::: bisonium.com :::

Keynote coverage delayed since the WiFi and GPRS signals everywhere were blocked. But here it is!!!!

• Retail stores numbering 101 stores, London store largest to date.
• Update on the iMac. Quoting Walt Mossberg, Detroit Free Press, PC Magazine best quote "5 out of 5 - BEST" iMac most popular computer sold to date.
• Mac OS X Update, 14 million users have transitioned to date. On schedule to release first half of the year. Talking about the major features of Tiger. Showing handful of features.

Spotlight:Talking about Spolight wannabe's like Google and MSN. Demo of spotlight, pretty darn slick! Spotlight is FAST. Amazing what this new feature can do. Searching over 100,000 images from Corbis that are loaded on the Mac. It searches the drive for metadata as well. OOOOPS! Demo poooped, Steve flawlessly switches to his backup system. Crowd cheers! Ouch, another app crash, but nothing major, he keeps truckin through the demo. Finder: Smart folders absolutely kick ass. Searching capabilities rule. WOW, new screensaver that can grab images like album art and make a screen saver out of all of them.

Mail: Mail is integrated with Spolight. LIghtning fast searching through emails. Smart mailboxes from Spotlight integrated into Mail. Wowsa, new slideshow button integrated into mail windows. Clicking will show you all images in the email as a slideshow right within Mail. You can automatically add the photos from Mail into iPhoto. INCREDIBLE integration with the system apps.

Quicktime 7: QT6 has had over 330M copies downloaded. 98% downloaded to WINDOWS clients. Live resizing, MPEG4 compliance, 24ch surround sound, full HD play. H.264 codec adopted by Blu-Ray and HD DVD. AMAZING picture quality, on screen controls. Steve playing an HD movie. Resizing and scaling on the fly without a hitch. F L A W L E S S . Sound quality in U N R E A L. This is going to REVOLUTIONIZE the video industry.

Dashboard: a place for widgets to live. showing off the widgets - AWESOME! Widget tool bar pops up under the main dock. UNBELIEVABLE widgets. Steve showing off the widgets live. Just an amazing amount of widgets that have actual REAL every day functionality. This is going to be HUGE. Konfabulator will never see this kind of integration and functionality. The integration with the OS is just rockin.

iChat: Made it even better for Tiger. Extended audio conf. to 10 people, video added multi-party conf. with 4 people using H.264 compression. Live demo: WOW - full screen looks AMAZING. Reflections below the participants on the tabletop are realtime. This is incredible.

Introducing FInal Cut Express HD: Priced at $299 ($99 upgrade) and available in Feb. 2005 the year of HD video editing.

iLife '05: Major upgrades of all apps.

iPhoto - Better organizing & searching, more formats, more powerful editing, Added project folders. Added calendar view. Supports MPEG4 movies. Supports RAW format native. Editing is much nicer, pics run across the top and added an editing dashboard. SWEEET! Almost a mini-Photoshop within iPhoto. CRAZY level of editing options. Advanced slide shows. New way to make books. Live Demo: Searching & organizing capabilities are improved dramatically. Editing of the images is just insanely easy. Ablility to straighten photos is amazing, grid pops up on screen and you can make the image level to the horizon or anything else. Slide shows kick ass. New transition looks like a water ripple is sweet. New book making abilities are impressive. WAY more advanced than previous versions. You can order photos from iPhoto for only $.19 a print (half the previous price). Books can be ordered 8.5x11, 8x6 or 3.5x4 in both hard cover or soft cover.

iMovie: Dramatically faster, non-destructive trimming, more transitions, mpeg4, magic iMovie, HD support. Live Demo: running HD movie right from a camera through iMovie. AMAZING picture and sound quality. Images are unbelievably life like. Demoing new SONY HD Prosumer camera FX1. HOLY JEEPERS!!! Introducing President of SONY: Kunitake Ando!!! Kunitake is praising and commending Apple and Steve Jobs saying how much admiration he has for Steve. This is amazing folks, history in the making. Kunitake cracking a joke about Apple just sticking to software apps. :-) Crowd is laughing. Kunitake wants to work together with Apple on making HD the standard format for the future. Kunitake struggling with the English language, but making his point well heard. Even cracking jokes about making products with lower prices.

iDVD: 15 new themes. Animated drop zones. 1 step DVD creation. Supports ALL DVD formats. Live Demo: New themes are smokin hot. Moving video within video. Fantastic! Better than most Hollywood DVD's!!!

Garage Band: Covering the Jam Packs. Introducing "Orchestral Instruments" Jam Pack. Up to 8 track recording, real-time music notation, pitch and timing fixing, recorded tracks are now as flexible as software instruments and loops, create your own loops, vocal transformer. Introducing John Mayer to demo Garage Band!!!!! Demoing music notation. OMG! This is like having Finale inside Garage Band! This is absolutely incredible. John Mayer crackin a joke about not winning a Grammy for playing the piano. Crowd cheers. Now they are fixing notes manually by dragging them up and down the notation scale. WOW. Coolness. John Mayer about to start jammin on the Guitar. OH YEAH BABY! ROCKIN!!!! He is playing Neon. Recording live 2 guitars and vocals into Garage Band!!!! WOOOOT!!!! Crowd is rippin and cheering. 4 tracks recorderd LIVE. Playback is flawless. Now soloing and muting tracks to demo GB. That was awesome. Absolutely rockin. Priced at $79. On sales Jan. 22, 2005. FREE on all new Mac's.

iTunes: no updates. Sold more than 230M songs to date. Selling at 1.25M songs per day. iTunes at 70% market share. 15 countries. 70% of global music market. Sold over a million prepaid cards since Thanksgiving. iTunes Essentials has been retooled.

• New product: iWork. Building the successor to Appleworks. Created from the ground up to take advantage of OS X. Upgrade to Keynote 2. 10 new themes, animated text, animated builds, presenter disply, interactive sideshows, self running kiosk mode. New themes are really nice. Animation features are wicked. Mere mortals can set this up. Nice animated graphics. Themes are really nice. Compatible with Appleworks, PowerPoint, Flash, PDF. New app: Pages. 40 Apple designed templates. This is insane. Word can't even touch this. All you do is insert text. Templates are beautiful and functional. Live demo: Wow, this is integrated with the iLife apps. You can drag and drop photos right into the documents. Automatic text resizing and flowing as you reposition graphics. Adobe & Quark could learn a lesson or two from Apple. Compatible with Word, Appleworks and PDF. Priced @ $79 available Jan. 22.
• Introducing the Mac mini!!!!!!! Holy cow, the rumor is TRUE!!!!!! OMG! This is AWESOME!!!! It looks like a toaster with a slot loading combo drive!!!! Holy MOSES! This thing fits in the PALM OF YOUR HAND!!!!!!! BYODKM "Bring your own Display, Keyboard and Mouse". It hooks up into ANY industry standard display, keyboard and Mouse. Tons of ports on the back. Comes with OS X Panther and iLife 05. Oh man, here it comes, this is gonna be awesome. 2 models priced at $499 and $599. Both G4 based. Most affordable Mac ever. Available Jan. 22.

• iPod: Last year had 733k iPods sold. Sold 4.5M iPods during 2004 Holiday Quarter. Cumulative to date has sold over 10M iPods. Over 8M sold in 2004 calendar year. iPod is leading the charge in the digital music era. Amazon top 5 Consumer Electronic Products, Apple has 3 of the top 5. New accessories: iTunes-iPod-Car. New manufacturers offering iPod adapters on their cars. Mercedes, Nissan, BMW, Volvo, Scion. Alfa Romeo and Ferrari in Europe as well. Mercedes brought 2 cars to Macworld show floor with iPod adapters. AWESOME. SLK Roadster and the new CLS which nobody has even seen yet. One other thing....iTunes-Cell Phone. iTunes integration with MOTO phones rolling out this spring. No new iPhone as predicted, just integrated phone with existing MOTO phones. Uh oh - ONE MORE THING....talking about iPod market share. Talking about flash market. iPod Mini results. iPod Market share is 65%, up from 31% from last year. Flash down from 62% to 29%. Now we are going after the remaining mainstream flash players. Talking about the Rio and just rippin it apart. Tortured user interface, very small display, no click wheel, batteries will cost you over $100 a year. Apple wants to make something really great. Something easier to use than current iPods. iPod users discovered a new way to listen to their music last year. SHUFFLE. You don't have to find your music. It finds it for you. Apple decided to make a flash based player that just shuffles your Music. Introducing the iPod Shuffle. Smaller than a pack of gum. Weighs the same as 4 quarters (< 1 ounce). Simple set of controls. This thing is SICK. USB connector built into the bottom of the unit, it just pops out. USB 2 and a 12 hour battery. Works on PC or Mac. Lanyard is supplied and you can wear it around your neck. WOWOW!!!! SEXY!!!!! this is slick. iTunes now has feature called AutoFill. Goes through your library or playlists and picks random music that will be the precise size of the iPod shuffle to fill that puppy up. You can use the iPod Shuffle as an external drive. Interface built right in to enable disk use. iPod Shuffle will have 2 models: 512MB for $99 and 1GB (240 songs) for $149. Available TODAY. Accessories: Armband, dock, sport case, battery extender. All $29, rolling out in the next 4 weeks. Now showing us the new TV ad for the iPod. NICE!!!! RUMOR has it there might be some at the Apple store a few blocks away!!! :-)

What a Keynote! Some of the media were actually not allowed to sit at the main event, and were crammed into a room with a video feed. Yours truly was in fact up front and personal. Jaron, that son of a gun, got 2nd row seats thanks to a buddy that procured the seat for us. Some of the famous faces in attendance were Al Gore, Robin Williams (the comedian), the usual Apple Executives, and some dreamy folks like Laua Burstein. Overall, it was one hell of a keynote. On my way to the show floor to get some more juicy video and interviews. Stay tuned! I will be uploading Day 2 pics and maybe even some video teasers later tonight. Cya!