Jan 9 2000.	MacWorld 1999 SF Trip Report

APPLE KEYNOTE ADDRESS 1999.

By John M McIntosh.

First we opened the show with a Web only ad based on HAL9000 from 2001, this Quicktime movie is available from Apple's web site. The ad expounds the virtues of the Macintosh's ability to survive the so-called Y2K bug.

Steve Jobs was introduced as the iCEO, interm-CEO, he felt that was neat, and went on to thank Apple employees, Mac developers and finally both old and new customers, and closed with saying that Apple would post its 5th profitable quarter (no surprises there).

As a summery to what would come he said there would be four surprises:

1st Surprise
Product line

Apple needed a simple product line, when Steve started in the summer of 1997 he found lots of complicated products and platforms, his solution was to simplify the product line.

First the Pro line, we will introduce a new lineup. The current G3 are 14 months old but we have sold 1.6M of them to gain 3 billion dollars of revenue. However our goals for the new line are:

o Most powerful (PC)
PowerPC does that
o Best graphics (2d,3d)
Serious 3D graphics cards.
o Most expandable
Easy access
o Best Design
A new industry concept.

Therefore for the high end 1999 G3 will run up to 400Mhz, with a cache speed of 200Mhz and a memory access speed of 100Mhz. ByteMark comparisons for the new G3 are 13.1, old G3 11.3, and finally 450 PII 5.6.

To demonstrate these performance number in a real world setting he proceeded to compare a 400 G3 to a Compaq 450 Pentium. Their example was a 25MB photoshop file from the Disney movie Mulan. The macintosh finished rending the image much faster than the Pentium based machine.

After this we saw another 2001 video clip with HAL disbelieving that a macintosh could be more powerful than himself since he was based on the 'fastest' Pentium processor.

To demonstrate the best graphics, Steve then announced that the G3 line would come with a ATI Rage 128 (128bit) double speed PCI card as standard equipment. A Mac first and only product, with 16MB video memory. This card should do 68 Quake frames per second, the Voodoo 2 does 50 frames, and the older Rage Pro (which I believe is in the iMac only does 36).

To demonstrate how powerful this card was we again compared that 450Mhz PC with a Voodoo 2 display card (a $200 extra option) to a G3. They ran a AppleScripted game of Dark Vengeance and of course the Macintosh was at least 20% faster, 55 frames, versus 45.

But graphic cards are only part of the problem in 3d modeling, the other side is software. Then they announce to the applause of many that Apple was licensing Silicon Graphics Open G/L and will integrate it into the Macintosh OS. (Actually Apple purchased a small company that made a Mac version of Open G/L and made their programmers part of Apple, everyone seems happy about the move)

At this point they introduced the Chairman & CEO of Silicon graphics Rick Belluzzo to talk about how glad they were that Apple was joining their group, and as part of their commitment they were moving their awesome flat panel display to the mac. (This panel is unbelievable and has a $2800 price tag)

Most Expandable, another goal.

Decked out from Apple you can factory order the machine with
1GB of memory
100GB of disk by using 3 of IBM's 36GB drives.
A CD, or DVD or DVD RAM drive.

Ultra2 DMA ATA onboard, the latest high end IDE standard, expect 33MB transfer rate, but this pales in the 80MB you can get with ultra2 wide SCSI.

However you should note there is no SCSI or floppy in the base box. To meet the SCSI issue Adaptec announced a $49 SCSI I card. Careful reading of the tea leaves shows that most PC on the dark side ship with IDE, SCSI is rare and only for servers. In fact when visiting a CompUSA store last year when I asked about SCSI drives I was referred to the Apple store within a store and told, only macs use SCSI drives.

It comes with four slots using 64 bit PCI for 3 slots, the fourth being a double speed PC slot for the video card.

For I/O ports it has Ethernet 10/100Mbit built-in and Giga-bit Ethernet as an option.
Some USB ports, of course, which is an important trend setter, over 100 vendors now make USB devices targeting the iMac. Lastly FireWire, a 400Mbit (50MB) hot plugable standard, you can have upto 63 devices with dynamic drivers and no terminators, attached to your Mac.

To expand on FireWire Steve went on to say that FireWire is being used in Digital camcorders, the Nikon pro camera, by Cannon, and Sony. Actually a bunch of electronic vendors are prompting a standard to interconnect electronic devices (stereos, tvs, etc). This standard has a generic name, but under the covers it's FireWire.

Remember it's a BUS each mac has two connectors. So given one camera and two G3 we can plug the camera into one, then plug G3 #1 into G3 #2 and we get the same image on both machines. Now to think different, what about hard disks, so Steve then showed a
6GB FireWire drive, since power is on the bus we only need one wire to plug it in and up spins the drive and it appears on the macintosh desktop. He then proceeded to show a QuickTime movie, and then unplugged the drive without crashing the machine. Your author is sure he saw QuickTime V4 streaming video being used to demonstrate the movie. If this was neat a hard drive vendor will introduce a shirt pocket size version of the drive in June.

All wonderful, but the machine looks like? Well go look at the Web site, words fail to describe it, however all agree it's a trend setter, especially on how it opens for accessibility.

Best Design and it's $1599 (start) to $2999 available today
Bondi blue, ice white Handles
G3 around apple logo
Very easy to open (door on side, with lock)

Along with the new look there are three new apple studio displays
21 inch (sony, calibrated, looks like an iMac) $1499
17 inch (sony, looks an iMac) $499
15 inch flat panel $1099

Steve then showed some commercials, with 2001 themes
Secret door
Open minded

Lots, but lots more to come, the 2nd surprise

Mac OS 8.5
1 million upgrade copies plus 1 million sold as new.
Don't forget Apple owns 1 of the 2 high volume OS in the world

Mac OS X is our upcoming product, but today we announce the Feb availability of Mac OS X server

Uses a Mach Unix kernel. Provides file services for the macintosh and now provides net booting so you can boot off server.

To demo this Steve show a diskless iMac booting off the server and running a QuickTime demo. But what if you wanted a few more macs, say 50. Steve then had a wall of 49 iMac rolled out, they all booted off the server and ran the movie, very impressive, 1Mb streaming video to each iMac on the 100Mb Ethernet.

So one copy on server, 50 imacs using 1 copy on server.

For other software you get Apache the number one web server, WebObjects (which now has 2000 customers on Unix) but now it's on the macintosh, and of course BSD 4.4 and Java to round out the mix. Pricing is $999 for the software, or as part of a
$4999 server bundle. All agreed this was good pricing.

3rd surprise
1355 New/renewed macintosh applications since iMac introduction, then they trotted out:

Ben Waldman (Microsoft)
Jobs remarked the co-relationship is terrific 99% and bad 1% of the time over multimedia issues, and the fact they are part of the Microsoft DOJ trail is because of the Government not their wishes.

The Microsoft/apple announcements are:

Three new products. Mac only

From the Mac Office team
1st IE 4.5
Two times faster launching
Translucent drag and drop, finder integration
Autofill forms
Printing changed and more intelligent
Printing now works in a web browser
Print preview
Sherlock button is integrated
Say find similar sites

2nd product Outlook express 4.5

3rd product Microsoft website mactopia for mac users using Microsoft products http://www.microsoft.com/mac

But what about games?

Jobs want's the mac to be the best gaming platform in the world. Therefore there will be 12 games coming in the next128 days:

Tomb raider III
Myth II
Sim city 3000
Fly
Rainbox six
Starcraft
Battle zone
Quest for glory
Age of empires
Quake
(and some others)

To prove his point he brought
John Carmack Co-Founder Id Software Quake (etc)
John stated there is no reason the mac can't be a wonderful gaming machine, just need that three button mouse. The next version of Quake only needed 15K of mac specific code. We will just take the code base and add the minor mac changes then deliver on all platforms (Windows, mac, linux). Since we license our technology set to other then expect other vendors to migrate to the macintosh.

Connectix then was brought out to show their Sony PlayStation emulator, with a reminder of USB game controllers.

4th surprise

The iMac.
Between Aug 15 and quarter close we shipped 800,000 units, one every 15 seconds, and we are the number one PC in america, and of course "Best" on many many lists.

December research
Who's buying
32% first time buyers
13% Wintel converts
so 45% are new-non mac users
55% mac users
24% add
31% replace

Other questions asked on the survey focus on the internet
Are you connected to the internet
82% are connected! (using imac)

When did you get connected
66% first day

How long to get connected
44% 15 minutes
62% within 50 minutes
74% within 1 hour

Do you do Internet purchases

42% said yes.

Search engines used
39% said yes

So in 1999 iMacs are 266 Mhz with 6GB at $1199 and of course in color blueberry, grape, tangerine, lime and strawberry.Teal (or bondi-blue) is being retired.

Collect all five!
What's your favor color
Hey people care about color
Available today