Apple WWDC '98 Keynote LIVE coverage
Steve is now onstage. Speech highlights follow:
Employee "attrition" rate, the rate at which people left
Apple, used to be
33%. Since then, it's dropped to 15%, which is below the
Silicon Valley
average.
CompUSA Mac sales went from 4% to 15% of total sales since the
introduction of the Apple Store.
Apple's Web sites now receive 10 Million hits each day.
Apple's market share has increased by about 15% since its low
last year.
Apple has 1.8 Billion in cash now.
Apple's Market value has gone up from 1.8 Billion (8 months
ago) to 4
Billion now.
Steve talks iMac....gives the clear advantages of this unit
over comparable
x86 offerings.
Steve wants to bundle lots of games with the iMac.
New consumer portable in '99
Apple sees QuickTime as a similar idea to PostScript, which
allowed all
printers and all applications that print to talk to each
other with a standard
language -- which is what Steve sees QuickTime as doing with
all the
standards for digital imaging and video.
New Fall release of QuickTime will include "real" streaming
video, using RTP (Real Time Protocol).
Streaming QuickTime will not just be on the Web...the new
streaming QT
client will work as a stand-alone or can be written into
third-party
applications.
A QT-based presentation can be synchronized with the
streaming video.
Metrowerks, Netscape, Apple, and Microsoft will be
standardizing a new
Java Virtual Machine for the Mac OS.
Allegro will ship this Fall.
Apple's Java Virtual machine delivered slow performance
compared to
Microsoft's on the Pentium II -- Steve has pledged to make
the Mac's JVM
just as fast by the time Allegro ships.
Steve set out to combine Rhapsody and the Mac OS, allow
developers to use some of their old code.
The new Mac OS will be Mac OS X: that's "Mac OS 10"
2000 out of the current 8000 APIs in the Mac OS are gone in
Mac OS X.
The new APIs will be called "Carbon." In Steve's words, "All
Life Is Based On It."
The average existing application is 90% Carbon-compatible in
Apple's tests.
Carbon will run on top of Mac OS 8.
1-5 days to "Bring Up" your app to Carbon-compatible.
1-2 months to ship for Carbon
Compared to 1-2 Years for Rhapsody.
"Carbon dater" app will show developers how much of their
existing code
works under Mac OS X.
Carbon will have:
*Protected Memory
*Extremely fast I/O -- saturates high-speed Ethernet cards
easily.
*Advanced virtual memory
*Extremely fast threading.
*100% PowerPC native.
*All Mac OS 8 apps will run on Mac OS 10, they just won't
take advantage of the new features until they're tuned up.
Allegro will be Mac OS 8.5, and ship probably in September.
8.6 will ship in January next year.
Rhapsody 1.0 will be shipped in Q3 this year (Fall).
Mac OS 10 (Sonata/Cyan) will be in beta in January of next
year -- will ship
in Q3 1999.
Avie Tevanian and assistant show off AppleWorks, ported to Carbon
running on top of Rhapsody DR2. This application, with
350,000 lines of
code, only needed a fraction of a percent of its code changed
to run perfectly
in the demo.
Avie has trotted out people from Microsoft, Macromedia,
Adobe, you name
it -- all to show their support for Mac OS X.
Adobe's Photoshop software VP personally (with the help of a
couple of engineers) ported Photoshop 5 to Carbon, and
demonstrated it. A very exciting experience..... It seemed to
work perfectly. This is with less than two weeks of work by
one developer.
--Go sell crazy somewhere else, we're full up here. ...Nicholson
<> tbyars@earthlink.net <>