Hot
off the Press Story
by
Keith Benicek, Editor 1/14/03
Macworld SF 2003 Wrap up and comments, page 2
Dot Mac, a rather touchy subject with many early free subscribers was Job’s next focus. He explained that Dot Mac is the collection of many useful tools and that going to a pay service “because it was not free for us to run it”, and it was necessary to allow Apple’s continued investment into it’s growth. Jobs announced that there certainly was a “bit of noise about that” (charging for it), but that there was now over 250,000 paying subscribers as of today.
“I wish I had a dime for every time I heard this, iPod is being recognized as the Walkman of the digital age”, said Jobs. “And we’ve been shipping iPods, it seems like for ever, but it’s only been 14 months”, he added “Apple has shipped over 600,000 iPods, that’s one every minute.” Steve reported, “in Japan it has a 42% market share”.
Also announced was the new Burton Snow Boarding jacket with an internal pocket for the iPod and control buttons on the sleeve. Only available this season at the Apple online store, it retails for a whopping $499. I am so glad I don’t have teenagers any more!
Jobs then moved on
to “Jag-Wire”, yep that’s right “Jag-Wire”;
not “Jag-u-are” as in Briton, or “Jag-war” as
the rest of us “colonials” say, but “Jag-Wire”.
Hmmm, am I missing something here? I wonder if anyone at Apple has the
balls to correct Steve . . . . not a chance!
He talked about Mac OS X’s ton of new applications,
“ it’s super stabile and super communicative UNIX base, Mac
OS X talks with everything” Jobs said. “We hit our goal, we
now have 5 million active users of Mac OS X” he noted, “we’ve
climbed from 1.2 million from this time last year.” Jobs said, “We
feel confident that we’re going to get to 9 to 10 million active
users this (2003) year. So the 10 transition is basically over”
Jobs proclaimed. “We’ve got a few laggard apps we’ve
got to get out….. we all know which one we’re talking about
(QuarkXpress).”
New Macs will only boot now into OS X as of today; adios OS 9.x except for Classic.
Steve also pronounced the latest version of Office X from Microsoft to be “at the top of the heap”, of the growth from 2,000 to 5,000 native OS X applications. He announced that the special buying program called “Office Party” allowing new Mac purchasers to also buy Office X for $199, would be extended to April 7th, 2003.
QuickBook Pro from Intuit for OS X was announced, as well as Connectix Virtual PC 6 release for those that need to run “for some reason” Windows apps on a Mac in OS X said Jobs. Macromedia also announced a new OS X native Director application, and the Digi Design release for Mac OS X of Pro Tools 6.0, a recording studio in a box.
Jobs proclaimed that Final Cut Pro “has become the number one pro video editing application in the World as measured by total units sold”, but because of the high price (US $999), thousands under the competition, it is still too expensive for most users. Final Cut Express, “minus a handful of features only the pros need”, was announced by Jobs for only US $299. It looks and works just like Final Pro, and you can import your iMovie projects right into it. Editing in real-time is easy and smooth; Apple has done a great job. What will this do to Adobe’s Premier? I don’t think very much, as the Premier crowd is pretty dedicated and it’s still a great application, albeit a few restrictions.
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