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Jobs: New Intel-powered Macs are 'screamers'

Focus on creating media, not selling it
The company had few of the media announcements that have come to define Apple events in recent months. Jobs did say, however, that the iTunes store would begin selling clips from cult US comedy show Saturday Night Live and that more than 8 million videos had been sold through the iTunes online store since October.

The iTunes Music Store has now sold 850 million songs and is on track to pass the 1 billion mark in the next few months, selling about 3 million songs a day, he added.

He also introduced a new, £35 FM radio and remote control accessory for the iPod. Most rival MP3 players already offer FM radio as a standard feature.

Aside from those media tidbits, Tuesday's announcements were focused on the new generation of consumer software, much of which has been seemingly inspired by the success of podcasting and is designed to help Mac users distribute movies, photos and audio more easily over the Net.

Jobs spent considerable time demonstrating the new version of iPhoto, which includes a 'photocasting' feature that lets people create online photo albums. Other people can subscribe to these albums, just as they do today with blogs or podcasts, and have new photos downloaded automatically to their own computers.

The new iPhoto is faster and can now handle up to 250,000 photos -- ten times the prior limit, he added.

The GarageBand music-production software has also been updated to include a podcasting studio, which streamlines the process of making a radio-like show and posting it online.

As expected, the iLife software suite's biggest addition was a new application called iWeb, which allows users to make their own Web sites, complete with audio, video and photos drawn from the company's other applications, in just a few minutes. (Watch News.com's video of the iWeb launch.) The entire software suite will keep its £55 price tag, and will come free on new Mac computers.

"It's a giant new release," Jobs said, talking about the new iLife '06 suite. "It's going to propel us even further ahead of anything else in the world.

The company's consumer applications, including iLife, will run natively on the new Intel processors starting immediately, as well as on the PowerPC chip. Professional audio, video and photo applications will be updated in March, and customers will be able to buy a 'crossgrade', or new version of the existing software, for $49 (about £28 -- a UK price was not available), he said.

Most other applications will run smoothly by using the translation software called Rosetta, which will come with every new Intel-based Mac, he said. Microsoft's Office will be one of those applications.

Microsoft Mac Business Unit general manager Roz Ho joined Jobs onstage to say that the software powerhouse is moving ahead to create an Intel-based version of Office, and she announced a deal between Apple and Microsoft under which Microsoft will continue creating new versions of Office for Mac for a minimum of five years.

The "commitment should leave no doubt in your mind that we're here to stay, and we're in it for the long term," Ho said.

Other developers are starting to release Intel-based versions of their products too, but they hadn't been warned of the change in the release schedule, Jobs said.

Leaving no doubt that Apple would launch a marketing blitz around the new Intel-based machines, Jobs showed off a new advertisement introducing the products. Reminiscent of the '1984' commercial that touted the first Macintosh computer, it painted the new line of products as a liberation for the Intel chip itself.

For years, the Intel chip has been "trapped inside PCs -- dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks," the ad says. "Starting today, the Intel chip will be set free, and get to live life inside a Mac." The online Apple Store proudly boasts on its front page, "What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it's ever done in a PC."

As is often the case, some of the wildest predictions about potential products turned out to be off the mark, including rumours that Apple would have a plasma television with a built-in Mac computer. The company also did not update the Mac Mini or iBook with Intel chips, as many enthusiast sites predicted.