What follows is a reverse chronological transcript of our WWDC 2010 Keynote coverage, discussing the launch of iPhone 4 and iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4) in June, 2010. The event was presented by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at 10 AM Pacific Time in San Francisco, California at the Moscone Center.
Click on the title of this article for the full transcript.
11:50 AM: Glass in the body is 30x harder than plastic, Ivy says. Glass bending under pressure and not cracking. Video’s over. This is going to change everything, all over again, it ends. Signpost showing the intersection of technology and liberal arts. It’s not just the hardware, it’s the software to make everything do everything seamlessly. 18 months of work to make the front-facing camera work perfectly. Before we end today, he thanks teams that have worked on it – Mark Papermaster and team, huge applause. Ive, Mansfield, et al up. Forstall’s software team. Tim Cook + operations team. Really proud, he says. Awesome people. End of event. Thanks, everyone, for following along!
11:45 AM: Ive, Joswiak speaking on intro video. Forstall discussing FaceTime, Mansfield on Retina Display. The demo video is going through all of the various iOS and iPhone 4 features, spinning the iPhone around and showing the glass screen, etc. Very long video discussing the hardware, software, A4 chip, manufacturing process, etc.
11:40 AM: Pricing. Two colors – white/black. Price with normal quals – $199 US 16GB $299 32GB. AT+T is going to make a generous upgrade offer. If your contract expires any time in 2010, you’re eligible for new iPhone 4 at these prices. 6 months early eligibility, top off contract for two years. Lineup: iPhone 3G was there for $99. 8GB 3GS will now be $99. June 24 is date. Pre-orders start June 15. June 24 will ship in 5 countries. US, France Germany UK, Japan. 18 more countries in July, including Canada (sorry Jesse), 24 more countries August, 40 more in September. 88 by end of September. New Dock for iPhone 4, $29. iPhone Case. iPhone Bunker Case, in an array of colors. $29 each. Six colors shown. iOS 4 upgrades: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, iPod touch as applicable. Free upgrades for all products. June 21 is date. iPod touch gets free upgrades too. Demo video showing features of iPhone 4.
11:38 AM: People applauding for the sign language and at end of demo. iPhone 4-to-iPhone 4, anywhere there’s wi-fi, reiterating points. FaceTime is based on H.264, AAC audio, SIP STUN TURN, ICE, RTP SRTP, etc. He’s making the whole thing open industry standard. That’s number 9.
11:36 AM: Demo video. Louis Armstrong is now in the background. Baby videos shown to mommy and daddy. Kids playing. Travelling dad saying hi to daughter in hotel rooom. Grandparents watch a girl’s graduation. Two friends showing each other new clothes. I suppose this is “freedom from porn?” A soldier in barracks talking to his girlfriend/wife. Ultrasound being shown to soldier from doctor’s office. Sign language conversation.
11:31 AM: iPhone 4, what do you think, he asks. One more thing. Turn off Wi-Fi devices, he says. In 2007, when we launched the iPhone, I made the first call to Jony Ive. On this occasion, he’s calling again. 2010, video chat. FaceTime button appears besides add call and contacts. Rapturous applause. iChat-style Picture in Picture. Mute button, end button, camera rotation button, camera icon and 3-D-ish rotation arrows. The majority of the screen is shown as the other caller, with a PIP for your own face. “It’s real. Especially when people turn their Wi-Fi devices off.” Notably, the demo is being done over Wi-Fi. Even more applause. FaceTime video calling is the name. iPhone 4 to iPhone 4, anywhere there is Wi-Fi, and there’s no setup required. Just make a phone call. You can use the front or rear camera to let people see what you’re seeing in real time. Portrait or landscape. Video and audio quality is great. Wi-Fi only in 2010. We’ll work a little with the cellular providers. Apple will ship 10s of millions of Face Time devices this year.
11:26 AM: Can see the car from different angles, see menu options with more information. The ad lets you compare MPG between different vehicles, a compelling feature that’s fun, too. What iAd is all about, he says. They’re going to give away a car, so you can enter the contest through the app. Shake the iPhone to select a color. And it lets you submit your contact info from the device to Nissan. Will be turned on July 1 for all iOS 4 devices. How successful has it been? They’ve committed $60m for the 2nd half of the year. Developers will be getting 60% of that. He says that for 1/2 of the year iAd will represent 48% of the year’s mobile advertising market, and they haven’t stopped selling ads yet.
11:25 AM: Newsreader app has an ad pop in at the bottom, loading the ad at any time, leaving the ad instantly to get back to the app. “Meet the Future” ad is playing. 100% electric Nissan car.
11:21 AM: Point #8. iAd.
Why are we doing it, he asks, “one simple reason: to help our developers earn money so they continue to create free and low-cost apps.” Wall Street Journal app with Toy Story 3 banner at bottom. Emotion + Interactivity in ads. You don’t want, as a user, to be hijacked out of an experience to visit some random web site. iAds keep you in the app. Built into iOS 4 – you can add them in an afternoon as a developer. iAd branding is shown in bottom right of the banner, notably. Apple sells and hosts the ads, shares 60% of revenues. Apple started selling ads 8 weeks ago, now has these brands for 2nd half of year: Nissan. Citi. Unilever. AT+T. Chanel. GE. Liberty Mutual. State Farm. Geico. Campbell’s Soup, Sears, JC Penney, Target. Best Buy. DirectTV, TBS Network, Disney. Just some of the brands that have signed on. He pulled a Nissan ad in progress for their new car.
11:20 AM: iBooks, iTunes Store, App Store. Over 150m accounts for these stores with credit cards – ready to buy apps. 16 billion downloads combined, #1 on the web.
11:18 AM: iBooks text on the iPhone 4 screen is readable. Demoing highlighting and color-changing of highlighting, making notes. Makes note, “I Love Winnie the Pooh.” Switching to PDF bookshelf, separate from books. PDF shows thumbnails of pages at bottom in a menu bar.
11:14 AM: Point #7. iBooks. iPhone gets iBooks, as previously announced. Same controls, highlighting, bookmarking, notes, done really well, he says. Same bookshelf, same PDF. Really excited about this, and iBookstore right on the iPhone. iBooks now has iPad, iPhone support – but what about all these products together? They work wirelessly. Download a book wirelessly, to all the devices, no extra charge. iBooks will automatically, wirelessly, sync your current place, bookmarks, and notes across all devices. Start reading book on your iPad, and continue reading on iPhone when you go out. Demo.
11:12 AM: All the apps and icons look improved for iPhone 4, supporting Retina Display. Deeper enterprise support: lots of requests have been made, and we’ve fulfilled them – wireless app distribution, enchange server 2010 support, mobile device mgmt, data protection, ssl vpn support. Google Search + Yahoo + Bing. One more choice. Praises Microsoft’s search feature. Developers will get iOS4 golden master candidate today. This month, we’ll sell the 100 millionth iOS device. iPod touches, iPhones = 100 million.
11:04 AM: Point #6. He notes there are 570 wi-fi base stations in the room. Tells people to turn off their Wi-Fi so the demo is available. Turn everything off for a little while… Everyone’s being told to put computers on the floor. Alright, #6. iPhone OS 4. The most advanced mobile operating system, he says. First new feature is renaming it – iOS 4. 1500 new developer APIs. 100 new user features as well. Biggest is multitasking. He’s citing Google’s embarassing gaffe on battery life for Android. Apple’s locking rotation feature, folders, etc. Launch Pandora. Playing Jack Johnson. Go to web page, and it loads. Pandora continues to play, which makes people applaud after earlier network problem. Switches back to Mail using multi-tasking. Unified inbox. Uses a left-swipe to bring up audio controls, which bring up Pandora instead of iPod. Ability to manage mail more aggressively. Use folders to manage apps. All previously known iPhone OS 4 stuff.
11:03 AM: iMovie will be $5.
10:58 AM: iMovie for iPhone. HD themes, transitions, titles, all within the device. He’s the guy behind FCP and iMovie for the Mac. Project thumbnails, opening project, and using landscape all looks like iMovie ‘09. Filmstrips/timeline at bottom of screen, preview taking up majority of screen. Select clips from separate screen by scrolling, pinch to change scale of timeline, pins can be used to trim clips. You can add photos from the Photos app, too, along with audio. Photos auto-get the Ken Burns effect; you can pan and zoom photos too. Theme transitions, title styles, location support also appears on the menus for geotagging of videos. Title styles look a lot like iMovie ‘09. Music from the iPod application, and built-in theme music. Play it back on the device to preview it; he’s showing off the five different themes, including the pin-on-map theme of iPhoto ‘09. Export 360p, 540p, 720p. Video about to be shown that’s composed, edited, outputted entirely on phone. Hmmm, wonder how he’s getting the 720p video out of the phone? You’d never know the video was done on an iPhone.
10:53 AM: Point #5 Whole new Camera System. Everybody loves to talk about megapixels… We ask how do we make better pictures. MP are nice but what cell phone cameras are really about is capturing photons. Lenses and lighting are challenges. So we went from 3mp to 5mp sensor but we’re using backlit sensor. Backside illuminated sensor combined with good sensor size, keeping pixels same size as in iPhone 3GS. 5x digital zoom. Tap to focus. LED flash. Pictures are pretty remarkable, he says. The pictures he’s showing haven’t been edited, and look a lot better than with iPhones in the past.
On-screen translucent controls for things like flash on/off. Low-light photographs come out better. HD video recording, too. 720p at 30fps. Real HD. Tap to focus video, built in video editing, and one-click sharing. And LED flash can be used for video, too. Even further. Written an application – iMovie for iPhone. He’s going to show it off by bringing up video engineering head, Randy Ubillos.
10:49 AM: Point #4 Gyroscope. Now added in addition to accelerometer. Rotation, pitch, roll, yaw. 6-axis motion sensing with accelerometer, plus Core Motion APIs for precise positioning. Standard in every iPhone 4. “Since this demo does not require the network… it should be OK.” (laughter) A block is rotating via the accelerometer. Using the gyro, you can track all axes. Removing blocks like a Jenga game. Tower just fell.
10:46 AM: Point #3 of iPhone 4. iPhone 4 is powered by A4 chip. Packed to gills with tremendous functionality in not so big space. Micro-sim is smaller – we needed the space. Biggest single component inside is the battery; we were able to make it a little bigger. A4 is so good at power management – 7h of 3G talk 6h of 3G browsing, 10h of wi-fi, 10h of video, 40h of music. 300h of standby. Environmental report card, strong. Up to 32GB of storage. Quad-band HSDPA/HSUPA max. 7.2mb down, 5.8mbp up, 802.11n.
10:44 AM: 3.5” screen is same size, but 960×640 pixels. 326ppi, 800:1 contrast ratio, 4x better than 3GS. IPS technology for superior screen angles and colors. Better than OLED, he says; can’t make OLED with this resolution. 78% of the pixels on iPad in this smaller display. iPhone OS 4 loads apps – iPhone OS auto-renders text at higher resolution, and controls as well, automatically for old apps. Existing apps look better. The most important single component, he says.
10:43 AM: He’s trying the demo again. Asking for suggestions from the crowd. Someone yells “Verizon!”
10:40 AM: Both devices running OS4, blowing up the crispness. The crispness of the iPhone 4 display is great by comparison, the icons on the 3GS look blurry by comparison. Loading NY Times web site. Icons within the iPhone OS 4 Folders feature can be seen crisply inside the folder icon on the main screen. Taking a while for the site to load. Network problem. Silence. Switching over to a backup. Note: they’re using Wi-Fi, not AT&T’s 3G service. Still having issues loading. “Could not Activate Cellular Data Network.” He’s going over to Camera Roll to compare photos between the two devices. Considerably better. Applause anyway.
10:36 AM: iPhone 4. Point #2: Retina Display. Dramatic increase in pixels – 4x. Showing how you can add more precision with more pixels. Because there are 4x as many pixels, there’s really, really sharp text. 326ppi. People haven’t even dreamed about a display like this. There’s a magic number at around 300ppi which is the limit of human retina to differentiate the pixels. Everything looks like continuous curves. At 326ppi we’re comfortably over that limit, and it’s extraordinary. He’s showing how text looks at different ppis. NYT web page compares theml the difference is very noticeable. Kanji text, same thing. It’s not just text – it’s images and videos, too. Showing a live demo of iPhone 3GS with its widely praised display versus iPhone 4.
10:30 AM: 2008 added 3G + App Store. 2009 twice as fast, other cool features like video recording. 2010 biggest leap since original iPhone. iPhone 4. There are well over 100 new features. He’ll cover 8 new features. All new design. Just like the leaked images. “How many of you have already seen this?” “You ain’t seen it.” Glass on the front and rear. Precision with which it’s made is beyond any consumer product we’ve ever seen.. like a beautiful old Leica camera. 9.3mm thick, 24% thinner than 3GS. Thinnest smartphone on the planet. Volume buttons on side, front facing camera. Microsim tray. Camera and LED flash in back. Bottom, microphone, speaker, 30-pin, and headset set with mic for noise cancellation. What’s this, people ask, about the stainless steel band’s lines? Well, it turns out there’s not just one—there’s three. And they’re part of the structure—there’s some brilliant engineering to use the thing as part of the antenna system. It uses steel for strength, glass for optical quality and scratch resistance. Extraordinary build quality.
10:28 AM: Now, let’s talk about the iPhone. Two pieces of data re: market share. First is Nielsen: Q1 US Smartphone Market Share – RIM #1 with 35%, iPhone 28%, WinMo – 19%, Android – 9%. 9% other. Another study, U.S. mobile browser usage from May shows iPhone at 58.2% of entire category. Android at 22.7%. Rim 12.7%.
