Apple WWDC: Additional Info

Here's the blog post I originally promised would appear last night. Sorry, but a 19-page contributed article I needed to edit took priority. I'll list additional information from Jobs' keynote in roughly chronological order (some of which relates to my cover story on digital audio which'll appear in Thursday's edition of EDN), supplement it with the contents of a post-keynote discussion I had with Peter Glaskowsky, and sprinkle my own analysis throughout.

First, though, two tidbits:
1) Here's a stream of the keynote, in MPEG-4 simple profile format (Quicktime MOV wrapper).
2) You might enjoy the post-keynote cartoon from the Joy of Tech! website.

Ok, here's the keynote highlights:
1) There are over 3800 attendees at this year's developer conference, (largest in the last decade, possible in history), from 45 countries, including China (38) and India (27). There are now over 500,000 Apple Developer Connection members.
2) Retail: Apple has 109 retail stores around the world, which see over 1 million visitors per week. Over the last 12 month, Apple stores (including online) have sold over 500 million dollars' worth of third-party products.
3) Music business: By the end of March, about 16 million iPods had been sold. Apple estimates it has 76% total market share (HDD plus flash players). Over 430 million songs have been sold and downloaded (i.e. includes freebies) from the iTunes Music Store. The iTunes Music Store has an estimated 82% market share (month of May), which has increased over the past year in spite of competition.
4) iTunes v4.9 will include podcasting (variously described as "TiVo for radio", "Wayne's World for radio", or the "hottest thing going in radio") support. Apple will provide a directory of podcasts for users to easily subscribe to and download to their iPods. Over 8,000 podcasts are now active. Apple will be launching its own podcast, on 'New Music Tuesdays'.
5) PC business; over the five-quarter time interval began in January 2004 and ended in March 2005, PC year-over-year market growth has slowed from just over 20% to just over 10%. Over that same timeframe, Mac market growth has accelerated from only around 5% (Q1 2004, and again in Q3 2004) to over 40% (Q1 2005). Last quarter the Mac grew at over 3x the rate of the rest of the PC industry.
6) Quicktime 7: a preview release for Windows is now available. Over a billion copies of Quicktime have shipped in its lifetime to date.
7) OS 10.4 Tiger: This week Apple will deliver (through retail, maintenance and natively on new Macs) the 2 millionth copy of Tiger, in roughly six weeks' worth of sales. Over 40 Spotlight plugins, 400+ Dashboard widgets and 550+ Automator actions have been posted. An estimated 16% of Mac users are currently on Tiger, with 49% on Panther (OS 10.3), and the remainder on prior OS 10-and-before releases. By this time next year, an estimated 50% of Mac users will be running Tiger. 5 versions of OS X have been released in the last five years. The next version, Leopard (OS 10.5) will appear in late 2006 or early 2007 (coincident with when Apple believes Microsoft's Longhorn O/S will appear).
Apple-on-Intel: Looking back over my notes, I think I already hit most of the main points with yesterday's post-keynote blog post. Jobs' pitch starts at around 20 minutes into the video stream, if you want to see and hear it for yourself. Version 2.1 of the Xcode Developer's Environment, which supports both Intel and PowerPC processors and creates Universal Binaries, is now available. It requires that the machine you run it on have OS 10.4 installed, and you need to be a registered Apple Developer Connection member to download it (basic membership is free). Select and Premier ADC members have access to a $999 Developer Transition Kit, which includes a hardware platform, based on a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor, that must be returned to Apple by the end of 2006.

Continued with 'Apple WWDC: Post-Keynote Thoughts'….