Keynote April 8th 2010 : LIVE is closed !
Friday, April 09, 2010
You must read from the bottom to the top of the post !
11:41AM - Huge thanks to the always awesome team at the Rackspace Cloud for powering today’s live coverage!
11:40AM - Steve: “It’s like we said on the iPad: if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t have to ever, ever, EVER think about that stuff. Well, thank you very much, we appreciate your coming this morning and hope we’ve answered most of your questions!”
11:39AM - Steve continues: Remember, the relatively small window to the store can only do so much, so we’re seeing web sites that feature iPhone apps outside and around the iPhone in other mediums that provide some of that recommendation.
Phil: I think it’s important to mention that we do more to promote applications than any other company in history has. We do TV ads, print ads, direct emails… [You know, Phil is right, Apple does do a pretty good job of promoting (a small number of) 3rd party apps.]
Q: Discoverability and organization are becoming an issue in the App Store. Is that something that will be improved in OS 4?
Steve: A few things: number one, the App Store is not part of OS 4 or any release, it’s a service and it’s programmed on the server side, and we can enhance it without waiting for a major release. … We’re constantly interested in improving that, and do so fairly frequently. In terms of discoverability, we’ve added things like Genius recommendations, but I also see an infrastructure evolve to help users find apps.
Q: How do you close apps?
Scott: You don’t even have to worry about closing apps.
Phil: I think it’s important to mention that we do more to promote applications than any other company in history has. We do TV ads, print ads, direct emails… [You know, Phil is right, Apple does do a pretty good job of promoting (a small number of) 3rd party apps.]
Q: Discoverability and organization are becoming an issue in the App Store. Is that something that will be improved in OS 4?
Steve: A few things: number one, the App Store is not part of OS 4 or any release, it’s a service and it’s programmed on the server side, and we can enhance it without waiting for a major release. … We’re constantly interested in improving that, and do so fairly frequently. In terms of discoverability, we’ve added things like Genius recommendations, but I also see an infrastructure evolve to help users find apps.
Q: How do you close apps?
Scott: You don’t even have to worry about closing apps.
11:32AM - Phil: What’s surprised me the most is not that they get [the iPad] — we hoped they would — it’s the speed that people are getting it. It’s happened at a remarkable rate.
Steve: If our competitors ever introduce a competitive product to the iPad, they’ll be HOPING they’ll get 3.5k apps in the first year. And we’ve seen that in the first week — it’s happening fast, and because it’s standing on the shoulders of 85 million people who already know how to use it, and they’re just taking to it like a fish in water.
Steve: If our competitors ever introduce a competitive product to the iPad, they’ll be HOPING they’ll get 3.5k apps in the first year. And we’ve seen that in the first week — it’s happening fast, and because it’s standing on the shoulders of 85 million people who already know how to use it, and they’re just taking to it like a fish in water.
11:31AM - Steve on the iPad: You still have butterflies in your stomach, you’re nervous because you never know what people are going to think. People seem to think this is a profound game changer. We think when people look back on this years from now, they will think of this as a major event in the history of personal computing devices.
11:29AM - I asked whether Apple will enable unsigned applications like Android and Palm OS.Steve: There’s a porn store for Android… you can download it, your kids can download it. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to.
11:27AM - Q: What are you guys doing to make these phones more safe so people won’t use them [while driving]?
Steve: I think we do more than most to connect our phones into cars’ control systems. I think we’ve done a great job so users can have hands-free calling, they’ve got controls on the steering wheel. I think we’ve probably done a better job on that than anywhere else because of the momentum of the iPod.
Steve: I think we do more than most to connect our phones into cars’ control systems. I think we’ve done a great job so users can have hands-free calling, they’ve got controls on the steering wheel. I think we’ve probably done a better job on that than anywhere else because of the momentum of the iPod.
11:26AM - Q: Can you talk about compatibility with earlier devices? Will apps degrade gracefully?
Steve: We didn’t make decisions, there were none to make — earlier hardware just couldn’t support it.
Scott: We allow developers to see what the hardware can support and enable features based on that. It’s really up to the developer.
Steve: This isn’t a problem, just that some of the older products won’t be able to support multitasking.
Phil: We’re sensitive to this, we want to make everything simple and able to run on the widest number of devices possible.
Steve: We didn’t make decisions, there were none to make — earlier hardware just couldn’t support it.
Scott: We allow developers to see what the hardware can support and enable features based on that. It’s really up to the developer.
Steve: This isn’t a problem, just that some of the older products won’t be able to support multitasking.
Phil: We’re sensitive to this, we want to make everything simple and able to run on the widest number of devices possible.
11:23AM - Steve: We do not have plans to be a worldwide ad agency. We don’t know a lot about advertising, but we’re learning. We tried to buy AdMob, but Google snatched them up because they didn’t want us to have them, so we bought another smaller company, Quattro. But we’re babes in the woods.
11:22AM - They’re talking a lot more about iAd right now. Steve: “Why is this so different? These 185k apps don’t exist on computers. This is a new phenomenon, this is the first time this kind of thing has ever existed. We never had that on the desktop, so search was the only way to find a lot of things.” The man has a point, the web (and web ads) are the mechanism of choice on PCs.
Steve: We shipped on Saturday, and rested on Sunday. [laughter] Anything possible… [very non-committal!]
11:17AM - Q: Is there a reason why you can’t keep track of a timeline in the API?
Scott: We believe a lot of things like Twitter work better with push notifications where you get what’s relevant for you. In terms of saving your state, the technology is deep… you’re told where you’re being pulled back in. It’ll be far better than what it is today, because today the app quits.
11:15AM - Talking about ad agencies. Steve: the ad agencies we’ve talked to, like our own, have been super excited about this. For the first time, they’re seeing how to bring their storytelling skills to digital ads. They’re really excited about hiring technical people to create these kinds of ads to combine them with their storytelling.
11:13AM - Q: Any change in Apple position on Flash and Java?
Steve: No.
Steve: No.
11:12AM - Q: Apple is hosting ads, will there be an approval process like the App Store?
Steve: I think there will need to be some boundaries. Like, you can’t run just ANY ad on ABC. There are some ads you can’t run. But these advertisers are paying to run ads… I’m hoping there won’t be anything other than a light touch.
11:10AM - Q: Will iPad’s success impact its international launch?Steve: I think there will need to be some boundaries. Like, you can’t run just ANY ad on ABC. There are some ads you can’t run. But these advertisers are paying to run ads… I’m hoping there won’t be anything other than a light touch.
Steve: No, we said we’re launching internationally later in April, and we’re launching later in April,
11:09AM - Q: Does wireless app distribution open an avenue for distributing apps not through the app store?
Scott: No, we have a program for enterprises to allow them to sign their applications. It doesn’t open additional devices they can run on.
Scott: No, we have a program for enterprises to allow them to sign their applications. It doesn’t open additional devices they can run on.
11:08AM - Q: How is AT&T prepared to compensate for greater data usage?
Steve: I’m not sure the assumption that it’s going to use more data is correct. Well, we’re not multiplying the number of minutes of usage. It might be accurate, but there’s nothing to suggest there is going to be more data used.
Steve: I’m not sure the assumption that it’s going to use more data is correct. Well, we’re not multiplying the number of minutes of usage. It might be accurate, but there’s nothing to suggest there is going to be more data used.
11:07AM - Steve: “Okay, we’d love to answer some questions you might have!”
11:06AM - Phil’s up, looks like we’re starting Q&A now.
11:05AM - Steve and Scott are up on stage, one more stool. Assuming that’s going to be for Phil.
11:03AM - Don’t go anywhere, Q&A with Steve in just a minute!
11:03AM - “iPhone OS 4 to the iPad this fall. So, that’s iPhone OS 4, and I really want to thank you for coming today. What we’re going to do now is have a short break and I’d like to ask the press to remain for the Q&A starting in about 5 minutes. Thank you for coming, I think you’ll be very pleased with iPhone OS 4. Thanks!”
11:02AM - “For iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd gen, they will run many things, but not everything — they will not support multitasking, the hardware just can’t do it.”
11:02AM - “Now, we’re releasing a developer preview today. You can get it today at developer.apple.com. We are releasing it to end users this summer, and that’s for the iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3rd gen (last fall’s). They will run pretty much everything.”
11:01AM - “So that is iAd, and that’s our seventh tent-pole.” Applause. “Let’s review: multitasking, folders, iBooks, GameKit, iAd… these are just some of the over 100 user features, and over 1500 new developer APIs in iPhone 4.”
11:00AM - Demo’s over. “That’s an example of 3 ads that are very easy to make. In addition to ad agencies being able to make these things, there are hundreds of thousands of iPhone app devs who know how to make these things. Emotion plus interactivity. The ads keep you in your app, so you’re much more likely to click on then and explore.”
10:59AM - Faux Target ad, Steve: “I’m going to build my dorm room. I am a duuuude… I’m going to Michigan.” Seriously, can you imagine Steve in college?
10:58AM - Showing Dunks progressing through the years. Nike ID: “shake your iPhone to get another.” So they’ve done some serious OS-level integration with these ads, which is clearly a huge, huge difference from where things are today.
10:57AM - “Have you ever seen an ad like this?” Silence. “… anything even close?” Laughter. Showing a faux-Nike demo with a nice, high res video.
10:56AM - Steve’s winning the little game. “Yeah, this is good.” Heh. Shows theaters it’s playing, uses location. Also has in-ad purchases. Alright, we got the point. And as far as ads go, this is pretty short of revolutionary.
10:55AM - Showing off the interactivity of the ad presence. It’s pretty good — kind of like an integrated microsite in a window. “They even included a game in this ad! Well… we included the game.” Chuckles.
10:54AM - Demo time! “What we’ve done is mocked up a few ads.” Toy Story 3 ad. “It’s a Disney movie coming out this June… I’ve seen it, it’s really good.” Laughter.” All this stuff is done in HTML5, by the way.” Bigger laughter. Ouch, Adobe.
10:52AM - “The user can return to their app any time they want. We think the user will be much more interested in clicking on these things because they won’t pay the penalty for doing so. You can add iAd opportunities in an afternoon — we’re going to host and deliver the ads, and we’ll give developers an industry standard 60% of the revenues.”
10:52AM - “We want to be even more interactive than the ads on the web, and we want to get some of that interactivity from video. The ads keep you in your app…” People don’t click on ads because you get yanked out of your app. “Because iAd is in the OS itself, we’ve figured out how to do interactive and video content without ever taking you out of your app!”
10:50AM - “This is a pretty serious opportunity, and it’s an incredible demographic. But we want to do more than that. We want to change the quality of the advertising. We’re all familiar with interactive ads on the web. They’re interactive, but they’re not capable of delivering emotion.”
10:49AM - “The average user spends over 30 minutes using apps on their phone. If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that’d be 10 ads per device per day — about the same as a TV show. We’re going to soon have 100m devices. That’s a billion ad opportunities per day!”
10:49AM - “On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop. They’re spending all their time on these apps — they’re using apps to get to data on the internet, not generalized search.” Steve is basically just talking to Google, now.
10:48AM - “What some of them are starting to do is put mobile ads in their apps… and most of this advertising sucks. We want to help developers make money with ads so they can keep their free apps free.”
10:48AM - That’s Steve, by the way. “”Well, we’ve got a lot of free apps — we like that, users like that, but these developers have to find a way to make some money, and we’d like to help them.”
10:47AM - “Our seventh tent-pole: iAd. It’s mobile advertising. So, what’s this about?”
10:47AM - “We wanted to make this even better — we’ve added a social gaming network. We do automatic matchmaking, we’ll find others with a similar ability and match them against you. You can see how you’re progressing in a game with achievements.” Wow, so Apple just totally knocked off Xbox Live (and PSN) in the iPhone.
10:46AM - “Gaming is extremely popular on the iPhone and iPod touch. In fact, we have over 50k titles… let’s look at the competition. If you look at dedicated gaming devices like the PSP and DS, this just blows them out of the water.”
10:45AM - “That is our fifth tent-pole!” Applause. “Our sixth is Game Center. This is a dev preview in iPhone OS 4.”
10:45AM - Mobile device management, helps manage deployment. Gets some applause, but I’m not entirely sure why! “Next: wireless app distribution. With iPhone OS 4, a company can wirelessly distribute an application anywhere in the world with their own servers. Next, as Steve mentioned, we’re adding support for multiple Exchange accounts on the same phone. We’ve also added support for SSL VPN.”
10:44AM - Scott’s up: “Our fifth tent-pole is some great features for the enterprise. Already over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are using the iPhone. First: better email encryption. We’re making APIs available to allow developers to encrypt all the data INSIDE their app, too.”
10:43AM - “Buy your books once and read them anywhere. We’re wirelessly syncing pages and bookmarks automatically. And just like on the iPad, we’re supplying a free book: Winnie the Pooh. You know, we labored over that choice, which to include!”
10:42AM - “We’re really excited about this. Just since rolling it out on the iPad, we’ve had so many requests to bring this to the iPhone — of course, we were already doing that. We think customers will really enjoy this on their iPhone or iPod touch.”
10:41AM - “There’s more, but these are the biggest ones.” Applause. And if you live in mail like I do, this is definitely one to applaud. Next: “We’re adding iBooks.”
10:40AM - “In addition, we’ve added the ability to organize by thread.” Can I just say… finally? “Follow that conversation all along by looking at the prior messages bundled in one place. And open attachments. Tap on it, open with an app downloaded from the App Store.”
10:39AM - “The first: a unified inbox. Customers have really wanted this.” Yeah, like this guy right here! “And, we’ve made it so you can have more than one Exchange account, as well. If you want to focus on just one account, we’ve added fast inbox switching.”
10:39AM - “Let’s go to tent-pole number three: an enhanced mail. We’ve added a lot of great features to mail.”
10:38AM - Folders can live in the dock, too. “So, that is folders!” Applause. “An incredibly great drag and drop UI with intelligent naming. You used to be able to see 180 apps in your phone over those 11 pages. If you replaced every one of those with a folder, it’s over 2,000!”
10:37AM - By the way, if you’re not already a gdgt user you should go sign up and join the discussion!
10:36AM - Drag and drop apps onto one another to create folders — the name auto-populates but you can edit it. This is pretty hot.
10:35AM - “As people are downloading more and more apps, you’re having to flick from page to page to find them. People want a better way to organize them — instead of talking about them, I want to show you, it’s beautiful.”
10:35AM - “Thank you Scott. So, our second tent-pole: Folders.”
10:34AM - “This is the easiest to implement.” All of the state is stored and preserved instantly, the app no longer uses resources. “These are very deep, and they add a lot of power for developers to add to their apps. I’d like to hand it back to Steve!” Steve’s back up.
10:33AM - “The next is task completion. One is like Flickr: sometimes photos can take a while to upload. With task completion, Flickr can continue to upload those photos in the background when you browse away. Our last service: fast app switching.”
10:33AM - “Building on push notifications, we’re building on the service and adding local notifications: they’re like push notifications, except there’s no server, they’re all done ON the phone.” This is hot, and definitely needed.
10:32AM - “If anything has asked for your location in the last 24 hours, you’ll se a check there, too. Next: push notifications. We’ve had these for about 9 months now, incredibly popular. Great for things like score updates, news alerts… in fact, in just 9 months we’ve pushed over 10 billion notifications.”
10:31AM - “With all these location services, we take privacy very, very seriously. We’re taking it several steps further in iPhone OS 4.0. First, we’re adding an indicator to the status bar if something is tracking your location. Next: we’re adding fine-grained settings so you can enable/disable location on per application.”
10:30AM - “Now it can continue to track your location with GPS in the background. Now, GPS uses a fair bit of power…” mentions making the best use for this in the car. “There’s another class of application, like social networking services like Loopt.” Uses this positioning system with cell-based A-GPS.
10:29AM - Scott: “The next is background location. There are two classes of apps that want to use your location in the background. One is turn by turn directions, like TomTom. The problem is, until now, if you left an app like TomTom, you’d stop getting directions.”
10:28AM - David is talking on Skype in a live call while loading up some dinner spots in OpenTable. “I’ll send you the details in a few minutes, I’m just with some folks right now.” Har har. Demo’s over.
10:26AM - “Until today, navigating away meant I’d go offline. In iPhone OS 4.0, when I leave the app, it goes into the background, and I’m still able to receive calls.” Oh, I can absolutely see using this.
10:23AM - “It took our developers just one day to make Pandora fully background aware.” Showing Pandora playing while the phone is in Safari, as well as locked.
10:22AM - Pandora demo time from Tim Westergren. “It’s not exaggeration to say the iPhone has singlehandedly change the trajectory of Pandora. … it was a transformative moment for us. Our growth rate almost doubled overnight, and we add almost 30k new listeners a day on the iPhone.”
10:21AM - “We’re providing seven multitasking services. First: background audio streaming.” Talking about Pandora — exactly who should be getting this first! “Pandora is great, but until now if you left Pandora to go to another app, the music would stop.” Not anymore!
10:20AM - Scott’s up: “How are we adding multitasking while preserving battery life and performance. We looked at tens of thousands of apps in the app store, and we’ve distilled the services those apps need to run in the background. So we implemented those services, and we’re providing those services as APIs to developers so they can add multitasking while preserving battery life.”
10:19AM - “Very easy to use, very efficient, we think users will love it. That’s our multitasking UI, it’s really wonderful. We’ve been using it a lot, and it really changes the way you use the iPhone. So, to explain how we did this while preserving battery life and performance, I’m going to turn it over to Scott Forstall, SVP of iPhone Software.”
10:18AM - “Very simple, very very simple.” Applause. Opens eBay app, “I’m right to where I left off.” Tap Tap Revenge: “Alright, I’m not winning here.” He’s moving back and forth between apps fairly quickly, but we’re not seeing how this is actually multitasking though — what Steve is showing right now is just app switching.
10:16AM - Steve launches mail, opens a message, clicks a URL into the browser. “So far this is what we already do every day on the iPhone.” Double click home button, window raises, shows app s that are running right now.
10:15AM - “If you don’t do it right, your phone will feel sluggish and your battery life will go down. We’ve figured out how to avoid those things, and that’s what took us a little longer, and I think we’ve nailed it.” Demo time! “We’ve got a great UI for it, I think you’ll like it.”
10:15AM - Big applause. “We weren’t the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best. Like cut and paste — it’s better than any other implementation. It’s really easy to implement it in a way that really drains battery life. And, it’s really easy to implement it in a way that reduces the performance of the foreground app and makes your phone feel sluggish.”
10:14AM - “Let’s start off with the first one, the biggest: multitasking!”
10:14AM - Gift apps, persistent WiFi, iPod out, search SMS/MMS, wake on Wireless, CalDAV invitations, web search suggestions. “These are just a few end user features. Of those, we’re going to talk about seven today.”
10:13AM - “… and one called Accelerate, itself over a thousand math-related APIs for accelerometer.” New user features: 5x digital zoom, playlists, tap to focus video, places in photos, home screen wallpaper, file and delete mail search results, Bluetooth keyboards!
10:12AM - “iPhone OS 4 delivers over 1500 new APIs for devs. They can access calendar, photo library, still and video camera data…” Quick Look, SMS, Full map overlays, automated testing.
10:12AM - “We’ve been working on this for a while, it’s pretty great. We’re going to ship it this summer, and release a dev preview today.”
10:11AM - “How many iPhones have we sold to date? Over 50 million. If you add iPod touches into that, it’s over 85 million. If you’re a software developer, that is a plum market to go after. Today, we’re giving a developer preview of iPhone OS 4, the next major release of the iPhone OS.”
10:11AM - “We had a really nice thing happen recently: we won the JD Power award for customer satisfaction… we’ve won it three years in a row. If we take a look at market share, one way to look at that is share of use. iPhone has a 64% mobile browser user share.”
10:10AM - “Netflix: this app has been very highly praised. And… where would we be without an accordion?” Laughter. “That’s just a few of the iPad apps… let’s get to the iPhone.”
10:09AM - Showing off some apps, like Zillow, Marvel, MLB, ESPN, Epi, E-Trade, IMDB. Yeah, these are all pretty good apps! “ABC turned out a phenomenal app for the iPad! You can just turn it sideways and watch these shows in incredible resolution, it’s fantastic.”
10:07AM - Update on the App Store: over 4 billion (with a b!) apps. Over 185k apps in the App Store. Over 3.5k iPad apps in the store. “This is also accelerating — these apps are just amazing. I just want to show you some screenshots of some of the apps — you’ll be surprised at just how great they are.”
10:06AM - “Beyond all the numbers, what it was really about, was this…” Laughter. “People are just loving this product. You know, when you create something, you have butterflies in your stomach before you put it out in the world, you don’t know if people will love it.”
10:06AM - iBooks: 250k book downloads. As of today: over 600k. “We’ve gotten tremendous positive feedback on iBooks.” First day iPad apps: over 1m downloads. As of today: over 3.5m Applause.
10:05AM - “On Saturday, we’ve sold 300k iPads. As of today we’ve sold about 450k.” Applause. “I’m told Best Buy is out of stock, we’re getting them in and selling them right out. We’re making them as fast as we can, but evidently we can’t quite make enough of them yet, so we’re going to have to try harder.”
10:04AM - “Before we get to that, though, we’ve got a few updates. First, the iPad: we just started shipping it on Saturday. We got some really great reviews. … Walt’s a tough critic.”
10:03AM - “Good morning. Thanks for coming this morning, we’ve got something to share that we’re pretty excited about: iPhone OS 4.”
10:03AM - Steve!
10:01AM - Oh hey, they’re playing Phoenix’s Lisztomania, totally unlike every other press conference we’ve been to in the last 6 months! Ahem. In all seriousness though, the music is a lot less “reflective” as Steve had playing at the iPad launch in January.
9:57AM - Okay, we’re seated, people are still filing in, and the WiFi is already under stress.
9:52AM - Alright, we’re all just starting to head in!
9:44AM - Yeah, things are definitely filling up! Everyone is still milling about, I’m expecting we’ll be admitted in a few minutes.
9:29AM - It’s slowly filling up in the lobby, but it seems a little lighter than usual. We still have another 30 minutes or so, though, stay close!
8:55AM - Alright, we’ve arrived on campus! We’re still a bit early though, so there will be a bit of loitering before things get going.
7:45AM - You know, while you’re at it, might as well go check out iPhone OS 4.0 on gdgt, too. And don’t forget, you can discuss the keynote coverage right here.
7:44AM - Welcome to gdgt’s live coverage of Apple iPhone OS 4.0 unveiling! We’re already en route to the mothership in Cupertino, and will be getting started in just a little bit.
