MacCentral’s live coverage of Steve Jobs’ keynote address to attendees of Apple Expo 2003 has concluded. Please visit MacCentral’s home page for further details. Special thanks to Shawn King of Your Mac Life for information used in this article.
The keynote has ended.
“Our strategy at Apple is to innovate:” First 17-inch notebook; Safari, iLife, Keynote, Final Cut Pro 4, new iPods, Power Mac G5, iSight, iChat AV, Panther, 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks, wireless keyboard and mouse. “We are gonna keep innovating because that’s what we love to do.”
“One more thing:” Wireless keyboard and mouse based on bluetooth. Adaptive frequency hopping reduces interference, 128-bit encryption. “Great for offices and classrooms full of these things.” $59 each.
15-inch: 1.25GHz, 2GB 333MHz DDR RAM max, SuperDrive, lighted keyboard, FireWire 800 and 400, USB 2.0, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet. $1999 and 1.25GHz $2599. Available today.
12-inch: 1GHz,
17-inch: 1.33GHz, 512K L2 cache. 2GB maximum memory. Gains USB 2.0 as well.
2003 has been “the year of the notebook” for Apple. Industry averages 24-25 percent all computers sold as notebooks; Apple sold 42 percent last quarter. Jobs recapped 17 PowerBook configurations.
Jobs reiterated “end of this year” release schedule for Panther.
Over 500,000 downloads of iChat AV since release.
Jobs has moved onto a demonstration of iChat AV. He bills it as “video conferencing for the rest of us.” He demonstrated sending and receiving iChat AV sessions both to London and from Cupertino.
Jobs also demonstrated Exposé, which tiles open windows, FileVault encryption, the Pixlet video codec and more. He demonstrated Panther’s PDF rendering capabilities.
Mac OS X: Apple’s goal is to have 10 million daily users “before too long.” Panther will be “as big if not bigger than Jaguar.” Jobs then led into a discussion about some of the features and benefits of Panther, like its ability to play well in Windows network environments and its user-centric interface.
The audience was shown the introductory video for the Power Mac G5 that Apple posted to its Web site following the device’s WWDC debut in June.
“We’ve committed before the end of next summer” to get the Power Mac G5 to 3GHz.
“G5 is one of the most important product announcements we’ve made in a long time.” Stands by previous ‘fastest personal computer’ remarks. Recapped information previously offered to WWDC and Macworld CreativePro attendees about the architecture, features and prices of the G5.
Jobs started by introducing the new 20 and 40GB iPods. Apologized for not having them more available.