Applelust.com: Live: Friendly Expo

Live: Friendly Neighboorhood Expo

Dean Browell 7-18-01

Who predicted a Keynote appearance down to the name? Well we did on one count, read on...It's the New York opposite of fear and loathing...

Your keynote, True Believers was up and not really down but let's say mild in places. The highlights lay here...

Steve started with the new Applestores, with 4 new ones in Dallas, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis on the way. A tactic a bit overused was to show subsequent and already released video, and he started here with the Glendale tour.

He then sailed on in to an OS X presetation that took up the most time but in some of the most crowd pleasing ways. Steve introduced what would become a circus of presenters for a '10 on X' demo. It included Microsoft with Office, Adobe (take THAT naysayers), Quark, Filemaker, Connectix, IBM, Worldbook Encyclopedia, Blizzard, Aspyr, and Alias/Wavefront.

Everybody had 'wow' moments, especially Connectix's Virtual PC. Adobe did show up with a game face on, but forgot the jersey as they revealed In Design, Go Live and Illustrator, but no Photoshop or the recently announced Pagemaker 7.0. (So, what are we to assume is the Quark killer again? I thought it was great we saw Quark immediately after Adobe in the line up.) Filemaker, *yawn* actually did surprise me with a fairly dynamic prsentation. Worldbook was a really peculiar addition, but a great buy-in with the educators (although saying Worldbook belongs up there with IBM and Adobe is like saying Gleek the Monkey was an essential asset to the Superfriends Legion of Superheroes). The gaming companys were present and not much else in my book. Yes, Aspyr has a great and exciting product in Tony Hawk, but that was the demo (and it's already out). Blizzard gave us a working build of the Winter (!) release of Warcraft 3, which makes me laugh to think that the delay in release is due to the simultaneous slow down Windows XP is causing on that build. Warcraft 3 was actually pretty lackluster, and not a dynamic 'ooh and ahh' on par with the other demos (even Worldbook's encyclopedia was pretty cool). IBM had a great Viavoice moment in dictation, more on that later.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, 10.1. Well, or sorta now, actually September but we're sure glad he showed us now. Rest assured, the thing is damn fast, a huge leap, and worth the wait. Consider how long we waited for 9.1 and the upgrade that was... well, this is bigger, trust me. Finder windows: fast. Dock: any place. Finder resizing: "like a knife through butter", Steve's words. One of the more amusing moments was Steve's use of 'bounce' as an official unit of Apple measurement to display how much faster things loaded up. Preview: 'one bounce'. Sherlock: 'less than a bounce.' I.E.: 'one bounce. I'm measuring everything in bounces now. This article probably took me 1500 bounces.

And yes, Virginia, there is a DVD player. It even faltered a bit when he first loaded it (A mistake? Watch out everyone, he's human!). But it works, it's there, and we're happy (applause). CD burning is better, slicker (just drag and click if you've added 'Burn' to your toolbar like you can now). Volume/Brightness hotkeys and new mini finder bar icon/menus add some of the functionality OS 9 had and X left desired. His camera demo flubbed a bit, but it was the camera's fault- Apple doesn't make cameras (yet, but Steve looks mad enough to start).

Hardware-pa-looza began with a held breath by everyone in the room. iBook gets props (182k sold in one quarter, more than any portable for Apple of ANY quarter) and some great quotes. Powerbook, same thing. *yawn*

Then Steve said the word 'iMac' and we all exploded a bit in attention, and he proceeded to both impress us and worry us. The worry (to get that out of the way) was the CRT's seemingly immortal life span on the iMac, which still hasn't ended. But that doesn't mean we should count the iMac out. The whole line got a boost with the low-end giving us 500mhz, 128MB RAM, 20GBHD, CDRW (!) and available today for $999. Incredible news! (But the $899 iMac is now dead, R.I.P.) And the upper level (700mhz, 256RAM, 60GB, CDRW, $1499 in September) is a real beast of a machine considering its a consumer desktop thingy. The middle machine is, well, in the middle.

Was there a weird sigh that flatscreen iMac's didn't show? Yep. My guess is that's why they put the hardware square in the middle of the presentation. But the lull was tangible in the air as they moved onto the pro towers...

G4's got a big boost and essentially were the big talk of the town. The enclosures are a pretty cool upgrade with slimmer, better drive doors. (And that website's photos were right! HA! Think we'll see any apologies from the vehement detractors?) (See full tech specs here.) He shows a video, explains the Superdrive again for all us idiots who had no idea (a bit much I think) and we are all left wondering what the "and another thing" talk will focus on.

And then, Steve decides to make my New York dream come true. He begins the Apple vs. Intel demo and decides to test it with MediaCleaner in a split screen demo cleaning a new movie trailer from Apple's Quicktime page... SPIDER-MAN. For those of you keeping score, that means Applelust.com managed to predict down to the exact name something appearing at MWNY 01! I was out of my skin. When the Apple boy next to Steve reminded the audience that "this is appropriate because Spider-Man is from New York, ya know" I halfway thought they'd call me out of the audience and give me a tour jacket (like I always dreamed bands would at concerts I attended).

Am I happy?!? Of course, in that several demos they subsequently did, the Mac screamed past (867 MHz PPC versus 1.7 Intel) Intel. Despite my enthusiasm, they decided to go into a tedious bit of explanation of the "pipeline"difference in the Megahertz myth. It was good, helped some I'm sure, but was a bit of a snore. (Where's Spidey when you need him?) It all almost wraps with Display info, and then, "another thing."

Okay, aboslutely NOBODY would have thought Steve would use iDVD as the "and another thing" today, and at first blush it seems like it was a bad choice... until you actually SEE iDVD2. Seriously, this is an app that will level several playing fields. Not only is it still as powerful, but on top of that it ads motion menus, motion backgrounds (demoed in a nice Wedding theme), new themes (and background music in menus, which he demoed with Johnny Cash, Green Day and American Beauty themes, an odd choice, and a new screaming speed (old DVD burning was 25X length of movie, iDVD did it at 2X, and with the Dual 867mhz, you can now reduce it with iDVD2 to 1X, which is pretty incredible, and you can do it in the background even).

So, it all comes to a wrap. Steve thanks the Apple peeps and their families and we applaud for them. It starts to get a pretty warm atomosphere and he does some really legit and deserved back-patting, emphasized and epitomized with the line that Apple is, "...standing at the intersection of Liberal Arts and technology..." which, it is.

It feels good. The press room is abuzz. More to come from me, and maybe more Spidey references. The good guys won, but by how much remains to be seen. (Did the LCD iMac rumors kill the reaction?) See you soon...

-Dean