Live: Apple announcement at Cupertino headquarters

The press conference has begun.

Steve Jobs is out on stage in his signature outfit.

He says good morning, thanks us for being here.

New iMacs

Today we’re going to start off talking about the Mac. Incredible last 12 months: Showing industry growth vs. Mac. Says it’s three times that of the industry for the last four quarters. Says it’s picking up market share.

Says today they will focus on the iMac.

It’s an all-in-one world, he says. iPods, iPhones are all-in-one; he shows a computer with lots of wires, wonders why people put up with it. He says Apple thinks cleaning up the mess and delivering a better computer is Apple’s philosophy.

Aluminum and Glass

Aluminum and glass will be key to the next iMacs, he says. Apple builds professional products out of aluminum. Recyclers love it.

Glass is elegant, and also desirable from a recycling point of view.

What would an iMac look like if we upgraded it and made it out of aluminum and glass: He shows us. Its look is inspired by the iPhone. USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and 800, gigabit ethernet, etc. Everything you’d expect. You can add memory with one screw.

It will come in two sizes, 20 and 24 inches. Both displays will be glossy. He says everything pretty much looks better.

Inside the iMac

He shows the new keyboard – it’s thin, etc. Makes the point that people might have seen it on the Web (the rumor sites had pretty much all of these details, except for the aluminum and glass). There is a new wireless keyboard as well. It has Bluetooth 2.0 as you might expect.

Intel Core 2 Duo inside, up to 2.8 gigahertz, 4 gigabytes of memory, ATI Radeon HD, up to terabyte of hard drive storage, 802.11n.

This replaces the 17, 20, 24-inch models, $1,199, $1,499, $1,999. the 24-inch will now be $1,799, and the 20-inch will be $1,199 and $1,499. (It’s $300 cheaper to get a 20-inch iMac)

The $1,199 model has 2 GHz, 1GB memory, 250GB HD, 8x Superdrive, etc.

He says it has really been thought through from a recycling point of view; Apple’s using high-quality aluminum and glass.

New iMac Ad

He’s showing the new ad:

A bunch of iMacs are spinning through the screen’s visible area. One stops, faces forward. The screen says, “The New iMac.” That’s it. There’s music in the background, and pretty simple.

He said that’s it for the Mac.

Now he wants to talk about apps that run on the Mac.

Apple invented digital lifestyle apps, he says, several years ago, with iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD.

iLife ’08

Today, iLife ’08. This is the biggest jump in iLife since we first introduced it many, many years ago, he says.

iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD, GarageBand

iPhoto:

“Events” being added. Our photo libraries are now tens of thousands of photos. Now there are tons of albums that we have. Often, the photos are centered on events, he says. iPhoto will now group them by events automatically. iPhoto ’08 is about Events. You can now view photos by events or by general photos. Instead of looking through 5,000 photos, you’ll look through 100 events, he gives as an example.

All photos taken in a day are in one event. What happens if you go to a birthday party in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon? You can split and merge events. Same goes for a 3-day ski trip that should be one event.

“Hide” photos being added. This is for photos that aren’t great, but you don’t want to look at them all the time. You can hide them and bring them back. There’s also unified search, so you can search by dates, keywords and ratings.

You can also copy and paste editing functions onto multiple photos. There are also enhancements to photo themes, and new books and calendars. There are now dust covers on the front, and you can print on the inside covers. There’s foil printing on the book itself. Calendars are 70 percent bigger at the same price.

Jobs is demonstrating iPhoto now. The coolest feature yet: mousing over an event lets you flip through the photos in that event, without having to actually launch an album or something. Nice use of computing power. Also, you can preview photos without going into edit mode. He’s also demoing the split/merge function. Looks pretty simple and easy to use. (As an iPhoto user, I can say this is a smart addition. I’ll be curious to hear what the system requirements are for these features.)

The “hide photos” feature is also pretty nifty. Within an event, if you hide photos, it tells you there are hidden photos in the event. You can choose to view them, or leaev them hidden. (I’d like to use this feature in the album for the trip my wife and I recently took to Europe.)

.Mac:

.Mac has more than 1.7 million subscribers, Jobs says. When you marry .Mac and iPhoto, you’ll get amazing things. He’s announcing the .Mac Web Gallery.

One-button photo sharing. You push a button to publish your photos on the Web. Anyone, if you want, can see it. He says it’s a rich Web 2.0 experience. People can see them in a grid, as a slideshow, in a mosaic, or in a carousel. It works in “any browser,” he says. People can download “print quality downloads,” and people can contribute photos to your Web gallery from anywhere, if you choose.

People can get a special e-mail address from the Web gallery, and send them to your gallery. (I, of course, wonder about the security features built into this.) “Send to Web Gallery” is now an option on the iPhone as well. So you can send the photos you shoot on the iPhone into your Web gallery. (I wonder how AT&T (T) feels about this? The carriers like to tie people to their own services, but here Apple is, building its iPhone base into its Web services.)

Jobs is demonstrating the gallery features. It wasn’t apparent that there was a way to limit which visitors can contribute photos to the Web gallery — it seemed to be a “yes” or “no” sort of thing. Also, it seems to be easy to guess a Web Gallery address; the one he’s using for the gallery is http://gallery.mac.com/steve

The “skimming” feature in iPhoto that allows you to quickly flip through album photos works in the online gallery as well. That’s pretty darn cool.

Now Jobs is showing how easy it is for others to contribute to the Web gallery. Phil Schiller sends a photo from out on the Apple campus; it’s Phil with a cutout of “MiniMe” from Austin Powers. (It’s been rumored that “Mini-Me is actually Phil’s nickname around here.)

iMovie:

An iMove engineer went on vacation to the Cayman Islands, shot footage, came back, and wanted to make a cool movie in 30 minutes or so. It was too hard to do it fast. The engineer came up with a “startlingly better” way to edit video, Jobs says.

One library holds all your video. You can scroll through it just like you can your photos. iMovie ’08 takes video from just about any source. (Camcorders of all kinds, Jobs says. I’m wondering if this means you can drop QuickTime into it easily?)

“Skim to preview,” the photo feature, will work with video, too.

“You can put movies together way faster than you ever could before,” Jobs says. “You can select video like you select text.” You can add music, sound effects, add photos … you can drag a whole event in. (iMove really does look totally different.)

You can do to the Share menu and make a version to send to iTunes, and share it on your iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, etc. You can also send it to the .Mac Web Gallery. There’s an option to put the video up in higher resolution than a DVD.

You can also send to YouTube automatically. (Thank you!) There’s an option for that in the menu.

Jobs is now demonstrating it. He’s scrolling through the video, much like he would in iPhoto. (Someone’s phone rings in the audience, which is kind of annoying. ‘You might want to answer that,’ Jobs says.)

This really does seem to make it easier to browse through your video. Looks like another smart use of processing power and memory to enhance the user interface.

Jobs is now grabbing scenes out of various clips, and dragging them up to the edit area. It’s a bunch of snowboarding footage. He’s moving around and arranging clips like you would text on a page. It’s much easier to throw in titles and transitions.

Now he’s showing it. It looks really awesome, actually. Impressive. And he did it really fast — and it was high-def video. (Again, I imagine this has to require Intel processors. There’s a lot of computing power backing up an app this smooth and sophisticated.)

Jobs is now showing a movie that’s uploaded to a .Mac Web Gallery, higher resolution than a DVD. Much better than “sending DVDs to Grandma,” he says. You can also let people download your videos onto their own computers if you like.

Jobs says, somebody asked him, you guys are so far ahead of everyone else, why do you keep obsoleting your own products? He says it’s for the same reason they made them in the first place — because Apple really cares about this stuff.

iWeb:

Now there are “live Web widgets.” You can drag Google Maps into your Web site, for example. Apple’s making it easier to embed stuff.

There’s also a big deal with Google — you can sign up for AdSense from within the app. (Mighty cozy relationship here; I guess that’s no surprise, since Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple’s board of directors.)

You can also make a “Media Index Page.” There’s personal domain support. (This is actually a big deal. I wonder, though, how customizable.)

iDVD:

There’s better performance and high-rate encoding. There are new themes; he shows two, that have more elaborate motion menus.

GarageBand:

Multi-take recording, 24-bit audio, more. There’s also “Magic GarageBand,” something he’s going to demo.

“Magic GarageBand” has genres — things like blues, country, reggae, latin, rock. You can “Audition” slightly cartoony-looking instruments, and decide what instrument will play the melody to a demo song. The songs are sort of pre-loaded, and people can sing or play over them. It makes the app more accessible to people who aren’t that comfortable with music.

The app will be $79, available today. It also ships free with all new Macs, beginning today.

.Mac will now come with 10GB of storage, up from 1GB before. The subscription is still $99.95 per year.

iWork:

Now, iWork, the productivity app.

Jobs is talking about how it includes Keynote and Pages, and Apple has sold 1.8 million copies.

Today, there’s iWork ’08.

Keynote:

Keynote has new text effects and transitions. There’s also “Instant Alpha,” which lets you quickly cut out elements of a photo, and drop the cut-out element into a presentation. There’s also “Smart Builds,” which handles a new suite of animations. Jobs is demonstrating the animations now.

Pages:

There are now two distinct modes — one for word processing, one for page layout. That should make it “a lot simpler for a lot of people,” Jobs says. There’s a contextual format bar, and change tracking; Jobs says it’s compatible with Microsoft Word. There are also 140 templates.

(This announcement is sort of winding down at the end. Will he have some sort of punch at the end?)

Yep. Apple’s introducing a spreadsheet, called “Numbers.” Jobs calls it “the spreadsheet for the rest of us.”

Numbers:

There are checkboxes and sliders, sort and filter, and a flexible canvas. You can have multiple sheets on a canvas that are tied together with formulas, so you can move stuff around with one group of numbers without screwing up the whole sheet. (This is sort of big.)

There’s also “Interactive Printing,” to keep you from printing out the wrong part of a sheet, making it easy to set up spreadsheet printing. (This has got to be freaking Microsoft out, and I’m guessing this is why the latest version of Mac Office has been delayed — Apple showed this to Microsoft as a courtesy, and the folks in Redmond realized that their app would look pretty weak next to iWork, particularly in the spreadsheet department.)

Jobs is demonstrating Numbers now. The app makes formulas for you, and it’s drag-and-drop. This one app could really change Apple’s relationship with the Mac Business Unit. Spreadsheets are a key part of what small business users care about, and that’s a big part of the loyal Mac base.

Jobs says Leopard will ship “later on this year,” which is no change from what he’s said before. Jobs previously gave October as the ship date.

That’s the end of the Jobs announcement part. He’s now moving into a Q&A session. Tim Cook, operations guru, is up with him, as is Phil Schiller, marketing guru.

Q&A:

Michael Gartenberg is asking how Apple’s going to market the fact that its products work so well together. “You’re going to help us by writing about it,” Jobs says. “That’s why we’re all here together.” Hm. Very honest answer.

Why isn’t Apple putting Intel stickers on Macs? “We like our own stickers better,” Jobs says. “Don’t get me wrong. We love Intel …. It’s just that everybody knows we’re using Intel processors.” Phil Schiller also says Apple doesn’t want people to have to peel stuff off of a computer to make it look better.

Someone asked how thin the new iMacs are, and Jobs invited her to measure one outside.

“Desktops are still, today an important part,” Jobs says about the future of desktops compared to laptops. “We think the iMac’s got a pretty strong future to it.” … “I’m not aware of anybody asking for a 24-inch laptop,” Jobs says.

We are refreshing the Mac mini and making it faster, Tim Cook says. It will be in the online store.

How is Apple’s relationship with Google changing? Is it getting cozier? “We are working closer with Google. They make some great back-end services that we’d love to tie into our applications. … They’re buying a lot of iPhones over at Google. … It’s a good relationship. We like working with them.”

iPhone: “We think the iPhone is a pretty strong success, and we’re pretty happy with how it’s going.” And I think most of the world feels that way too, he said, aside from a few outliers.

What are Apple’s latest thoughts on using AMD chips? “We don’t have any latest thoughts, we just use Intel chips.”

There’s a question about the use of Macs in business, and Apple execs generally say the Mac is gaining share, but there are no specifics.

Someone asks about why Apple doesn’t allow HD uploads to the Web. Jobs answers that the HD camcorders out right now don’t necessarily do full HD, so Apple isn’t marketing it that way.

Someone asks about Apple making it so easy to add music tracks to a movie and share it over the Web. Is that a problem as for as intellectual property rights? “We, probably more than anyone else encourage people not to steal music,” Jobs answers.

Someone asks what the introduction of Numbers, and what that means for Apple’s FileMaker group, which also does spreadsheets. “I think what you see in iWork is what you get.” Jobs didn’t really answer the question.

There’s a question about the iPhone’s multi-touch technology, and whether that would come to the Mac. “We think it makes a lot of sense in the iPhone, we’re not so sure it makes a lot of sense in the Mac. I would classify that as a research project at this point,” Jobs said. Interesting.

On iLife: “Our customers love it, and a lot of Windows customers are going to switch because of this stuff.”

Does Apple want to overtake Windows in market share? “We just can’t ship junk. There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are,” Jobs says. “Our products are usually not premium priced. … We don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products. We just don’t offer categories of products like that.” In other words, Apple isn’t trying to address the low end of the market, and that means it probably won’t ever have dominant market share.

The presentation has ended.