Steve Jobs introduces Xserve - Apple Special Event 2002
Archive source note: The original catalog dates this recording September 10, 2002. Its references to the fifth month of the year and the previous week's Jaguar preview suggest the May 14 Xserve launch. This event date is inferred, and the supplied date and original file are preserved.
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
Good morning. I'm Steve Jobs and I'd like to thank you all for coming.
We've got a really interesting morning planned because we're going to introduce our first real server.
And we wanted to take you through it. We've got a few presentations. I'm going to do an overview.
We've got a presentation on the software and remote management.
We've got a presentation on sales, support, and service.
And we've got a few partners and customers. And then we'll do a Q&A.
We had three hours down on the agenda. I'm hoping we only take about two, so get you out of here a little after 11.
And then we've got some stuff set up in the piano bar across the hall here where you can go get your hands on some of this stuff yourself.
So let's get going.
This calendar year, Apple has already introduced a stream of innovation.
Just since January, we introduced the new iMac, which has been a really big hit for us.
It's selling very well, and I think it's one of the best products we've ever made.
We also introduced a desktop for our education customers, the eMac,
and this has been received very well by our customers.
We're in the first quarter of selling it, and we expect to do very well this quarter.
The reaction so far also has been very strong from our education customers.
We also introduced an upgraded PowerBook that's got a dramatically better display on it,
and the industry's first DVI connector on a portable.
So you can connect to new projectors with DVI connectors on them,
but also you can connect to R displays.
So this PowerBook can drive a Cinema HD display
and has all the graphics and video memory inside it to be able to do that
so you can triple your pixels when you get to your desk and plug in one connector all digitally.
And last week, we introduced an amazing, or we previewed, excuse me, an amazing new product,
Mac OS X Jaguar, the next release of Mac OS X, we had our most successful developer conference last year in the company's history,
which is saying a lot given the travel and budget restrictions this year.
As you may know, the number of registered Apple developers has doubled in the last 12 months,
and all of the new developers are principally Unix and Java developers,
and we are so excited to have people coming to our developer conference that wouldn't even talk to us before our Unix-based Mac OS X.
them. Jaguar, which we previewed, which will be available late this summer, has a ton of
new features in it. Some major enhancements to mail, a whole new address book, Inkwell,
which is probably the best handwriting recognition out there, which came from you know what.
Universal access so that we don't leave anybody behind. A new finder, something incredible
called Quartz Extreme, which is taking our whole Quartz graphics pipeline and putting
it through our graphics hardware so that it is amazing what you can do now or what you
will be able to do with Quartz Xtreme.
A technology called Rendezvous which allows multiple computers and devices, let's say
in a home or in a business, to automatically find each other.
It's dynamic discovery over IP networks with zero configuration.
It's really, really cool and our developers loved it.
Two of the biggest things we introduced was QuickTime 6,
which is a whole new version of QuickTime based on MPEG-4.
This is the best MPEG-4 streaming video solution
around, and it's going to be bundled in the next release
of Mac OS X coming out late this summer.
And instant messaging coming to the Mac, integrated right
into the operating system in an application called iChat.
It's totally compatible with AOL's AIM instant messaging
network.
And it's the first time AOL sort of let another company
into the tent officially.
And all of this stuff, of course, runs on Mac OS X,
which is Unix, true Unix under the hood.
And as a matter of fact, we are now
the largest supplier of Unix in the world.
Isn't that incredible?
I'll say that again.
Apple is now the largest Unix supplier in the world.
It's hard to believe.
And that's why all these Unix developers now
are coming to Apple and Mac OS X.
So that was Jaguar.
So we've seen already, we're only in our fifth month, we've
seen a tremendous stream of innovation so far this year,
continuing what we've done for the last 18 months to try to
innovate our way through this economic period.
So we're going to add another piece of innovation today
coming from Apple, which is a server.
And we call it XServe.
XServe is a new server from Apple.
Now, when you think about servers, you think about the enterprise, right?
And when you think about the enterprise in Apple,
you're more likely to think about this than anything else.
But it's not really true.
Though we are not on every desktop in every Fortune 500 corporation,
we are in...
in most Fortune 500 corporations.
And they have departments that use Macs.
AOL Time Warner uses a lot of Macs.
Their magazines every week are put out on Macs.
Companies like Disney, companies like in biotech,
like Genentech, usually half or more of their computers
are Macs.
So there are a lot of Macs in a lot of Fortune 500
corporations.
But XServe is really designed not only for business, but
also for education, because we have a large presence there
as well.
So if there's one word that I would say describes our entrance into the server market, it is humble.
We know we have a lot to learn.
And this is our first offering.
We've listened to our customers a lot.
And we think we got a pretty hot product.
But we know that for everything we know, there's ten things we don't know.
So we're approaching this very humbly.
So XSERT, what is it?
It's a 1U server solution designed from the ground up.
It's been customer driven.
And our customers have told us they want to do the following
things.
They want to do file and print service, obviously.
They want to do web and email service.
They want to do database on their server.
They want to do QuickTime streaming.
This is a way to, and they want to stream hundreds of
streams.
Boom.
And they want to do computational service.
As an example, our customers in biotech want to run probably
the most popular program in biotech.
They run dozens of times a day called Blast.
And they want one or a cluster of servers
to run this very fast.
So what did they want to see in a server?
Well, the first thing they want from Apple
is a dedicated server platform.
They don't want to use a Power Mac G4 as a server.
They want a dedicated server platform.
They want it to be rack mounted.
It's the most efficient way to do it.