Chris Curtis dot Org

As most people know, today was the day of the keynote address from Steve Jobs at Apple’s MacExpo San Francisco.  There were some pretty significant announcements, as well as some recaps and highlights of Apple’s successes.  Considering that this is the first MacExpo in the year of the company’s 20th anniversary, it was pretty charged, and I think even PC enthusiasts would have gotten goosebumps at some of it if you were there or watching it live.  There were many things just about the accomplishments of computers in general that are just astounding when put in perspective to the timeframe at which they occurred.

At any rate, I’m going to summarize the two hour keynote address, and insert my personal comments as well.  It’s long, so you’ll have to follow me inside…

Introduction

Steve got the expected applause and cheering, and rattled off a lot of Apple’s accomplishments.  Significant to me were that in 1984, Apple was the first company to introduce 32-bit processor computing, and now, twenty years later, they’re the first to introduce 64-bit.  Paraphrasing Steve, “Here we are again, ahead of everyone in innovation, Microsoft is copying us again—it feels great.” Remember that when they released the Mac in 1984, they had to teach people what a mouse was and how to use it.  He also showed off some new Panther features, and tossed some numbers out showing that they were finally through the transition into their new OS.  OS X is their first change since 1984.  And like Microsoft, when they made Windows 95, it took some time before the established userbase adopted, and it’s a scary time for a company, but necessary to innovation.

Applications

Over 10,000 applications are now native to Mac OS X.  They showed off the use of a new product release, Final Cut Express 2, that is a true non-linear video editor, that allows for real time effects, filters, compositing, titling, animation, etc.  In other words, you no longer have to wait for such things to render before seeing results.  This is crucial in editing DV, where the tedious but crucial step of color-correction is normally skipped by amateur DV editors because of how long it took previously.  Final Cut Express 2 is available for $199, or $99 as an upgrade to FCE 1 users.

Microsoft then came out (the head of their Mac software development team), and perhaps delivered the most surprising news to me.  They were also celebrating 20 years.  20 years of Word.  That they delivered first on the Macintosh in 1984.  Not only Word, but Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint were both Mac-first products.  It makes sense in retrospect, but it’s weird thinking about it, since I still get comments from people like, “You run Word on your Mac?  Isn’t that Microsoft’s program though?” Well, they’re kind of doing it again.  Office 2004 is their latest offering, and has quite a few Mac-only features, largely due to the operating system’s built in capabilities.  My personal favorite is minor, but fabulous.  You know the formatting palette?  The crappy thing that you really like having quick access to, but hate how it takes up your screen space?  Well, when you haven’t used a control on the formatting palette for a few seconds, Word utilizes OS X’s Quartz rendering system, and the formatting palette automatically goes transparent.  *drool*

The G5

I’m sure you’ve read the news about Virginia Tech‘s supercomputer built from 1100 G5’s (2200 processors total).  It ranks, by the independant council that rates supercomputers, as the third fastest supercomputer on the planet, behind the #1 Earth Simulator, and #2 Los Alamos supercomputers.  Here’s the catch.  The Earth Simulator cost 500 million dollars and operates at 35 teraflops.  The Los Alamos supercomputer cost 250 million dollars and operates at 15 teraflops.  VT’s cluster supercomputer of G5s cost 5.5 million dollars, and operates at 10 teraflops.  Each of those measurements is for actual productive computing.  Years and years of research and building went into the custom designs for the two faster supercomputers.  VT’s cluster was built from the ground up in three weeks.  I/O interface cards were added in a standard method to the motherboard (no soldering, rigging, or hacking), and they are using InfiniBand to connect all of them together.  And guess what?  It still is running OS X.  They aren’t just using the hardware because of it’s technical prowess and high I/O bandwidth--it’s also the right operating system for the job.  Which is great for students and researchers, as it’s the same OS that most of them use for getting their email, browsing the web, etc.  Supercomputer designers have made trips to this computer-Mecca to see how they did it, and it looks like a huge new market for Apple, since it’s so affordable.  Which brings me to their next product announcments:

XServe Hardware

If you followed the link above and looked at the pictures, it’s pretty impressive, and really cool looking.  But what they really would have loved to have, is an XServe.  But at the time, the XServe was only available as a G4.  Well now the XServe G5s are available.  They are a form factor 1U, so they are tiny, standard for server racks.  Up to 750GB of storage, and up to 8GB of RAM, these guys are a powerhouse.  And they start at $2999.  Compared to PC-based offerings that are similar in processor power (generally Xeon based), that’s an amazing price.  For obvious reasons, companies that run Windows as a user platform have often chosen XServes, and that likelihood increases quite a bit with this release.  Oh yeah, and out of the box with the lowest model, XServe comes with OS X Server, and a license for unlimited clients.  So you’re talking tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than Windows networking solutions.

In addition, they are releasing a new XServe RAID, offering up to 3.5 terabytes of storage utilizing 14 hot-swappable drives, at a price just above $3 per Gig.  For enterprise storage, that’s a steal.  Most are between $10-$35 per Gig, and don’t offer the ease of use and maintenance.

iTunes

iTunes hit over 30 million songs sold, grabbing 70% of the market share of legal song downloads, and they are now hitting almost two million songs per month.  They have sold over 50,000 audiobooks since their partnership with Audible.com, and over 100,000 gift certificates (thanks Chris!) They have also added a new feature of Billboard Top 100 lists.  This is a really cool way to find music.  The recent addition of 12,000 classical music songs has increased their total number to more than 500,000, the most available through any service.  This...is the coolest...starting February first, Pepsi bottles will have yellow tops.  One in three is a winner for a song--an instant download from typing in the code on the bottom of the cap.  Them’s good odds, and I plan on switching to Pepsi for two months, during this promotion.

iLife Apps

Of course this includes iTunes, previously mentioned.  If you aren’t already using this for your jukebox software, you’re insane.  That means you too, Windows users.  Everyone’s copying, and Musicmatch Jukebox is the closest one, but still no where near to iTunes, and MMJ costs $30.  Anyway, Jobs had a “cute” statement about the iLife apps.  Office is what you use at work.  It’s a suite of applications that controls you and is your center of computing at work.  “iLife is Office, but for the rest of your life.” It’s what you do with your computer on your own time.

iPhoto 4

iPhoto 4 was showcased, and it’s crazy.  Support for over 25,000 photos, with “smart albums” similar to the “smart playlists” in iTunes.  Scaling and resizing in wicked fast realtime, improved slideshows, and the coolest--Rendevous sharing of photo albums.  Two computers on a network, wired or wireless, have instant access to any other machine’s shared iPhoto albums.  A guy came out with a Powerbook, with built in wireless, on stage, and Steve connected to his iPhoto album through his desktop computer onstage, and showed just how instant it was.  He didn’t even look at or copy any information.  When the guy’s Powerbook powered up from sleep mode, his album instantly popped up on Steve’s album list.  He selected it, hit the slideshow button, and it instantly began showing the album, with transitions.  He even went to the iTunes music store and bought a song real quick to show that it also was integrated, and was immediately available in iPhoto, since it was then in iTunes.  The most useful feature to me, especially considering my new business, is removal of the limitation of having only one song play, looping, on a slideshow.  You can now select any of your iTunes playlists, and it will use them all.

iMovie 4

iMovie had significant additions, but were less important to me since I’m a Final Cut Pro user.  But for the amateur or hobbiest, iMovie really makes near-professional editing as simple as eating a bowl of cereal.  Trimming of clips in the timeline is now a breeze, and is non-destructive.  Everything jumps into place with your trimming.  And if you expand to increase the length, it doesn’t overwrite anything, they all move to accomodate.  In other words, what you expect it to do, which is a major theme in the iLife suite of apps.  There was inordinate applause when the new titling features were shown off, and there among them is a perfect copy of the Star Wars scroll, now available instantly to every fanboy with a Mac.

iDVD

iDVD didn’t bring a whole lot of new things to the table as far as iDVD goes.  But for those unfamiliar with it--it’s sickly easy to create professionally styled DVDs, replete with motion menus, menu transitions, etc.  The most significant technical update is a superior encoder from the Pro tools which allows up to 2 hours of video on a consumer burnable DVD, with full quality.  Most encoders can only handle 1 hour on a 4 gig disc, and go into a compressed mode above that.  If you have the Pro tools from Apple, that barrier is gone.

Garage Band

I guess there’s no good word that they could start with a lowercase “i”, so Garage Band it is.  This is a piece of software that you just have to see demonstrated to really “get it”.  It’s a music production tool, that allows live recording, creating of music using professionally sampled loops, etc.  I’m not talking MIDI or a Casio keyboard either.  John Mayer showed up and demo’d a few dozen intruments, all which sounded superbly real, even the guitar, which took John by surprise.  The program even has guitar “amps” which allow you to plug a real electric guitar into, and record live tracks through the amps.  British Invasion, Surf, Blues, Acoustic, etc.  They sounded sweet--they were all traditional old-style amps that guitar players today love to get their hands on (that means you, Greg.) Finally, Jobs took the reigns and used some of the over 1000 samples to create a song on the fly that sounded great.  As he put it, Garage Band “brings the band along with it.” Add a mic and record vocals, and you have your own professional studio.  “Professional,” you ask, “Derek?” Yes, professional.  The technology and the samples are far beyond what professional musicians have been using for years.  Mellencamp records all of his albums with drum machines.  Incubus heavily utilizes samples.  (Incubus creates their own, whereas Mellencamp simply adds a guitar lead and vocals.) There are instruments sampled here that only the most expensive studios can afford, including $150,000 pianos.  Oh, and of course, it exports directly to iTunes.

iLife Price?

Here’s the part I was talking about, Greg.  In order to “kind of” do this on a PC, the cheapest outlet would be:

• Musicmatch Jukebox - $30
• Canopus editing and DVD software - $130
• Adobe Photoshop Album - $50
• Cakewalk Music Creator Pro - $110

These are ridiculously close to professional apps, for $50.  Plus, no matter what other solution you might claim to find to the list above, they will never, ever work together as a suite and recognize the content that each one has.

The iLife apps are truly an set of innovative, incredibly fun, incredibly creative apps, that set the Mac apart from the Windows world in a very tangible way, in the same way that desktop publishing set the Mac apart from the rest of the tech world in 1984.  Even if you’re a Windows fan, or think that Macs are overpriced, you have to applaud.

Please keep in mind that the author of this post was a PC lover, self-taught programmer, pusher of DOS and Windows, and of PC architecture in general.  I am not a bred Mac-phile, I am a walking Switch campaign.  Any reasonable person would choose a Mac for their computing needs over any other current offering.  Perhaps the percentage of Mac owners vs. PC owners reveals, not what is the best for computing, but the percentage of reasonable people left in society.

Posted Tuesday January 6, 2004 in News by Derek Jones

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