: "I'm so excited. I get to be the first one to introduce you to our newest Mac, the Mac Pro. The brand new Mac Pro will be based on Intel's Xeon chips, also known as Woodcrest. Based on Core 2 microarchitecture. Run at speeds up to 3 GHz and include 4 MB shared L2 cache. 127-bit vector engine that's even faster than the Velocity Engine. And they're 64-bit If you compare the performance/watt, you see up to 3x performance per watt than we got in the G5. It's an amazing processor to put in our products, but in every Mac Pro we're going to put two of them. Comparison: G5 quad to Xeon quad. From 54 to 115 increase, 2.1x. From 48 to 76, 1.6x increase. 4.8 to 7.6 From 1.5 to 1.8x faster with applications."

10:13AM - "Xcode is 1.8x faster to build your applications. Each of those chips sits on a 1/33 GHz Front side bus. 4 channel 256-bit memory bus. Four hard drive pays, up to 2 TB of storage. Our most requested feature, we've got two optical drives. FireWire 800 and another USB on the front. 4 full-length PCI stores. Double-wide graphics slot on the bottom.

We have the best enclosure in the business. Inside it's entirely new. New drive bays, snap right in place behind each other."

10:15AM - "8 fully buffered DIMMs, an incredible design and beautiful, simple access to it all. We've had a lot of fun building great configurations for our customers. One standard configuration... Dual 2 2.66 dual-core Xeons, 1 GB, 667 MHz FB-DIMM. 250GB HD. Nvidia GeForce 7300GT, 256 MB and 16x superdrive for $2499. I know what you're thinking. Apple makes the best computers but they're expensive. We're going to bust that myth. Similar configuration about a thousand dollars less than Dell."

10:18AM - "We've really worked on build-to-order. Most customers go this route. You an choose what processor speed you want. You can add up to 16 GB of memory and you can upgrade to an ATI Radion or Quadro FX 4500, Bluetooth and AirPort. Almost 5 million possible configurations. So that's the new Mac Pro, a quad Xeon 64-bit workstation. And the Mac Pro will start shipping... today." (applause). The transition is complete, January 10 to August 7. Just 210 short days."

10:19AM - "I really want to thank our engineering team for doing the impossible. The Mac transition is complete. There's another product called Xserve, a 1U server that delivers great value. This is a company called Xtech. They've built a server farm called 'the Aquarium.' If you've made a credit card transaction, chances are your transaction was validated (or not) on Xserve."

10:20AM - "Today we're introducing an entirely new Xserve up to 3 GHz performance. This is an even bigger challenge with a 1U server. In fact, we couldn't even put a dual core G5 in it. So you can imagine the performance increase is incredible. 5.4x integer faster. Depending on the apps you run."

10:21AM - "We get to add redundant power with the space we've saved and up to 2.24 terabytes. Lights out management. And the XServe is entirely built to order with over a million possible configurations. If you compare the latest Dell, Xserve beats them there but busting the myth of more expensive. Xserve is 300 dollars cheaper. New Xserve will be available in October and our transition is really complete. Steve?""

10:22AM - Steve back on stage. "So, our transition is complete. Now let's talk about the software that runs on all these Macs. What have we been doing for the last five years? We've been putting out new releases of OS X. And because of the progression of this software, I'm pleased to report that we now have 19 million active Mac OS X users. This is fantastic. We've also gotten a lot of critical acclaim."

"The best and most advanced operating system ever." -Unkie Walt. Tiger is Apple's best-selling software ever.

10:24AM - "We had a sixth major release that we don't get much credit for. Tiger on Intel. Porting an OS is is no easy task. And our software team did a great job. They made it look really easy which has enabled this amazing transition. 86 million lines of source code that was ported to run on an entirely new architecture with zero hiccups. Along the way, we created a way to run universal applications that run on PowerPC and Intel. I'm pleased to report that there are more than 3,000 universal applications and we at Apple would like to say, thank you. Thank you, guys. You guys have done a phenomenal job and there are a lot more being announced at the developer conference this week."

10:25AM - "What has our competitor been doing? Well, they've been trying to build a single release that has had many names but is now known as Windows Vista."

10:26AM - Bertrand: "Two years ago, we thought we'd have a little fun with the folks in Redmond. Let's look at Spotlight. Now it's easier to find information on your local disk and on the Web. They did a major innovation. Instead of having the menu on the top right, they have it on the bottom left. Another major technology is RSS. We have a browser that's simple and elegant and added Safari RSS. Guess what? IE7 RSS."

10:28AM - "This is iCal, our calendaring program, and this is Windows Calendar They even tried to copy our color scheme but they didn't get it quite right. This is their logo. You may think I took a Windows logo and added a nice Aqua bubble on top, but no, that's the logo, but underneath it's still Windows. It still has the registry at its core. It still has DLL hell and it still has this well-loved feature called activation. If you can't innovate, you have to imitate, but it's never quite as good. So, to talk about our future, I'm going to turn back to Steven."

10:30AM - "You know, our friends up north spent over $5 billion on R&D, but these days all they seem to be copying is Google and Apple. Shows money doesn't buy everything. Today we want to give you a preview of Leopard. First I want to tell you there are some top secret features that we're keeping close to the chest."

10:31AM - Scott takes the stage: "First feature is support for 64-bit applications. In Tiger, we brought support for 64-bit at the Unix layer. In Leopard, we're taking this a giant leap forward, up through Carbon and Cocoa right to your applications. In Leopard, you can have a fully native 64-bit Carbon application and we did this in a completely compatible 32-bit compatible way. That means that you can run 32-bit and 64-bit applications side by side. None are emulated. 64-bit top to bottom. Number 2: (this is a big one): Time Machine."

10:33AM - "When I look on my Mac, I find pictures of my kids that are absolutely priceless. If I were to lose any of these pictures, it would be awful. If I lost all of them, it would be devastated. What does everyone tell you to do? Back it up. And I know what I should do. Who backs up? 26 percent of our users are backing up our files in any way whatsoever. "

10:35AM - "Most of these users manually drag a few files to a CD. They might forget. How many people use automated software to make sure they always back up? 4 percent. Only 4 percent use automated software to make sure that all of our valuable content is being backed up. We plan to change all of that in Leopard with a feature called Time Machine. And we back up everything. All of your files, folders, applications, operating system, which means we can restore everything. If your hard drive dies, you can buy a new one and be right back where you were."

10:36AM - "On top of this, you can restore a la carte. If you're missing just one file, you can restore just that one item. You can back up to a hard drive or a server. You can plug in an external hard drive and start backing up your machine. But the coolest part of Time Machine is because we have a whole new way of backing up and restoring your files. Have you ever had an incident where you accidentally overwrote your files and you wish you could just go back in time? With Time Machine, you can. Have you ever looked at a folder for our presentation, but you remember that it was there? Don't you wish you could just go back in time and bring it back to the present? With Time Machine, you can. Let me show you that now."

10:37AM - "So here we are on the Leopard desktop. Here are the four files I'm working on. Click on Time Machine down on the dock and..." Screen changes to a 3D group of of screens that lets you select from multiple versions of the window. "Notice the stars are moving. Let me go back to yesterday. I can go back two days. I'm not sure where the file is. I can fly back through time and... oh, there it is. So as you can see, this file was deleted some time after June 24th. I can double-click to get a preview of it. Now I just click Restore... done."

10:40AM - "It is that easy to go back in time and bring back things. Now Time Machine works with more than just the Finder. [opens up iCal] I'm going to look for... Sonia. I must have accidentally deleted Sonia. Now [opens Time Machine] I can look for Sonia and... there she is. Again, I just click Restore and I can bring her back to the address book. But as I said earlier, the most important thing to me is my photos. Now there's an entire roll missing from a trip I took..."

Looks like we may have a crash. People are mumbling. Relaunches, fails, switches machines.

"Bring up iPhoto, fly through time, select the photos, hit restore and restores them all the way back to the present. There they are in iPhoto."

10:42AM - "So that.. is Time Machine. We think it is absolutely the best way to back up all of your files and restore everything, but the coolest thing is to go back in time. Number 3, I'll go back to Steve."

10:44AM - Steve: "Third feature is the complete package. What do I mean by this? We have some good software that's in beta right now and we have other applications that we only ship on some machines. Boot Camp. There have been over half a million downloads. It will be even better in the beta and it will ship as part of Leopard. Another app is Front Row, it gives access to your music and media. The next generation of Front Row will be built into Leopard. Another example is Photo Booth and it's fantastic. People spend hours on Photo Booth and we've expanded the range of cameras it works with."

10:46AM - Number 4 (this is a big one). "We call it spaces. What is spaces? Spaces is a new way of working on your Mac. You've got a lot of apps going at once. Wouldn't it be great if you could create a space with its own collection of apps? Well, let me show you Spaces now." Brings up mail and Safari. Brings up GarageBand and iTunes. "Whenever I have a few extra minutes, I can bring up my Podcast. I can zip down here and work on my Web site. I can bring up iWeb. And I've created a space for these." It's virtual desktops, for those familiar with the term. Very pretty virtual desktops, but basically what's been on X-based *nix systems for years and years.

10:47AM - Steve flips among GarageBand, mail/Safari. You can move windows across spaces. "Spaces lets me create with collections of apps and super intuitively switch among them instantly. That is Spaces built into Leopard."

10:49AM - Number 5, back to Scott: Spotlight.

"Spotlight was one of the great features of Tiger. We're going to make Spotlight even better in Leopard. First thing we're going to do is enable you to use Spotlight to search other machines." This means that if you're at home and you have several Macs in the house, you can search any of them. We're also adding the ability to search servers and find exactly what you're looking for. Next, advanced search with advanced search. You want Boolean operations. We're adding all of that to Spotlight in Leopard. Next, we're going to make Spotlight a great application launcher. Hit one or two letters and hit return. We're also adding recent items, recent photos, recent PDFs, recent presentations. Often, what you're looking for is right even there without doing a search. That is Spotlight for Leopard."

10:52AM - 6 is Core Animation. Core animation lets you dramatically increase the production values of your application. Lets you take a scene and deconstruct it into layers. Text, images, video, OpenGL. "You specify a start state, goal state and key frames optionally. Core Animation will automate the whole animation." Demo.

"This album cover screen saver took 4,000 lines of code to write. In Core Animation, it's 400 lines. You can also move the camera around. You can pick one album and see what text tracks it has. Even this is just scratching the surface." Now he's recreating the iTunes "City of Music" commercial.

It takes 2,000 lines of code to do all of this. "So that is core animation. It gives you a lot of power to add rich animation to your applications."

10:54AM - Back to Steve.

Number 7: Universal Access. "Mac OS X is so great that we want everyone to be able to use it. We've made major enhancements to VoiceOver, Braille support, closed captioning support, faster, better navigation."

10:57AM - "When that shipped it was pretty state of the art, but it's still pretty geeky." Now demoing Vista's text to speech. Mispronounces iPod as "i-POed" Steve: "They must not like our words." Now demoing Leopard text to speech. No errors, sounds just a bit tinny, but natural. "One of the things we like to do is speed things up. Listen to it sped up." Does a very good job speaking quickly. "We think we're making some progress here."

10:58AM - 8: Next up is a big one. "We're making some major enhancements to Mail. And anything we can do to make Mail better and more productive is really exciting. I want to highlight some creative things we're doing. We're adding Stationery, Notes and To Do's to Mail."

11:00AM - "You can send emails like this to everybody and it will look like this (standard HTML). We're shipping a lot of templates and you can make your own. Second thing is Notes. I send a lot of notes to myself because my inbox is really where I need to be reminded of things. There's gotta be a better way to do this that doesn't get lost among the others. They show up right in your inbox but there's also a special inbox that coagulates them all together."

"A lot of times we want to keep a To Do list, you can select a note and say make it a To Do and they show up like this. But it's even more powerful than this. I can take any email, any document and say make it a to do. But it's not just Mail. Any application can tie into it and contribute To Do's and view To Do's. So iCal is tied into this. All of your apps can tie into this and have one systemwide To Do service."

Showing mail stationery. "You can drop your own photos in here and move things around. Birthday announcements, dinners, you name it."

11:05AM - Shows drag and drop of photos in stationery. Very, very easy to create stationery. Now I want to show you notes. Shows making a note. "Let me show you to do's." Shows checking off a to do and having them show up under to do's.

"You send the most beautiful email messages you can ever imagine. You can keep track of them in a separate notes inbox. Super easy to turn anything into a to do in mail and it will keep track of everything systemwide. Just three features being added to mail."

11:06AM - 9, back to Scott. It's Dashboard.

11:08AM - "The reason dashboard has been great is because all of you have built so many fantastic other widgets. In fact, there are more than 2500 widgets available today. We're announcing two features to expand that today. First is for you developers and another is for end users. First is Dashcode. All you do is modify templates to produce the widgets you're looking for. We have templates for RSS, podcasts, images, whatever you're looking for. Dashcode is a great visual editor for HTML and CSS. We also ship with a rich parts library with search buttons and a JavaScript source editor and a full Javascript debugger."

11:09AM - "You can set break points. That is Dashcode. The other is Web Clip. We've come up with a way where anyone can turn any part of a Web page into a Widget."

Demo. Brings up Dilbert. "I can find exactly the part of the page I'm interested in, resize the widget and I'm done."

[Just talked to our server guy, he says Engadget is serving 500K pages every ten minutes! CORRECTION: He says it's 600K now! - Peter]

11:12AM - "Every day this will update and show me the latest of this comic strip. This here is an eBay auction. Let's say I want to track this throughout the day. I can create my own widget, lay it out just like so. I'll apply a theme that makes it look like it was torn out of the Web page... and it's done. We've had requests to turn the top ten widgets from the Apple widget site into a widget. Now you can do it yourself. And if you see one yourself, you can click on it and we'll take you right there. It's all live. Let's say you're interested in the top ten NY Times bestseller list, resize it and done, apply a theme. Let me do one more."

11:14AM - "Last one I want to do is webcams and some use QuickTime, some use Java or JavaScript. Now you can turn any webcam into a widget. I can apply a theme, done. Throughout the day, you bring up Dashboard..." (loud applause) "We've just created five live widgets. It's that easy for anyone to create a widget. Create a widget really easily, track it, and close the widget. With Dashcode, we have a way for developers to more easily create widgets and with Web Clip, we can turn any piece of any Web page into a Widget."

11:15AM - 10 back to Steve: iChat.

Multiple logins, Invisibility, animated buddy icons, video recording, tabbed chats. Tabs chats, consolidated on the left.

11:17AM - "But we want to go even further on this. A lot of our computers now have built in video cameras. No one else is doing this. So the first thing we'd like to do is let you have some fun. First thing we're doing is adding photo booth effects. Second one is more serious -- iChat Theater. Third is Backdrops, which you just have to see to believe."

Demo

"Let's go to iChat. I don't have a lot of friends. So I'll just request a chat with Phil. Let's start with Photo Booth effects. I can do a Jay Leno look. More Picasso like thing. Performance of this in real time is unbelievable. You look marvelous" (looks at a mirror image of himself) "Let's move on to iChat Theater."

11:19AM - "I can go right into iPhoto and show you the pictures right from the vacation. (Slide show starts inside of iChat window). So that's a lot of fun. I can go into Keynote and show you the transitions and effects. Phil, what if you work at an ad agency?"

Now showing the Get a Mac virus commercial, skewed within the iChat window. "Phil, that's fantastic."

11:20AM - "Show us Backdrops. There's no blue screen or green screen behind me. Now I'm at the beach. Or the Taj Mahal. Or in Times Square. If we can do photos..." Shows video loop behind him. "Hey, I found Nemo!" Now shows a roller coaster video behind him. "Thanks, Phil!"

[We just hit 700K page views every ten minutes! - Peter]

11:22AM - Phil turns around and waves his hands like he's riding the roller coaster. "We're really excited about this. We think iChat for Leopard will be a grand slam. So this is just ten of the many features that will be in Leopard."

"Let's review them:

64-bit top to bottom
Core animation
Universal access
Enhanced parental controls (which we didn't talk about)
We didn't get a chance to talk about iCal but iCal is going multiuser
The complete package
Enhanced mail
Enhanced spotlight
Dashboard
You saw Web Clip and Dashcode
Today we are announcing Xcode 3 at the afternoon session.
Spaces a whole new way of working with our Macs.
And of course, Time Machine."

"Time Machine is going to be a breakthrough in backup and recovery. All of this technology is gonna be in Mac OS Leopard so we have a developer preview that we're going to put in your hands today."

11:24AM - "We plan to get done with Leopard and ship it this coming spring. We think we're going to get it out next spring."

11:27AM - "So that is Mac OS X Leopard. So thank you for coming. We think we have a great week for you, 140 sessions, and over 100 hands-on sessions. Thank you very much and welcome to WWDC06"

That's it, show's over!

Big big ups to Gavin, Celly, Mike, Christoph, all the peeps at AOL, and, of course, Brian for their expertise in keeping Engadget running under incredible load. You guys are the best!