Today was the day everyone had been speculating over, Steve Jobs' magic show where he reaches into his hat and pulls out the latest iRabbit. The faster, cheaper iPhone was welcomed and (since everyone saw it coming a mile away) helped cement the rumor mill as a reliable source. Except for the bit about mysterious shipments from one of Apple's manufacturers, since it'll be a month or so until the phone ships. At the same time, the revelation of the new MobileMe service and the plan for Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" also featured prominently in pre-conference rumors.
Word is that the new phones will have to be activated in-store at purchase time (no online activation), which means that day 1 at the Apple and AT&T stores is going to absolutely suck.
Crowds being what they are this year, even Apple staff was advising that if you wanted to get into the main keynote hall, you'd want to arrive by 5AM (for a 10AM show). I made it by about 5:45, way earlier than I usually crawl out of bed, and met up with some friends who had thankfully made it there earlier than me. I could have slept in and gone to one of the overflow rooms, but I didn't travel this far and pay this much to get in so that I can watch the show on television.
The keynote was a little odd, in that it contained an extended demo of Xcode (Apple's main software development tool). Of course it is a developer conference, but in recent years the keynote has aimed more toward product and service announcements than to developer tools. Eventually they got around to the phone and the crowd started waving credit cards in the air.
Apparently in the overflow rooms, people don't clap. That tells me that Jobs' famed reality distortion field does not penetrate walls.
This evening was the traditional Buzz Andersen Monday night WWDC party, at 111 Minna again. Unfortunately there was no food, the taco truck apparently being unavailable, so several of us left early and got Thai food. Though I'm not normally a party person I'm making the most of these events. Craig Hockenberry drew a small crowd with a demo of an iPhone version of Twitterriffic.
Tomorrow the main technical sessions get underway. In preparation I'm currently skipping the pre-release version of Snow Leopard in favor of upgrading my iPhone developer tools to the new beta released today. I brought an extra hard drive just for Snow Leopard use but I'm not sure I'll use it this week. I'm still uploading a bunch of photos to Flickr, so if you'd like a to see what's up in something like real time, check them out.
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