Steve Jobs may be giving it a miss, but Apple’s last ever MacWorld keynote should deliver the usual thrills, spills and chills we expect from any of the Cupertino company’s grandstanding events. And we’ll be keeping tabs on the entire proceedings live, blogging away minute by minute to keep you up to date. Come on in!
10.35 – That’s it! Man, they’re wheeling out Tony Bennett now. It’s too early in the morning for his brand of loucheness if you ask us, but hey. He’s singing on stage. Well done Phil, you did a decent job!
10.32 – Lastly, the iTunes Wi-Fi music store is being made compatible with 3G. So you can buy tracks on your iPhone 3G wherever you are.
10.31 – Everything’s going iTunes Plus too! You can upgrade your entire library to 256kbps quality.
10.30 – DRM is dead! And not before time! Apple is killing DRM on 8 million tracks from today, with the remaining 2 million going DRM-free by the end of Q1 2009.
10.26 – He’s got three things to tell us. First, the pricing model is changing to a three-tier system: $0.99, $0.69, and $1.29. It depends on how labels offer the music, apparently. This’ll kick in in April.
10.25 – Oh wait, Phil’s on about “one last thing” – it’s something to do with iTunes!
10.23 – The new Pro comes out late January. The price is $2,799 – wonder what that’ll equate to in pounds?
10.22 – They’ll take it back and recycle it if you do need to change the battery though.
10.20 – It has the longest battery life ever for a MacBook Pro. 8 hours per charge, and it can be charged 1,000 times. That’s three times the industry standard, apparently – but it’s non-removeable…
10.18 – Tech specs: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz Dual Core, up to 8GB of memory. 320GB hard disk drive as standard, or you can opt for a 256GB solid state drive. Graphics cards are the same as the 15-inch MacBook Pro.
10.17 – There’s a big glass trackpad with multi-touch, natch.
10.16 – Ports are: three USB ports, Mini DisplayPort, Firewire 800 (no 400), digital audio in/out and Expresscard. Firewire’s in, that’ll please a lot of people. MagSafe too, of course, and Ethernet.
10.15 – Anti-glare is a $50 option on the screen.
10.13 – It’s the lightest 17-incher too – 6.6 pounds. 0.98 inches thin. Quick, somebody convert these to metric, I’m way too busy typing!
10.12 – The world’s thinnest 17-inch laptop! It’s got an LED backlit 1920 x 1200 screen – the “best display we’ve ever shipped in a notebook”
10.11 – It’s a new 17-inch MacBook Pro…
10.10 – Phil’s going to tell us about the third thing now, the “one more thing”. Ooh, here we go!
10.08 – The beta will be free, but when the app launches for real it’ll cost ya.
10.07 – They can then add notes, edit it etc. Actually it is a lot like Google Docs…
10.04 – A beta will be out soon. It lets you share documents online. It’s not quite Google Docs done Apple-style. Basically if you make a doc and want someone to run through it and give you comments, you can click an “iWork.com” button, enter some email addresses and it’ll send out invites to these people to view the documents through their web browser.
10.02 – Now, iWork.com. This is the cloud-based work suite we heard about, to take on Google Docs.
10.01 – Oh, okay. Now Phil’s telling us you need Leopard to run the new iLife. And from late January you’ll be able to buy something called the Mac Box Set which features Leopard, iLife and iWork. $169.
10.00 – iWork ’09, then: $79 for one license, $99 for a family pack for five people. What’s next, Phil? Come on, wow us!
9.57 – Pages and Numbers are getting some improvements, but nothing amazing. Numbers (it’s the spreadsheet app) can be merged with Mail now. Have that, Excel!
9.54 – Steve Jobs just didn’t fancy talking about this, did he? “Let Phil tell ‘em about Pages ’09, I got better things to do.”
9.53 – Okay, wakey wakey. You can use the iPhone or iPod touch as a remote control for your presentation. There’s an app to download.
9.51 – He’s talking about Keynote ’09, of course. You can jazz up your presentations with some pretty nifty transitions and zoom into 3D graphs and… zzz…
9.50 – Fair play to him, he says he made this presentation using it “so you know it’s solid”.
9.49 – iWork ’09! Oh.
9.49 – Okay, now Phil’s moving onto… wait for it…
9.47 – So that’s iLife ’09 – $79 to upgrade, $99 for a family pack, standard on all new Macs from now on.
9.45 – Oh my god, there are artist videos that tutor you. Sting! John Fogerty! Norah Jones! That knob from Fall Out Boy!
9.43 – There are piano and guitar trainers built-in, nine lessons for each…
9.43 – It’s got a brilliant new feature called “Learn to play” which, yep, teaches you how to play instruments! Genius!
9.42 – That iMovie ’09, now Phil’s going to talk about one last bit of iLife ’09 – GarageBand ’09! Lots of “’09s” today.
9.40 – This is great – you can drag a map into your movie and it shows where you’ve been, animated-style. It’s like Indiana Jones or something.
9.38 – You can also add effects like “cartoon, x-ray, aged film”.
9.35 – Image stabilization is in, so if you want to tidy up some shakey-cam footage it’s easily done. He’s demoing it by showing some stuff shot out of the window of a jeep barreling along. I film like that all the time, honestly. Jeep or no jeep.
9.34 – He’s now cutting together two clips of the same piece of action. Makes it look really easy – it seems like iMovie ’09 is quite a bit more advanced than previous versions.
9.32 – Randy’s demoing how you can just drag audio only and place it somewhere in the the timeline. Like if you have a piece of dialogue you want to use over something.
9.30 – I should say that Randy Ubillos, one of Apple’s engineers, is up there doing this now.
9.29 – You can edit by dragging. Want to put something in the middle of a video? Just drag it to the point in the timeline where you want it to go.
9.27 – Phil’s saying the new iMovie is completely redesigned and will “blow every customer away”.
9.26 – iMovie ’09 now!
9.24 – You can browse your photo library using a map. Click on a location and you’ll be able to flick through all the shots you took there. This is going to be great for looking back on holidays and travels.
9.23 – Basically he’s just showing us how easy it is to do all the things he just talked about – tagging people (it’s a bit a la tagging in Facebook, this), tagging locations etc…
9.21 – Phil is demoing it all on an iMac now.
9.19 – More iPhoto stuff… now you can make travel books that show where you took photos on nice-looking maps. Maps on one page, photos tastefully arranged opposite. You can print them out… it’s cool. Probably one of those features most people will never use though.
9.16 – Now Phil’s talking about Themes for iPhoto slideshows. Basically you can customise your slideshows a bit more, with photos moving in sync with songs and face detection orienting them correctly. This is really cool.
9.15 – Your geotags from iPhoto are carried into Flickr, as you’d imagine.
9.14 – Built-in support for Facebook and Flickr is hitting iPhoto too.
9.13 – If your camera or mobile phone doesn’t have GPS you can place them manually using iPhoto’s database of locations.
9.11 – Also for iPhoto ’09 is “Places”, which uses, yep you guessed it, GPS geotagging to plot all your photos on a map within iPhoto.
9.09 – This lets you organise your snaps by the people in them. Once you’ve named one it uses face detection to find other pictures with that person in. Nice. It also arranges photos like they’re thumbtacked to a board, which looks pretty cool.
9.08 – iPhoto’s getting some new features. First up is “Faces”…
9.08 – iLife ’09 is the first one…
9.07 – Oooh, here we go: “I have three new things today.” That’s more like it!
9.06 – He’s bigging up the Mac, saying it’s enjoying a resurgence. They sold almost 10 million last year.
9.05 – He’s talking about what an exciting time it is for Apple. Showing off some pictures of thousand queuing up at Apple Stores in Beijing, Germany, Australia.
9.04 – He’s actually wearing a blue shirt. Thinking different.
9.03 – Good reception for him – I guess he’s got some big shoes to fill. Or a big black polo neck…
9.01 – It’s Phil! Phil’s here everyone!
9.00 – Coldplay on the speakers (ugh), lights going down…
8.59 – They’re telling people to switch their mobiles off now. Don’t tell anyone but I’m just going to put mine on silent.
8.55 – I’m going to stop putting “am” on the time, you get the idea that it’s the morning in San Francisco don’t you? Five minutes to go until the last ever Apple MacWorld keynote gets underway…
8.50am - Actually, Tannoy should be spelt with a capital T shouldn’t it? Come on, Phil Schiller, get a move on…
8.45am – Well, everyone’s filing into the Moscone West auditorium as some MGMT blasts over the tannoy. Exciting stuff!
Tags: Apple, macworld, phil schiller