Good news TheAppleBlog readers! We’ll have live coverage of today’s “Back to the Mac” event right here starting just before the 10 AM PT scheduled start time today. Follow along with us as Apple (s aapl) unveils new Macbook notebooks, a brand new version of OS X, and more. Just stay on this page hit “Refresh,” Command-R or F5 periodically to get new updates.
We’ll be providing live updates via Twitter, too, so check in with @theappleblog.
Here we are. All set for the big event. Apple put on a big spread at the cafeteria in Building 4 but I am hungry for good stuff Steve us going to share with us.
10.00 AM: Waiting for Steve.
10.01 AM: Here he is. Applause. We got some fun stuff to share with you this morning. It would be nice to bring in engineers to demo this to you. I would like to start with the state of the mac.
10.02: Tim Cook is on stage. Apple’s revenue, Mac made 33 percent of the revenue last year and it is a significant number by itself. That is $22 billion, the Mac company as a standalone company would be $110 on Fortune 500 companies. 13.7 million mac in FY 2010, 5x 2005 and 50 million users. We are growing 2.5 X the market. US consumer market, we have 20.7 percent
10.04: One in PC sold in retail in US is a Macintosh. We have a vibrant developer community. 600,000 registered Mac Developers. Adding 30,000 developers a month. We have developers like Valve (people behind Steam)
10.05: Autodesk is on a Mac and we have coveted that and we couldn’t be more pleased. We have developers who continue to develop on Mac. Office 2011 and Outlook on Mac, it is exceptionally good.
10.06: Fueling the Mac momentum is the incredible push in the Apple retail. 75 million visitors and sold 2.8 million mac in last year. 50 percent are new to Mac. 318 stores in 11 countries. Stores in China are highest trafficked of any of our stores.
10.08: Steve is back! Moving on to new products. iLife is widely regarded as the best suite of digital life applications. You can do amazing things with photos, videos, music. We keep improving it every year. We are now introducing iLife 11.
10.09: iPhoto 11 which has Facebook enhancements, full screen modes, made it really easy to email photos from within iPhone. New slideshows and big leap in books. We are printing 2 million (photo) books every years. We are adding Letterpress cards to this. Phil Schiller is on stage demoing it. New full screen places view. Location oriented photo collections are pretty awesome.
10.22: Steve is back! That is awesome. This is why we do what we do. Recaps iPhoto. We are really excited about these new features.
10.23: iMovie 11. The number one request was better audio editing and we can do extremely sophisticated editing easily. All new audio editing. One step effects. People finder and news and sports themes and the ability to construct movie trailers without much effort. On stage, Randy Ubillois, chief architect of video applications.
10.35: Demo of iMovie is over. Sharing in YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo.
10.37: New Garageband 11 and it helps you fix the rhythm in your music. It has stuff like Flex Time, Groove Matching , More Guitar amps and more. Apple product marketing Xander Soren is on stage and demoing the new software. Groove Matcher is like spell checker for bad rhythms.
10.46: 5 million people are using Garageband.
10.47: iLife 11 — all this amazing engineering has gone into these products. Free with new macs and cost $49 for upgrades. It is available today.
10.48: Steve just gave props to the engineering team behind iLife 11
10.49: Since we have introduced in 4 months. 19 million devices with Facetime. #1 request is to do Facetime calling from and to Mac. It is here. Steve demoing it. This is so simple. Nothing to set up. Simple demo. I think people are going to like it.
10.51: We are going to beta release of Facetime for Mac today. Start Facetime calling. New Logo too.
10:52: The entre for today, sneak peak of where we are going with Mac. Seven releases in one year. Today we are giving you a preview of the eight version of Mac OS X. It is called Lion.
10.53: What we have done is started with Mac OS X, created a version called iOS and invented new things. We have perfected it and now it is used in iPad. We are inspired by those innovations in iPhone and iPad and bring them back to Mac OS X. We want to bring those “back to the mac.”
10.54: Multitouch gestures can be important on the Mac too. App store has revolutionized and why not Mac too. Full screen apps. App Home Screens. Apps on the iPad on autosave and data is constantly saved and when you launch apps, they auto resume. And that be great on Mac too.
10.56: Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical, but after a short time, you start to fatigue. It is ergonomically terrible. Hence we have pads. And that is what we are doing with notebooks. A multitouch trackpad in a mouse and now pure play device.
10.57: 7 Billions apps have been downloaded from the App store. We are brining to back to the mac and we will have a Mac app store. It will best place to discover apps. One click downloads. Same free and paid apps. (70/30 split) and automatic installation and automatic app updates. Apps licenses for use on all your personal macs.
10.59: Four cool inventions – Expose, Full Screen Apps, Dashboard and Spaces — and this is great but as we have added full screen apps so we have done is combined them and it is called Mission Control and navigate the mac. Craig Federighi, VP of Mac Engineering.
11.04: The app home screen in OS-X Lion. looks pretty bad and I am not sure I like it. Bleh! I like the full screen mode in apps and it makes good use of the screen estate.
11.06: Mission Control is pretty sweet and I want it now. One click access to all apps.
11.08: Steve is back. Really excited about it. Again, a whole new way of getting apps and launching and finding apps. We will unveil it over time. Our plan is to release it in Summer 2011.
11.09: Mac App store is going to great for user and we were going to launch it on Snow Leopard and will launch in 90 days from today. We are taking app submissions in November.
11.11: There is one more thing and it back to the mac theme. Virtuous circle of creating iOS and now being back to Mac. Just like that philiopsohy it can have benefit in hardware. When Macbook meets an iPad.
11.12: iPad has instant on, great battery life, amazing standby time, thin and light and no optical or hard drives. What would happen if a Macbook and an iPad hooked up? It is the most amazing thing we have created. Macbook Air. It is gorgeous and it is the future of notebooks. It is really stunning and it is really small. It is 0.68 inch thin and at the narrowed point it is 0.11 inch and weighs 2.9 lbs.
11.14: Full unibody. 13.3 inch and high-res LED display and has more pixels than Macbook Pro 15 inch. 1440 X 900pixels. Full size Multi-Touch trackpad. No optical drive and no hard drive. We have gone to flash storage.
11.15: We have gone to flash storage. Why? it is instant on. It is unto 2x faster and it is 90% smaller and lighter. It is completely silent. More reliable. We are the largest user of Flash memory in the world. 7 hours of battery life on wireless web and 30 days standby time.
11.17: we are putting Flash right on the board. 802.11n WiFi, Core2 Duo. And a massive battery. We have taken eveyrhthing we have learned from miniaturizing from iPad and iPhone and crammed it into a board.
11.18: A younger brother,11.6 inch. Smaller. 2.3 pounds. High res 1366 cx 768 pixels. 5 hours of battery life and same 30 days of standby time. We see these as next generation of MacBooks. It is going to cost $999 for 11.6 model. More pricer models. 13.3 inch top end will cost $1599. Both are available starting today.
Guess who is going to the apple store right now!
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Man oh man, Im hoping they release this 11inch macbook air. it would be my first macbook. =]
At 10:04, one in a how many PCs?
IcyFog: He said “one in 5,” or a ~20% market share. Some of us grizzled old-timers remember when we were barely hanging on to 3%. So we’ve gone from BMW to Mazda; not bad for us shareholders, or us developers. More people developing more software means more and (hopefully) better choices for customers. And being #110 on the Fortune 500 for Mac, Inc., sounds about right. For all the growth in the US, what’s happening outside the US, particularly in previous “Microsoft shops” like Singapore and Korea, has to be seen to be believed. People want quality, stability and security: well over 90% of Windows PCs in Singapore have been compromised; the entire country is on several of the major DNS blacklists… having a system that is more respectful of and usable by the customer is an exhilarating experience here.
My one concern, and I still don’t have a clear picture on this, is if Lion’s App Store is going to be a supplemental alternative to, or a replacement for, the existing Mac software industry. I support folks who are new to Macs but have had iPhones for a couple of years, and I can see people like them loving the concept. But as a developer and a shareholder, again, I’m worried that people who don’t want to sell through the App Store are going to be limited to “jailbroken” or pre-Lion Macs for customers. That’s probably about the best way I can think of to stop this phenomenal growth that Mac has had in the last decade in a quarter or two.
Please, Steve, tell us you’re not so much into control that you’re willing to kill one of the best features about a Mac… along with all those developers you were crowing about.