2009 Macworld Keynote

Too much disappointment--Apple had decided to retire from their keynote and their booth at Macworld 2010 and in future Expos. However there was still one more Macworld Keynote to go. Along with this announcement came the statement that Steve Jobs would not be doing the Keynote speech, but that Phil Schiller would be doing it instead. Apparently Steve has a hormone imbalance, but will be back at Apple in the spring. So to many fan boys it looked like this final Macworld with Apple would be a disappointing one. However they proved themselves wrong. Even though the turnout was low the rumors were a buzz. The biggest was of an iPhone nano because cases had been leaked for it and the next were for new imacs, Mac minis, and a new 17-inch Macbook Pro. After a 4-hour wait in line I was finally let into the hall. I was wedged between to feverishly typing bloggers and I got the front row and center of the basic ticket area. I couldn’t believe my luck.

When Phil Schiller walked out everyone knew that he had a lot of weight on his shoulders because he would have to finish off Apples last public keynote ever. He did a fantastic job and personally I realized that Phil was just as good as Steve at doing keynotes. He kicked off the show with the usual statistics such as that apple was growing twice as fast as PC and that 3.4 million people visit apple stores every week. Also that the Macbooks were the number one most sold notebook in the industry.

Then he introduced iLife ‘09. He started with iPhoto, which now supports face recognition (photo above). It find someone’s face in one picture you tell the Mac who it is and then automatically it finds all the pictures with that person and puts them into albums in the faces section. You had to see it to believe how accurate and precise it was. Next he talked about places which was a way of organizing albums and batches of pictures according to place. If you have a camera that geotags your photos it automatically uses that data to put your albums on the maps in iPhoto. If you don’t have that kind of camera you can label events on where they are taken. iPhoto does most of the work for you and it’s very simple to use. It also looks great, which is what Apple is famous for. Next Phil moved onto iMovie which was the application that needed the most updating. iMovie ‘07 was very complicated and messy. So apple fixed that problem in ‘08 by throwing all the complicated stuff out and leaving iMovie very barebones. Unfortunately this made it very hard to get any great movies out of it. So finally in iMovie ‘09 apple made iMovie a great easy to use and very complex application that rivals many expensive editing applications. Green screen and movie shake stabilization are the very surface of all the new intuitive features of iMovie ‘09. Finally Garageband introduced a new feature that teaches you how to play the instrument of your choice. Apple hired many celebrity artists to teach you how to play their instrument. People such as Sting, Fall Out Boy, and John Fogarty are just a few of the many musicians who can teach you. Below their video they show the area of the instrument that you play on in amazing detail, and in the case of a guitar, the heads strings are depressed by numbers that resemble where your fingers go. Garageband includes a few basic lessons for instruments and the full collection of lessons cost 4.99 and you purchase them through iTunes. So for $79 you can get iPhoto. iMovie, Garageband, iDVD and iWeb in the iLife ‘09 suite, available late January.

Next Phil introduced iWork 09 which took down Microsoft office with breakthrough productive features in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers that really show apple strength in the office environment. I won’t get into any details, but the new iWork ‘09 costs $79 and is available today.

Phil introduced Apple’s new top of the line 17 inch MacBook Pro, which has two amazingly fast graphics card built in. A 320 gigabyte hardrive, 3 GHZ processor and 4 gigs of ram built-in for the price of $2799. The battery is non-removable but lasts for eight hours off a single charge. It has 3 times the life of a normal laptop battery, so that means less batteries in landfills. Apple has carved all their newest laptops out of solid blocks of aluminum for a amazingly strong laptop, making it so there are no unnecessary screws or plastic, therefore reducing their carbon impact. Their screens are toxic free and made of glass not plastic for a better look, and they use energy efficient LED backlight which saves a lot of power. The screen uses a quarter of the power of a lightbulb and is fully recyclable. Also the packaging is 40 percent less, making this the greenest family of notebooks in the world, and earning Apple tons of Epeat Gold Medals.

In the famous “one last thing” line, Phil Schiller started talking about the success iTunes has brought to them. Firstly they have sold 6 billion songs since the start 6 years ago. (Thats a song for every person in the world) Next that iTunes was the number one music retailer in the US beating stores such as Target, Amazon, and Best Buy. However one thing had been turning a certain crowd off of iTunes. Since the start, a song or album that you bought off iTunes included something called DRM (Digital Rights Management). This meant that the songs you buy on iTunes could only be used under an iTunes with your account on it and only Apples music players. This meant that overseas or in america people couldn't take advantage of legally buying music from iTunes catalog of 10 million songs and share it with their friends or put it on their mp3 players that weren't made by apple. This turned a lot of people off from iTunes. However in the past 6 years Apples success with iTunes finally gave them the upper-hand with record company's so finally they got them to agree to remove the DRM from every song in the iTunes 10 million song catalog. This was most definitely the best announced of the day, not only that but you could upgrade all your DRM music for only 30 cents a song or a dollar an album! Not only that but Phil Schiller went onto introducing a new price for songs. Starting in April the price for buying a single song would ethier be 69 cents or 99 or $1.29. This seemed like we would soon all be paying $1.29 per song until he said that more companies has signed onto the 69 cent plan and not the $1.29! He went onto unveiling a new mobile music store for the iphone and ipod touch where to buy songs or albums from the store you wouldn't have to connect your phone to a wifi network you could buy it over the 3G or Edge data network of AT&T which is what we iPhone users use to browse the internet. Finally this meant that if you heard a song on the radio or at a dance that you wanted you could open the Shazam application on your iPhone or iPod touch hold it to the speaker and it would find that song by listening to it and take it to you on itunes and you could buy it right there and download it in less than a minute. All these new features comes from Apple finally getting the upper-hand with record companies. This blows away Verizon's V-cast or Sprint's mobile store.

Apple has finally come full circle and I believe that this was a great way to finish off Apple's last Macworld and as we came out of the building where the keynote was and we looked around and say in the matter of an hour Apple had put the ads for their new products, that were introduced in the keynote, all over the block and the city. We were reminded how much of a special company Apple is and that they really think about their consumers first and don't put money making on the top of their list. As Tony Bennett sung at the end of the keynote I left my heart here in San Francisco and in that Moscone center.

From Macworld--Guest Journalist Emilio M-K

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