Live From Apple Event: New iMacs, iLife '08, iWorks '08

I'm here in Cupertino at Apple headquarters for a press event. Steve Jobs has arrived onstage--and is saying that Mac sales are growing at 3X the industry average. And he's saying that today's event is about the iMac.

He's making fun of messy PC desktops in Jobsian fashion, and explaining how the iMac's neat-and-tidy one-piece design has made it successful.

Now he's saying that Apple will turn to stuff from its professional products--aluminum and glass--to make the iMac better.

Aluminum is cool and environmentally friendly. So is glass. They're used in products like the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro and iPhone.

And now they'll be used in the new iMac. "It's just stunning...it's just gorgeous."

Audio in and out, Firewire (including 800), and more ports. Removing one screw lets you add memory.

Two sizes: 20-inch display and 24-inch display. (The 17-inch one goes away.) The displays are glossy, like that of the MacBook.

There's a new aluminum keyboard with two USB 2.0 ports. "It's dramatically lower in the front than our prior keyboard." There are screen-dimming and brightening buttons and media playback controls. There's also a wireless, Bluetooth version.

The new iMacs are Inel Core 2 Duo--and rhe 24-inch version has a 2.8-GHz option. Up to 4GB of RAM, ATI Radeon graphics, Airport Extreme...

Prices: 24-inch starts at $1799 (down $200 from before) and 20-inch starts at $1199 (down $300, and the same price as the 17-inch model).

"We think these models are all going to be pretty popular." Both consumers and pros will like them, and they're eco-friendly.

More news iLife '08, a new version of Apple's digital media suite. "We're dramatically enhancing" some of the apps and completely replacing one of them."

iPhoto: Much better. New feature called Events organizes your pictures by the event where you took them by default.

What's an event? All photos taken in one day are an event. If you went to more than one event in one day, you can split them. What if you went to a multi-day event like a ski trip? You can merge them.

You can hide photos which you like enough to save, but don't love, then show them again. There's unified search, and more powerful editing tools, such as the ability to cut a set of edits you did to one photo and apply them to another.

Printing "looks gorgeous" with new borders and themes. "They're much nicer." The books and calendars you can order from Apple are better (the books have dustjackets). "They're really quite nice." Calendars are 70 percent bigger at the same price.

Jobs sits down at an aluminum iMac to demo iPhoto.

You can browse through Events quickly--"skimming" lets you zip through all the photos in an Event from the main window. He's showing how to split one batch of photos into two events. Now he's merging events by dragging and dropping.

He's choosing which photos are keepers, and which ones are good enough to hide for possible later use. He's searching for all his 5-star photos. "That's a little bit of an overview of iPhoto '08--pretty cool, huh?"

On to more iLife. There are more than 1.7 million .Mac subscribers, and Jobs says he thinks it's going to grow, in part thanks to a new feature caled .Mac Web Gallery. It gives you one-button photo publishing to the Web, with "a real Web 2.0 experience" in IE, Firefox, and Safari.

If you choose, other people can upload photos to your gallery, and they'll show up there. And the gallery and iPhoto are synched, so those photos will come back to your Mac.

You can also send photos directly from an iPhone to a Web Gallery, and look at galleries from an iPhone.

Jobs is demoing a Web Gallery, which does indeed have a slick, iPhoto-like look right inside the browser. He's browsing through photos in various ways, including a "carousel" (similar to Cover Flow in iTunes) and as a slideshow.

Apple exec Phil Schiller taks a photo with an iPhone and sends it instantly to the Web Gallery which Jobs has onscreen.

Jobs moves on to iMovie. It's been hard to quickly make a great five-minute moview for sharing on the Web. An Apple engineer invented a way to accomplish it--and his invention is an all-new iMovie. iMovie '08.

You have one library for your videos, not unlike how iTunes manages all your music. "You're going to rediscover and enjoy your video you've shot."

iMovie takes video from a variety of sources, including AVCHD high-def camcorders. (Jobs praises a $799 Panasonic AVCHD camera.)

You can scrub video clips--"zoomzoomzoom!"--to see what's in them. You can "select video like you select text...and build a movie almost instantly...you can add polish quickly."

You can make a version of a movie to send to iTunes, which then lets you put it on an iPod, stream it via Apple TV, etc. Videos can exist in multiple versions, including a Web format that's higher-res than a DVD. A menu item lets you send videos directly to YouTube.

Jobs is demoing iMovie, scrubbing through videos quickly using a view that shows thumbnails of every clip. An audience member's phone rings. "You might want to answer that."

He's capturing bits and pieces of clips of people playing in the snow at Mount Hood, and creating a title. Now he's adding a Red Hot Chili Peppers song as a soundtrack.

Now back to the .Mac Web Gallery: It can include videos, too. He's showing a cool undersea video at "super high-resolution" inside Safari. "There's going to be no more sending DVDs to grandma."

Jobs is saying that someone asked him why they're making best-of-class products obsolete with these new versions. For the same reason Apple made the products in the first place.

Another iLife app: The iWeb site-creation tool. You can grab Google Maps and drag them into an iWeb page, along with hundreds of other widgets from the Web. You can also use the Google AdSense service to put ads in an iWeb page.

The "Media Index Page" creates an online index of all the media in your iWeb site.

iWeb now supports personal domain names, and you can change themes on the fly after you've created a site.

On to iDVD: "There are some people who still want to create DVDs." Jobs briefly mentions new iDVD features, and new features in the Garage Band app, including "Magic GarageBand," which lets you create music in different styles with almost no work.

That's iLife '08: "The biggest advance to iLife since we invented it many, many years ago." It's $79. "I think it's one of the best bargains on the planet." Also included with all new Macs, starting today.

How about .Mac? It has the new Web Gallery, and the storage capacity is now at 10GB, up from 1GB. It's still $99.95, and is available starting today.

On to iWorks, Apple's productivity sort-of-a-suite. 1.7 million copies have been sold, and iWorks '08 is here.

Keynote, the presentation app, has features such as fancy new text effects and slick animations. "Smart builds" let "mere morals" do A-B animations of objects. "It's very, very easy to do this stuff." We're seeing slides showing off the new features.

"Let's move on to Pages," Apple's word processor/desktop publishing program. Now it has distinct modes for processing words and for laying out pages. A contextual format bar gives you tools related to whatever you've selected. Change tracking keeps track of edits. And there are 140 Apple-designed templates. "That's Pages...and those are just some of the new features..."

Bigger news: iLife will get Numbers, "the spreadsheet for the rest of us."

Numbers has English-languarge formulas, checkblocks, slides, and "a flexible canvas" that lets you "format one part without screwing up the other." In other words, one sheet can have multiple, differently-formatted mini-spreadsheets within it. "I can make just gorgeous-looking spreadsheets very, very quickly."

"Interactive printing" is a print-preview mode that lets you drag-and-drop elements before you print. There are customizable templates. "And of course you can import and export almost all Excel documents."

Jobs is demoing Numbers. You can use sliders to change numbers in a spreadsheet, and graphs linked to them update automatically. Numbers "completes our productivity suite." It's $79--"another wonder of the universe"--and is available today.

That's today's news. Now, since this is "a more intimate setting," Jobs and Apple execs Phil Schiller and Tim Cook are taking questions from the audience.

I missed the gist of the first question, but the second one asks why Apple doesn't participate in the "Intel Inside" branding program. "We like our own stickers better...everybody knows we're using Intel processors...we'd rather tell them about the product inside the box." Schiller says that other PCs are covered with stickers and littered with junkware. Apple gives you a "great product you're going to love, and you don't have to peel stuff off of it."

Leslie Ayres of MacLife asks a question about the iMacs: "How thin are they?" Jobs: "They're really thin...appreciably thinner, which wasn't easy."

Tom Krazit of CNET: As people get more mobile, what does that mean for a desktop like the iMac? Jobs says that laptops represent most of Apple's sales, but desktops are important, and can offer advanced features at a lower price, since miniaturization isn't as big a deal. Schiller: "The desktop still has a lot of life in front of it." Jobs notes that nobody wants a 24-inch notebook.

Someone asks about the future of the Mac Mini. Apparently there's a "refreshed" version of that today, too.

Someone asks if Apple and Google are working closely. "We are working closer with Google," says Jobs, talking about the new AdSense and Google Maps features. "They like our products, too--you'll see a lot of iPhones over at Google," he says.

Someone asks if the iPhone was overhyped. "We think the iPhone is a pretty strong success...most of the world sees it that way, too," says Jobs. "There's always some outliers."

Robert Scoble asks about Apple TV. "We're really here to talk about the Mac business today, and the apps." Jobs refuses comment on Apple TV.

Another question: What about AMD? "We just use Intel chips," says Jobs.

Dan Farber of ZDNET asks about Macs in a business setting. Tim Cook says that Apple sees Mac market share growing everywhere. "A part of that is business," although consumer and education remain bigger. Jobs says not to discount the fact that communications is a more and more significant part of business, and people are even using movies to sell ideas internally.

Danielle Levitas of IDC asks if you can upload photos to a .Mac Web Gallery from an iPhone via either EDGE or Wi-Fi. Yes. And she asks about putting HD videos on the Web from iMovie, not just "higher than DVD" resolution ones. Jobs is saying that consumer camcorders use a "close to HD" resolution, and that's what Apple uses. "We think that's probably the way to go right now."

A question about rights issues with copyrighted music you use in your iMovie videos. Jobs says that more than anyone else, Apple discourages music theft.

Another question: The new iMovie looks like it might be better than Final Cut Express for some people. Does that change things? Jobs: "We think that iMovie '08 will be very desirable...if some people choose to use it instead of Final Cut Express, so be it."

Jason Snell of Macworld asks about Excel macro support in Numbers. Is there any? Jobs: "No."

A question about multi-touch technology as seen in the iPhone. Will it show up in the Mac? "I would classify that as a research project at this point" says Jobs.

Analyst Tim Bajarin asks about Apple's strategy for the Mac as a digital media hub, as articulated a few years ago. Jobs says Apple saw the digital lifestyle as being the next big thing for PCs, thanks to digital cameras, the Web, and other trends. Most people agree "they're dramatically beyond" Windows counterparts. "We take this very seriously...we're just topping ourselves at this point...we're obsoleting ourselves...a lot of Windows customers are going to switch because of this stuff."

Molly Wood of CNET: People say that Apple's pricing and design results in Macs appealing to an elite. Does Apple want to overtake the PC in market share? Jobs says the company's goal is to make the best PCs, ones they can recommend to anyone, and sell them at the best price they can. But "we just can't ship junk...there are thresholds we can't cross because of who we are." Feature-for-feature, Apple products aren't premium-priced, he says. "We compare pretty favorably."

And that's the morning's news. More thoughts later...

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