Greetings from our perch at Moscone West where Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at WWDC 2011, the Apple developers’ conference, is about to get underway. Luminaries milling around the stage include Jonathan Ive, Apple’s star product designer, and Walter Isaacson, author of the forthcoming official Jobs biography.
We’re expecting to learn all about the iCloud streaming service and exactly how it will relate to iTunes, along with more details on iOS 5 and OSX Lion. As ever, we’ll try to keep breathless liveblogging to a minimum, presenting the details you need to know clearly and cogently. So check back regularly for the latest.
10 a.m. PT: Steve Jobs has taken the stage, looking thinner than ever but sounding strong. We’re going to talk about three things today, he says: OSX Lion, iOS5, and some “pretty interesting cloud stuff.”
10:05 a.m.: Phil Schiller is on the stage, showcasing some impressive Mac stats we’ll get to later. Suffice to say Mac sales have grown 28% in the last year while PC sales have shrunk 1%. Three quarters of Macs sold are now laptops.
Now, onwards to OSX Lion. We already knew a lot of what Schiller is saying about the forthcoming Mac OS. One new piece of information he’s confirming: All the core apps, such as iPhoto, Safari, Photobooth and iTunes, will be fullscreen. That means less space for menu bars and the like, and more space for the app itself.
10:20 a.m.: Here’s what’s neat and new about Lion: the “resume” feature, which restores all your apps and windows after a restart, just the way you had them on the desktop beforehand. All documents will save themselves automatically, and you’ll be able to go forward and back between versions just the way you do in Time Machine. You can drag and send documents to other people in your network simply with a new feature called Air Drop. And the Mac app store will allow you to make purchases inside each app, just the way you can in the iOS store.
10:30 a.m.: Apple is spending an awful lot of time on Lion. It has taken up more than half the keynote at this point (and none of it with Steve on stage). This makes sense. It’s a beautiful OS, and the Mac needs more attention in order to catch it up to the runaway success that is iOS. But now we’re down in the weeds of the Mail app and its lovely new forms of threading. (Given that Apple is about to launch a cloud-based service, it seems especially odd to spend so much time on a native email app.) The camera-clickers in front of me have slowed their snapping to a minimum.
10:35 a.m.: Schiller confirms that Lion will be available only in the Mac app store — no more physical boxes. And now the price: an incredibly low $29.99. Developers get it today; customers will get it “sometime in July.”
10:40 a.m.: The tempo is rising. We’re on to iOS, which now runs 200 million iPhones and iPads. More than 14 billion apps have been downloaded from the app store, and Apple has paid out more than $2.5 billion to developers. They’ll be pleased to know there are 1500 new APIs in iOS5, and 200 new features for users.
A big cheer goes up for push notifications, all of which you will now be able to see at once by swiping down from the stop of the screen. Texts, for example, will no longer interrupt your game of Cut the Rope — they will simply appear inobtrusively at the top of the screen. Again, swipe from the top for more details, and tap the notification to go to the app.
10:48 a.m.: Note the date and time. This is when Apple began its bid to save the magazine and newspaper industries. The company has unveiled Newsstand, a single place in the app store where you can find papers and mags, from the San Francisco Chronicle to National Geographic. Newsstand, which looks a lot like iBooks, will download the latest issues of publications you’ve subscribed to in the background — so they will be ready for you when you wake up in the morning.
10:52 a.m.: Score one for Twitter’s bid to become a background utility, available everywhere in everything. Apple has added Twitter everywhere in iOS5, so you can tweet contacts, articles, YouTube videos and many more, without having to do any fiddly cut-and-pasting.
10:55 a.m.: The iOS updates are coming thick and fast. Safari will now have full tabbed browsing, which means no more going to another screen to switch between web pages. There’s a new offline reading feature called Reading List built in to Safari, which spells major trouble for services such as Read It Later and Instapaper. And Safari will now showcase online articles on a single page, stripping out extraneous items … such as advertising. This is going to be a problem for online news providers with multi-page feature stories.
11:00 a.m.: Major new updates for the iPhone camera, all designed to make it more accessible. You can get to it directly from the lock screen. You can take snaps by pressing the “volume up” button. An optional grid appears on screen to help you compose the photo. And you can edit photos on the phone, stripping out red eye with a single click. This may cannibalize photo app sales.
Another cool feature that flies by in the middle of a demo: You can drag the keyboard around the screen of your iPhone or iPad, placing it wherever works best for you — and splitting it for easy thumb-typing.
11:07 a.m.: The biggest cheer yet goes up for an iOS feature called “PC Free.” Yes, Apple is finally cutting the cord. For anyone who wants an iOS device as their only computer, you don’t need to connect it to iTunes any more. Software updates are now done over the air.
And yes, you can now sync to iTunes over wifi. That’s huge.
11:12 a.m.: Here comes iMessage, a new texting service that works between iPhones and iPads. You can send SMS, photos, videos and so on from your iPad now. It also offers receipts, so you know messages have been sent, and a notification that someone is typing a response — just as you would get in IM. All information is encrypted, and it’s built on top of the notification system.
Developers will get the iOS5 development kit today; the rest of us will see it in the fall.
11:20 a.m.: Finally, it’s time for iCloud. Steve Jobs is back on stage. He admits that devices have changed, and the system of storing music and video in a central device has “broken down” over the last few years. “Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” he says to applause. “We’re going to demote the PC and Mac to being a device. We’re going to move the digital hub into the cloud.”
“Some people think the cloud is just a hard drive in the sky. We think it’s way more than that.” In iCloud, everything happens automatically.
Jobs takes a swipe at himself, saying of MobileMe, Apple’s previous syncing service: “it wasn’t our finest hour.” MobileMe’s segments have now been upgraded for iCloud. Contacts, mail and calendar events are automatically updated on all devices. You can also share iCal calendars with other users over the cloud. And all of the above is now free — there’s no more $99 charge.
You can now see all the apps you’ve ever purchased on all your iOS devices. Hit the iCloud button to download again for free. In future, all apps will be downloaded to all devices. Anything you’ve bought on iBooks, as well as bookmarks and last read pages in those books, will be updated the same way.
11:30 a.m.: There will be automatic daily backups of your device to the cloud — no more worrying about losing anything you’ve done on your iPhone since the last sync. Documents are going into iCloud, too. All your Pages documents will now appear on all devices automatically.
The penultimate iCloud feature: Photo stream. Photos taken on any device will be automatically downloaded to other devices, including the Mac. “We’ve built this right into the app,” says Jobs, “so there’s nothing new to learn.” Apple TV will receive photos directly, too. Oh, and your PC will get the photos, too. They’ll go directly into the My Photos folder.
All photos will be stored on the iCloud server for 30 days. Macs and PCs will get all of them; iOS devices will store the last 1,000 photos.
11:45 a.m.: And finally, music. “Last, but not least,” says Jobs, “iTunes in the cloud.” Now for the answer to the big question: will it only be songs that you actually bought on iTunes that go into iCloud? What about the rest of your library?
Naturally, any song you buy on any device will be stored in the cloud, and will be available for download at your convenience on any device. Jobs is spending a lot of time demonstrating that.
The entire iCloud service will be free and automatic. You get it on your iOS5 devices, when that launches. You get 5GB for free, and they’re not counting music, photos, apps and books towards that total. Developers will be getting their hands on the preview today. Users will get the iTunes in the cloud portion today, too.
What about songs you ripped yourself? Jobs says you have three options. You can sync them yourself, buy them on iTunes, or a new third way: iTunes Match. This will automatically match songs you ripped to songs in the store, in minutes rather than weeks. No upload is involved. The cost? As predicted: $25 a year.
That’s it for iCloud details. Jobs is showing off pictures of Apple’s vast new data center in North Carolina, which will help bear the load of all this cloud-based music.
And that brings to a close a keynote that clocks in at two hours — quite possibly the longest Jobs keynote yet, and that’s without the assistance of a musical guest. We’ll keep you updated with coverage throughout the day. Thanks for joining us.
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