Steve Jobs unveils iPod mini, other software at annual Macworld Expo
The announcement came as Apple Computer Chief Executive Steve Jobs delivered his customary keynote address yesterday at the Macworld Conference and Expo.
In his speech, Jobs unveiled a new, smaller, cheaper iPod music player, and a faster version of the company's business and academic Xserve rack-mounted server — both attempts to extend Apple's lead in niche but high-dollar-volume markets.
The keynote featured a host of smaller software introductions and updates focused largely on consumer music and video creation and editing, including a new program for intermingling live and recorded music with prerecorded instrument loops.
But it lacked any single standout product with wide appeal or the surprise of previous years' keynotes.
In brief remarks about Office for Mac, Roz Ho, general manager of Microsoft's Macintosh division, said on stage that engineers were working steadily on Office 2004, but already planning features for the subsequent version.
Customers who purchase the current "v. X" version of Office for Mac will receive the 2004 version for the cost of shipping when it's available, the company said in a briefing Monday night.
Microsoft and Apple have had well-publicized friction over the future of Microsoft's development for the Mac platform since a formal agreement to continue developing Office for Macintosh expired in mid-2002.
Apple introduced its own free Web browser and a competitor to Microsoft's PowerPoint in January 2003, prompting Microsoft to cancel further work on Internet Explorer for Mac OS X.
The new Office suite adds a small but significant number of first-on-the-Mac features, including a new form of project management, which allows individual users to link calendar events, contacts, files, and e-mail into virtual project groups.
These projects can be shared among users through a network, allowing an approximation of features usually available only with centralized servers, such as Microsoft Exchange Server.
Microsoft's Virtual PC for Macintosh, which allows Mac users to run Windows software, will be updated to version 7 as part of the Office 2004 professional edition to allow it to work with Apple's 64-bit G5 processor, introduced in mid-2003.
During the keynote, Jobs waited until the end to unveil a new member of the Cupertino, Calif., company's best-selling iPod music player, the iPod mini.
At $249 and with 4 gigabytes of storage — enough to handle about 1,000 songs — the mini is only slightly smaller and slightly cheaper than its $299 iPod, which was refreshed to include 15 GB of storage. The mini comes in five colors; an optional armband is available.
Initial reaction after the keynote — as Apple employees roamed the exhibition floor with iPod minis strapped to an optional armband — was confusion over the small gap in price between the mini and entry-level iPod.
Jobs said the company sold 730,000 iPods in the fourth quarter of 2003, and 2 million since its introduction more than two years ago. Jobs said that Apple's market share of all portable digital-music players is 31 percent by unit sales and 55 percent by revenue.
Jobs said that 7 percent of the market was "mostly other hard-disk players that we're in the process of eliminating," a knock at Dell Computer and other entrants to the iPod-dominated market.
The iPod mini is designed to compete with high-end flash-memory music players that cost $100 to $200, Jobs said, and which also have 31 percent of the unit sales. Flash players use solid-state storage that doesn't rely on hard drives or magnetic media.
Flash memory costs substantially more than the minuscule hard drives Apple employs in its players, typically including only 256 megabytes in the most expensive versions.
The iTunes Music Store has sold more than 30 million songs, Jobs noted, and now has 500,000 items available for purchase and download, making the company the largest online music store of any kind, streaming or downloadable. Jobs said that Nielsen SoundScan ranked Apple's share of legal downloaded music last week as 70 percent.
Jobs pointed out that the top customer on the iTunes music store on the store had spent nearly $30,000, and said he wouldn't reveal the name for privacy reasons and so the purchaser "wouldn't get in trouble with his parents."
Focusing on the business- and academic-computing markets, Jobs announced a new version of the Xserve rack-mounted server using Apple's 64-bit G5 processors, previously available only in a desktop model. Jobs also confirmed the company's commitment to the IBM-manufactured processor: "The G5 is our future roadmap for new processors," he said.
Apple supplied the first 1,100 G5 tower computers it produced to Virginia Tech University, which used them to assemble the third-fastest supercomputer in the world at a fraction of the price per teraflop (trillions of mathematical operations per second) of the No. 1 and 2 systems.
The company has used the Xserve model to aggressively target cluster computing — combining computers so that they act as one unit — in academia and industry. The model includes advanced features for networks requiring both massive calculation and enormous data storage and transfer.
Two business- and academic-oriented versions of the Xserve allow an unlimited number of users as part of the price of purchase, in direct contrast to other server licenses, such as Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, which is provided on a per-user basis.
The longest part of the keynote involved a demonstration of Apple's new GarageBand software, a music editor aimed at combining live, recorded and prefabricated music from instruments.
Musician John Mayer came on stage to demonstrate aspects of the program and received the loudest applause of the day.
GarageBand is part of the $49 iLife '04 package, which includes the latest version of iTunes, and updated versions of movie editor iMovie, photo organizer iPhoto, and DVD video creator iDVD
Glenn Fleishman, a freelancer in Seattle, writes the Practical Mac column in the Personal Technology section of The Seattle Times. He can be reached at gfleishman@seattletimes.com.