So to recap: iPhoto, new 14" iBooks, and new iMacs. Sorta like the iPod-- doesn't look like much at first, but an all-in-one movie studio for under $1800, that's really quite awesome. Still, no sexbots. Bad Apple!

Well, 2 o'clock, and Apple's satellite time apparently ran out, in favor of someone broadcasting color bars and jazz from a local radio station. Sure, the jazz is nice, but it's not the news B-roll (product pictures and interviews) that they were promising before the show.

A little promo video for the iMac and iPhoto. Annie Liebovitz is impressed with iPhoto! Francis Ford Coppola thinks the iMac is a great tool for creating film. I would have to agree. With the G4 and the SuperDrive, that's pretty awesome. Just gotta get some FireWire drives fast enough for video and you're set.

Reality... Distorion... Field?... sinking... in...

New prices, 15" LCD, 700 MHz 128 MB RAM, 40GB HD, CD-RW $1299
add 256 MB RAM and a Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW), $1499
add 800 MHz, 60 GB HD and a Superdrive (DVD-RW/CD-RW), $1799

Design? Total redesign. Looks a bit like an overgrown AirPort Base Station-- a white half-spherical base 10.5" in diameter, and about 6" tall with a stalk coming out of the top, and the LCD attached to the stalk. It's a very clever design, if not totally my style. Maybe it'll grow on me.

Goodbye to the iMac, hello to a completely redesigned one. Woo!

Yes, 15" LCD screen.
Yes, G4 (700 and 800 MHz).
Yes, SuperDrive. DVD-R are now only $5 apiece.
GeForce2 MX
5 USB 2 FW
Ethernet
Modem, etc, etc.

Now doing a recap of all the ol' Jeff Goldblum iMac ads. I suppose to whip the crowd up into a drooling frenzy.Mmm... Jeff Goldblum...

Now, the iMac...

iBooks: They're lowering prices, and dropping the DVD-only model. Introducing the 14" iBook. 600 MHz 200 MB ram. Same thickness at the smaller iBook. $1799.

iPhoto: Import ---> Edit ---> Print. When you plug in your camera, iPhoto launches auto-magically. Allows you to do a contact sheet, crop, and print simply, using colorsync for dynamic prints without worry. Very cool.

Realised they needed to do more. Now also helps you save them, organize them, and share them. Steve does a demo... Takes a Canon camera out, takes a picture of an employee ("Oh, c'mon, don't be bashful. There's only 100,000 people watching on the internet."). Looks a bit like iTunes, thumbnails on the right, photo albums on the left. Can scale thumbnails to any size you like, also can separate my "film roll" (new one every time you dump your camera's storage card).

You can edit right in iPhoto. Non-destructive cropping with presets for basic printout sizes (4x6, 5x7, etc.). Can also do some basic color changes, like to black&white. You can also pick another editing program if you like, like Photoshop (once it ships, of course).

New ways to share photos. There's an on-screen slide show with dissolves and music, also automatic iTools home page creation with an album of photos, uploads photos and publishes the web page for you.

Printing is incredibly simple. Select your printer, paper type and hit print. It can also print greeting cards and contact sheets. You can also order Kodak prints on photo paper up to 16"x20", straight from iPhoto.

"The best for last." You can design and have printed a hardback book with all your own photos and layout, all from within iPhoto. You can select from 6 book designs, including Storybook, which is awesome. 10-50 pages. Books ship to you in about one week. Wicked cool. :)

Hinting... hinting... BAM! Steve announces iPhoto.

New major topic: "The Digital Hub" strategy. Combining DV camcorders, DVD, mp3 and digital cameras, making the computer the center of the "digital lifestyle." Started this movement a year ago, have since had iMovie 2, iTunes 2 and iDVD 2. Steve demos the 3 apps released. Leaves a slide up with a conspicuous looking space in the digital photo slot. Hmmm... ~~one of these things is not like the other~~

Now a word from an Apple client: Dan Gregoire from LucasFilm comes up to show how LucasFilm is using OS X. A (very shot) taped speech from 'ol George says they use OS X to create animatics for pre-visualization. Demo of stuff from Episode II in Maya, After Effects. He'll be at the Alias|Wavefront booth all week. I'm tempted to go. ;)

Okay, GAMES. Mike Rogers from Aspyr demos Harry Potter. Quidditch looks neat. Announced The Sims: Hot Date , and Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds.

Wolfram Research comes on stage with Mathematica. A couple months old, but for the technical computing crowd, this is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Also useful to calculus students. Also very funny goy demoing. He had an integrals joke. I laughed. Said he was rendering animations on his PowerBook in the background for like a week. Wouldn't do it on any other OS, because these things need to run for a long time without failing. Also commended OS X's Quartz graphics engine for providing awesome rendering capabilities for equations. The animations were very cool. :)

Mike Evangelist comes on stage to demo Final Cut Pro 3.0. Demos software real-time effects with ESPN's The Life, which is edited totally in FCP. RT transitions, superimposed titles, and color correction. Not new news today, but still very, very sweet. RT also works on the fastest PowerBooks, for mobile RT. :)

Guy from Palm comes on stage, new USB cradles, bonus software for Macs, shipping in multiple languages. Palm Desktop Software product manager demos the new Desktop for OS X. Better drag-n-drop for Vcards. Demoed Palm sync. Public beta downloadable at www.palm.com/macintosh.

OS X update. Seeing Mac programmers becoming Unix programmers as well, and vice-versa. Press likes it

12 month transition period (on a clock face). At 6 o'clock in September, 10.1 shipped. Now it's 9 o'clock. Now there's tons of apps (>2500). Office:mac for X shipped last quarter, Steve applauds Microsoft. Next: Adobe. The Executive Vice President of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen, comes up on stage to remind you how important Adobe is to you, and to beg humbly for your forgiveness for taking so long to come to Mac OS X. After Effects 5.5 is now shipping (YAY!). Demos of Illustrator 10, Indesign 2.0 (supports native photoshop files with transparency), GoLive 6.0... and FINALLY! Photoshop. ("Almost here!") Demoing AppleScript with Photoshop, building the Fellowship of the Rings release poster. New Spell Check in PShop. Adobe calls themselves "the poster child for Apps on OS X." HA!

Press likes the iPod.

Steve is proud of the Apple retail stores, hit the 25 stores by 2001-end-of-year mark (27, actually). Point of stores if to try to convert "the other 95%." 40% of retail Mac buyers are new Mac owners. 800,000 visitors in December to all Apple stores.

State of Maine equipping all 7th and 8th grade students and teachers with iBooks, statewide. That's 36,000 iBooks, if you're counting. Steve says "One down, 49 to go."

Steve takes to the stage, the SteveNote begins.

FACT: I'm really hungry. I eat some apple muffin and have some bottle Frappachino?. The keynote has not yet started, but there's some nice Peter Gabriel music to tide us over.

Okay, 11:55 EST, here we go?

The requisite 4 Macs/PCs are on a table on stage for the inevitable speed-tromping tests. Another mac is on stage, 90 degrees to the audience for Steve's also-inevitable OS X demo, hopefully for 10.2, but that's where I end my speculation. Everything from here on out is hard, solid fact.

Apple Hype Watch™ Day 8: "Watch the live webcast in QuickTime." Personally I think Apple's gone a little overboard with this whopper of a tagline. I mean, I have some Windoze using friends who can't seem to figure out how to install QuickTime on their machines (possibly because it requires an "administrator password"), and Apparently QT for Java doesn't work well enough that my buddy Ben could use it on his operating system of choice. Yes, Apple, you've finally taken this whole hype thing too far. Shame on you for raising our expectations so high.

On the "what is it already???" front, I'm now thinking maybe Apple finally came to their senses, and started manufacturing the iTari. I keep telling Steve, "Steve," I sez. "Steve, I think you should make the iTari. Everybody wants one." And then my cat looks at me as if to say, My name's not Steve. How true… how very, very true.

In any event, stay tuned for noon EST when I'll be posting a play-by-play for those of you who are interested, but either can't access the streaming QuickTime for some reason, or foolishly left your satellite dish in your other pants. Please note that the play-by-play may become an after-play-sum-up if I'm sucked in too hard by Steve's Reality Distortion Field™. Maybe I should take him to see the vet about that.

Apple Hype Watch™ Day 7: "Just one more sleepless night [for the web team]."

Personally, I plan on sleeping until noon. There's nothing worth getting up for until the keynote anyway. :P

I've got it— It's a time machine.

Yes, for our special Apple Hype Watch™ segment, we have decoded Apple's clues to bring you Monday's mystery product a full two days early! A time machine is big, time is related to counting (no, not the awful puns in the Count of Monte Christo trailer), it's beyond the rumor sites, it deals with "the future," that would definitely be where PCs have never gone, and I would definitely lust after it. As an added bonus, Days 5 and 6 of Apple Hype Watch™ obviously are making reference to Star Trek, and we all know that in space, you encounter a funky temporal anomaly nearly every week! …or maybe that's just on Voyager.

You know, now that I brought up the Star Trek connection, I relaise it could also be a transporter. A transporter, or a Klingon Battle Cruiser. Yep, gotta be one of those three for sure. You heard it here first.

I've just been corrected: This is actually Day 6 of Apple Hype Watch™. Seems I missed one day of hype, and foolishly assumed that it all started on January 1st, even though I saw it with my own eyes on December 31st. Shame on me.

In any case, the real list is as follows:

Day 1: "This one is big. Even by our standards."
Day 2: "Count the days. Count the minutes. Count on being blown away."
Day 3: "Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond."
Day 4: "It's like a backstage pass to the future."
Day 5: "To go where no PC has gone before."
Day 6: "Full speed ahead. Lust factor ten."

And that's day 6, Saturday the 5th of January. Only one more day of all-hype-and-no-substance until the keynote that will either blow us away, or turn me into a Linux user. Okay, well, maybe not, considering Final Cut Pro only runs on the Mac. Maybe it's time to start training on Maya…

Day 5 of Apple Hype Watch: "Full speed ahead. Lust factor ten." Okay, so yeah, beyond Sexbots.

Day 4 of Apple Hype Watch: "To go where no PC has gone before." Starting to look like either wearable or snortable will be right. Okay, or maybe just portable. Or maybe Apple has beat Microsoft to the punch at bringing out a notepad/clipboard style Mac with an LCD screen you write on… or something.

Actually, I'm leaning toward Crazy Apple Rumors' prediction that it's either a relaunch of the iPod, or "beyond Sexbots."

I feel a sudden urge to run to the nearest Apple Store, buy an iPod, and take tomorrow off. Must… resist…reality distortion field…

I wish it would snow already. Gloomy skies and butt-freezing temperatures just aren't charming and magical without the snow.

New Apple hype: "It's like a backstage pass to the future." Who thinks this stuff up?

So, I hear that good ol' Steve Jobs is planning something ex-trey special for his Macworld Expo keynote speech on Monday. Lots o' hype, and superlatives galore. The rumor sites have been scrambling over each other's carcasses to be the first to be embarrased by their complete and utter wrong-ness. Apple's own web site has been pumping up expectations with taglines like "Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond." and "This is big. Even for us." How can you ignore such unabashed optimism and pride?

Will it be a new flat-panel iMac? An Apple handheld? A wearable Macintosh? A nasally snortable Macintosh that induces digital gaming hallucinations like in that PlayStation 9 commercial (which I would think would lead to LSD-like leaping-from-tall-buildings deaths)? Who can say??

Well, yes, Steve Jobs can say, on January 7th at 9 am, pacific time, but that was a rhetorical question, really.

Me, I'm waiting patiently and hoarding my cash so I can be one of the first to order whatever it is. Mmm… grape…

Ooh, finally had a look at the settings for this thing and fixed the Time Zone offset, so nevermind about the 3 hour thing I said before. Everything is A-O-K now. Yes-sir-ree, Bob.

So… this bottlecap from my Nantucket Nectars lemonade says "Christopher and Rebecca Sears, of Bedford, N.H., have collected hundreds of Nantucket Nectars bottlecaps." I suppose they'd have to be as bored as I am right now. Bored enough to resort to actually posting something in my blog to pass the time. Thankfully, Lauri interrupts me to ask what effervescent means. So, I pull up m-w.com (Merriam-Webster, the best damn dictionary ever), and out comes:

Main Entry: ef·fer·vesce
Pronunciation: "e-f&r-'ves
Function: intransitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -vesced; -vesc·ing
Etymology: Latin effervescere, from ex- + fervescere to begin to boil, inchoative of fervEre to boil -- more at BREW
Date: 1784
1 : to bubble, hiss, and foam as gas escapes
2 : to show liveliness or exhilaration
- ef·fer·ves·cence /-'ve-s&n(t)s/ noun
- ef·fer·ves·cent /-s&nt/ adjective

Indeed. Like I said, all bubbly an' shit.