Apple Special Event 2001: Steve Jobs introduces the iBook G3
Transcript
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Good morning. Thank you for coming.
We've got something really amazing to share with you this morning.
Before we get into the main subject, there's one other announcement I wanted to make this morning,
and it concerns Mac OS X.
We shipped our first, as you know, we shipped Mac OS X on March 24th.
And it's been wonderful so far.
We've gotten tremendously positive feedback.
But there's always bugs we need to fix and features we need to add.
And so we shipped our first automatic software update,
which we have the technology now to do over the Internet automatically to all the clients,
about a month ago.
And it went without a hitch.
And we, at that time, said we would have a second software update
around the end of April, early May, that would include the ability to burn music CDs in Mac OS X.
And I'm pleased to report that that update went golden master a few days ago
and is going to be posted today at noon.
And that update will automatically start going out to all the clients.
We have them staggered, so it takes about a week to get to all of them.
And that's going to be posted today at noon.
So our second update, which includes CD burning in Mac OS X, is going out today.
So now to the main topic of today.
The main topic of today is notebooks.
We are enjoying a phenomenal sales of notebooks right now.
And as you can see, the percentage of our total systems that are notebooks has been climbing significantly in 2000 and the first part of 2001 as a percentage of our total systems.
And we're really thrilled about this.
And of course, this year, a lot of that is due to the amazing Titanium PowerBook G4.
We've seen a phenomenal response to this product.
It is the most advanced notebook in the world.
And it's the fastest notebook in the world.
It's one inch thick.
It's got this amazing 15.2 inch landscape screen on it.
And it's been wonderful.
And some of you and some of your colleagues have just written some marvelous things about
it and I want to thank you just to remind us of a few of them.
The San Jose Mercury News wrote, the PowerBook G4 is a landmark hardware achievement.
The titanium laptop blew me away.
Business week.
Apple's new laptop is a peach.
Apple has once again launched a powerful innovation and could literally reshape the
laptop.
The Houston Chronicle, I love this one.
Whether or not you need it, I guarantee you'll want one.
If you've ever suffered Sony bio envy, this PowerBook will end it once and for all.
This is a great one, too.
If you could take just one laptop with you on a desert island, this would be the one.
And then from Fortune Magazine, you can't say it any better than this.
I think this new PowerBook G4 Titanium is the most impressive notebook computer ever.
So we've really enjoyed tremendous critical and business success with our new Titanium G4 laptop.
But there's another pillar of our laptop business as well, and that is, of course, the iBook.
The iBook's a pretty amazing product.
It was the first notebook designed expressly for teachers, students, and consumers.
Before the iBook, there'd never been such a thing.
Everybody sold 18-month-old business computers to these people, and nobody had ever set out
to design a notebook expressly for them, and the iBook was the first one.
The iBook also ushered in the wireless networking revolution.
The iBook was the first notebook computer to ever have wireless networking in it with
802.11, the industry standard wireless networking.
It was the first notebook computer to ever have built-in antennas, which are better at wireless networking than the little stub antennas that stick out when you put a networking card in a PC slot.
They give you longer-range wireless networking.
So the iBook really ushered in this wireless networking revolution.
And we released it in September 1999.
That's about 19 months ago.
And since then, we've sold over 700,000 iBooks.
So this has been a really big success for us.
And today we've been working long and hard and today I'm very pleased to announce to
you that we're going to introduce a new iBook.
So I'd like to tell you about it.
This new iBook, as I said earlier, is amazing.
The new iBook weighs just 4.9 pounds, under 5.9 pounds.
There has never been a consumer notebook under five pounds before.
You can go pay $2,500 and get one, but never has there been a consumer notebook under five
pounds.
That's two pounds lighter than the previous iBook.
This new iBook is only 1.3 inches thick.
There has never been a consumer notebook this thin.
It's 35% thinner than the one it replaced.
We've got a 12-inch display, which is pretty standard, same as the old iBook.
But this is no normal 12-inch display.
This is a landmark for a consumer notebook because this is a 1024x768,
a 10x7 display that has 60% more pixels than a typical 800x600 display.
A full 10 by 7 display.
Let me show you what this means.
As an example, when you're running OS 10, that's a 10 by 7 display.
That is a 6 by 8 display.
Look at how much information you lose between the two of them.
It's dramatic.
And it's dramatic in every application you run.
There has never been a consumer notebook with this class of display on it.
It is the same number of pixels as a 14-inch notebook has that we've compressed down to a compact 12-inch display.
So you've got basically a 14-inch notebook display in a 12-inch display.
And as a matter of fact, it's the same number of pixels as iMac at its highest resolution.
You've got a full iMac display for the first time on a portable computer at a consumer price point.
So we're very happy about this.
The iBook also has a five-hour battery life, dramatically longer than anything else in the market,
all-day computing without recharging.
and of course it has firewire built in we really believe in desktop movies
we see more and more people making movies on
computers and they want to make them on their notebooks as well
so firewire is built in you can hook up to your camcorder to external firewire
drives and other type of peripherals
we also have ethernet built in so that when you
if you're using it on a campus you can plug right into your campus ethernet
if you're using it at home you can plug right into your DSL or cable motor
So Ethernet's built into every iBook.
And we also have built-in antennas, again, to give you longer-range wireless networking.
Now, how does this stack up against our competitors?
Well, our competitors in the consumer notebook space are Dell and Compaq.
So how do we stack up against them?
Let's take a look at weight.
We're 4.9 pounds.
Dell is basically 2 pounds heavier than we are.
compact is over two pounds heavier than we are.
That's a lot.
In terms of thickness, we're 1.3 inches.
They are both 1.7 inches, dramatically thicker.
In terms of displays, they all have 12-inch displays,
but of course, as we just heard,
all 12-inch displays are not created equal.
They have the old 800 by 600 displays.
We have the first 10 by 7 display in a consumer notebook.