Category: Event Coverage

Despite the seemingly unimpeachable nature of the source, many Mac users believe that Steve Jobs’ Leopard presentation yesterday was nothing but a collection of cleverly Photoshoped images.

After a string of supposed Leopard screen shots were promulgated on the Internet prior to WWDC, many may be gun shy.

As soon as Apple posted the QuickTime stream of the WWDC keynote, Mac users noted some troubling details about the so-called “Leopard demos.”

Analyzing screen captures he had taken of Jobs’ demo of Spaces, Mac user Alex Johnson noted “There’s severe pixellation on the edge of every window. And the font kerning is all wrong.

“Here,” he said pointing at the screen with a Space Food Stick. “And here.”

“Now, sure, it could be because it’s a screen capture of an overloaded QuickTime stream. Or it could be because this is yet another phony collection of Photoshop creations intended to fool eager Mac users into thinking Apple is going to release features called ‘Time Machine’ and ‘Spaces.’

“Wake up, sheeple!” Johnson shouted.

Then he angrily took a bite of the Space Food Stick.

Other Mac users went further than Johnson and speculated that Jobs himself may be a clever Photoshopping, pointing to the pronounced edge of his outline against the screen behind him.

“But I don’t just mean in the picture,” said Carl Stoller. “I mean all the time.

“Maybe I’ve just been burned too many times by Apple screen captures, but don’t you think Steve is just a little too good to be true?”

Apple representatives stood by the veracity of the screen images shown during the keynote.

But, under closer questioning, they did admit that Phil Schiller wasn’t really on a rollercoaster in the iChat demo.

10:00 AM – Coverage begins NOW! Hot and saucy, just the way you likes it! This post will be in reverse order [Editor: since reversed to make it readable.] to keep you up-to-date on how many bottles of that Apple-branded water Jobs has consumed.

Forget the stock options. How much is Apple spending to keep Jobs in fancy water?

Please note that earlier plans to provide coverage entirely in pig latin have been CANCELED.

Canceled.

Anceled-cay.

Not gonna do it.

10:03 AM – BREAKING!

CARS is confirming MacNN‘s breaking news that

Attendees are being asked to shift to the center of the seating rows.

That is CONFIRMED.

Attendees are also being asked to arrange themselves so the tall ones are in the back and the short ones are in front.

10:15 AM – Jobs is talking about the conference stats. 1000 Apple engineers are here. One for every 4 attendess.

More startling, however, is the 1 to 1 booth babe ratio.

And, without further ado… SCHILLERMANIA!!!

10:20 AM – Schiller’s introducing the Mac Pro. It’s an all dual-core unit that will give you a woodie.

What did he say?

Oh. “Woodcrest.”

Yeah, I don’t know what that is.

Holds up to 4 internal drives FOR ALL THE PORN IN THE WORLD!

OK, not really, but a lot of porn.

Case design is relatively the same, but the inside is all-new.

Strangely, he adds “The outside is also all-new.” Then he pauses, looks at the audience and raises his eyebrows several times.

But… it’s kinda not.

No one’s sure what he’s getting at there.

10:25 AM – Ooooh, 3.0 GHz.

FINALLY.

Sheesh.

Uh… “Yay”?

Whatever, Apple.

Says the Intel transition took 210 days to complete, “faster than anybody else.”

What?

Who else was there? Are we talking alternate universe Apples here?

10:30 AM – New Xserves. 5x faster than previous models. 1 billion times faster than “doing it by hand.”

Oookay. Well, I hope they don’t do a bake-off of that. I’ve got a flight back home in a couple of days.

OK, Steve’s back to talk about software.

Oh, Bertrand Serlet is puttin’ the BEAT DOWN on Vista! Oh, Steve Ballmer, I do believe that French bitch just used your toothbrush!

BOO-YAH!

10:35 AM – Leopard

64-bit app support for apps.
128-bit support for widgets.

Huh. That’s weird.

Time Machine – integrated backup facility. Jobs says “So you little sissies don’t have to go whining to your mommas when you loose your pwecious data-ums.”

Man, that guy really has an attitude, doesn’t he?

The bad thing is, Time Machine only backs up to floppies, so you need to go out and buy a whole shitload of floppies, like, right now.

10:45 AM – And, of course, Time Machine features a whole bunch of cycle-sucking eye candy that you KNOW you gots to get yourself some of! You know you want it, baby! You want it bad!

You’re just an eye-candy whore! Admit it! You’d do anything for the eye candy!

You’re addicted! Like some cheap prostitute on crack who keeps crawling back to your sugar daddy, Steve Jobs!

You disgust me.

Speaking of eye candy, Steve’s now talking about Spaces, a new virtual desktop environment that will put all the other virtual desktop environments out of business.

Kinda surprised Arlo Rose wasn’t working on one.

Eh, for all I know, maybe he was.

10:55 AM – Spotlight can search other machines now. VP of platform experience Scott Forstall says “We want it to be a great app launcher.”

He says he also wanted it to be a magical pony that would come when he called it and would always be his bestest friend forever and ever, but Apple engineers told him that wasn’t possible.

He says they told him that ponies grow up to be horses and then they get old and sick and they have to be shot between the eyes by a sweaty ranch hand out back behind the barn when the kids are at the fair.

Now he’s crying.

Boy, this is really uncomfortable.

Schiller’s trying to console him.

Jeez… I…

Wait…

Ponies don’t grow up to be horses.

Colts grow up to be horses. Ponies are just ponies.

What the fuck?

11:05 AM – OK, Steve’s back. He’s talking about Core Animation.

He says “Your graphics card just went obsolete.”

Oh, great.

Leopard does braille support and closed captions for QuickTime.

And there’s nothing funny to be said about that.

OK?

So just shut up, Rudy.

Mail to feature big enhancements.

“For all you ass clowns who switched to fucking Ubuntu because we made you have to use an export utility to move your mailbox to another application – like your mail is sooooooo important, Cory Doctorow – well, you douche bags can just kiss my…”

Well…

He’s just kind of going on like that.

11:15 AM – Apple’s delivering Dashcode – an IDE for developing widgets.

Oh, for chrissake, who needs an IDE to develop a widget? That is so lame.

I made one with construction paper, some blunt scissors and Elmer’s glue.

And some glitter.

It’s… really cool.

It um… counts down the days until “Snakes On A Plane” is released.

OK, I have to change the numbers by hand, but…

11:25 AM – iChat demo.

Hey, wait a minute… Steve’s chatting with Schiller.

Schiller was just on stage…

Now he’s in Times Square. They say it’s just an effect, but…

OH, MY GOD! PHIL SCHILLER IS THE MASTER OF SPACE, TIME AND DIMENSION!

But you already knew that.

There’s a rollercoaster background and Steve says “Life at Apple is a rollercoaster”!

Ha-ha!

Yes, one day your little music device is bringing you boatloads of cash and the next they’re investigating your stock options!

WHOOOOOO!!!

WHEEEEEE!!!

AHHHHHHH!!!

Just give us the Leopard wrap-up, rollercoaster boy.

11:30 AM – That’s it!

Leopard to be released in the spring, when the flowers are blooming and love is on a young man’s mind.

And in his pants.

With Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference barreling down on us like a tour bus full of booze and hookers – which, I understand, pretty much describes the evening program – it’s time for RUMOR ROUNDUP!

YEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAW!

Let’s bring in the rumor dawgies!

In a long-overdue move, Apple will phase out the brushed metal theme and will introduce a new “cheesecake” theme. Sources indicate that menu bars will be a crunchy graham-cracker crust and the window beneath will be a smooth cream cheese.

Either that or its someone’s birthday at Apple and they’re getting an OS X-themed cake.

The sources were kind of far away and had binoculars with a really narrow field of view.

It is without doubt, however, that the company will reveal its plans for movie rental downloads from the ever increasingly misnomered iTunes Music Store. Why the company would choose a conference for developers for such an announcement is not entirely sure, but if rumors of discounted downloads of portions of the Girls Gone Wild series hosted by Snoop Dogg are true, that would explain a lot.

Programmers love Snoop Dogg.

OK, and cheap 20-year-old floozies who are willing to bare their breasts for a string of beads.

But who doesn’t like that? Other than some neglectful middle-aged daddies, I mean.

I’m sure Apple developers would really love it if the girls would lift their tops for a linked list.

Frickin’ dorks.

Finally, it is a near certainty that Apple will release some developer-related feature – possibly a Cocoa class called NSWindowToolkitMenuBarWithRetsin or something – that will be basically incomprehensible to you, the non-attendee. Somehow, however, you will find yourself discussing its implications with your Mac-using friends and opining on how it will be a boon to developers, even though it took you four hours to write an Automator script that empties the trash.

Well, those are all the rumors that we have near-confirmed or partially confirmed or somewhere near the intersection of Confirmed and Bullshit.

Well, those and the new Mac Pros.

But you don’t want to hear about that.

Apple announced a profit of $472 million in its third fiscal quarter today, beating analysts’ estimates.

The company also reported a 32 percent increase in shipments of iPods and a 12 percent increase in shipments of Macs.

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer told analysts the company does not expect to have to post any material adjustments for the third quarter resulting from the ongoing investigation into stock option irregularities.

Oppenheimer further noted that iPod sock sales have continued their slide since their introduction, but expected that they would be flat for the current quarter as they’ve gone to zero.

In another interesting piece of news, Apple’s Cupertino campus was apparently overrun by wild boars early in the quarter, forcing a temporary evacuation and a hasty call to animal control.

After order was restored, the incident was followed by an impromptu luau.

Oppenheimer told analysts that all Apple employees will be given the day off on August 18th so the entire company can attend the opening of Snakes on a Plane.

He closed the call by revealing that next Tuesday, Apple will announce a new video iPod, a tablet device and a low cost laptop for inner city youth.

And that CEO Steve Jobs wears women’s underwear under that turtleneck and jeans.

Oppenheimer said that he wasn’t really supposed to reveal any of that, but he just couldn’t keep it to himself anymore.

Apple’s net earnings jumped 41 percent and net income jumped from $290 million to $410 million last quarter. Predictably, however, it was the negatives that analysts chose to dwell on, despite the company’s gains.

While Apple beat revenues, analysts noted earnings were below forecast. Guidance was also below forecast as the company expected that the current quarter would be tepid as users waited for new Intel-based Macs to appear. Analysts were also reportedly put off by the continued appearance of an evil-looking goat.

“That’s just freaky,” said Daniel Niles of Lehman Brothers. “Freaking goat, man. What is that?”

Further disappointing Wall Street, analysts noted that Apple’s OPS has dropped off dramatically as it has failed to make the adjustment to American League pitching and analysts sharply downgraded the firm’s PECOTA.

“Apple seems to have fallen out of its comfort zone since moving over from the National League,” said ESPN’s Jim Caple. “It’s swinging at pitches out of the zone and striking out more. If ever there was a candidate for watching more tapes of pitchers it’s Apple.

“Plus it needs to resolve some of those lawsuits. That whole thing can’t be good.”

In addition to Apple’s trouble at the plate, analysts noted that the company has:

• Refused to clean its plate, despite having been served its favorite meal.
• Attempted to parallel park by going in front-first.
• Neglected to floss, even the night before a dentist appointment.
• Persistently used the word “irregardless.”
• Failed to fill out its TPS reports.

Apple declined to comment for this story, but shuffled its feet sullenly and shrugged its shoulders when asked if it was thought that was the best that it could do.