Steve Jobs on Publishing Technology: G3 Speed and QuickTime

Good morning. It's a pleasure to join you this morning. The Seaboard experience is unique in all of the high-tech industry. There is, and always has been, an amazing feeling of community here. There's a strong sense of purpose and direction. When you come to Seaboard, you get the feeling that users are still driving this industry, because in fact, you are. It's because of the power of this community that Steve Jobs is our keynote speaker this morning. Many of you remember that Steve took the stage at Seaboard in San Francisco last September to report his word on the state of Apple. And he promised then to return to you at this event in New York to report again on Apple's progress.

I'm here to introduce Steve, which hardly seems necessary given who he is and who we all are. All of us know who Steve Jobs is. A revolutionary, an icon, a leader. All of these words have been used to describe him. The word I use is technologist. Steve believes in the societal benefits of technology. I share that fundamental belief, as I suspect you do as well. I appreciate all that Steve has done over many years to spread that belief in technology to millions of people around the world. Millions of people for whom computing seemed more approachable with a computer that smiled at them.

Some people credit Steve Jobs with leading the desktop revolution. Another generation first heard of him when they saw Toy Story. Still others hope he can orchestrate the recovery of one of America's most beloved brands. And who knows what lies ahead for this guy. I mean really, he's still pretty young as industry icons go. Regardless of which part of his public life you are best acquainted, I'm sure that you'll all agree that Apple's current ad campaign reflects a common thread in all of what Steve Jobs is about. At the end of the day, I suspect that Steve Jobs would be most satisfied if he found that he'd gotten all of us to think different.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Some people think the Pentium II is the fastest processor in the world. Not quite. The chip inside every new power Macintosh G3 is up to twice as fast. Apple Computer would like to apologize for toasting the Pentium II processor in public. But the fact remains, the chip inside every new power Macintosh G3 is up to twice as fast.

So that's ColorSync. WebObjects. WebObjects is fundamentally a dynamic publishing technology for the Internet. We're doing really, really well with it. It's fundamentally sort of just-in-time, just-for-me publishing. Where you can create webpages on the fly that are dynamically tailored for the exact situation that they're being requested for. And some of the new customers are Adobe themselves. AOL's using this stuff. BBC. Daniel's Printing, which is a huge financial printer here on the East Coast. A lot of ad agencies. Siebold. You can go see the stuff actually in Apple's booth today. Siebold's using this for all of their web publishing for their documents, which is a huge thing.

A lot of new customers here. This is Siebold's online site. And again, here's an example of how they're using WebObjects to manage the article database that they've got. And distribute these out for peer review and for publishing. Here's the BBC. All the BBC news stuff is being generated by WebObjects on the server side. It's worth checking this stuff out. We don't have time to go into detail on it today. But it's very, very significant technology. And one of the things we are announcing today is that Apple has formed a consulting group specifically around WebObjects to target the publishing market. And that is up and running today. And we have over 300 alliance partners to bring to bear that have apps already built today in WebObjects. So if you're interested, go check this out at the Apple booth.

This stuff also runs cross-platform. AppleScript. AppleScript, you saw the plug-in for Illustrator 7. We're distributing a publishing solutions CD-ROM with five years' worth of AppleScript wisdom on it. You can see FaceSpan, which is the interface builder for AppleScript, the new version 3.0 in the booth. We've got ColorSync and AppleScript integrated together. And we are also going to be having native AppleScript in the next release of the Mac OS coming out later this year called Allegro. And it's a speed demon. And so we believe in AppleScript. It's this wonderful object-oriented scripting language that's easy enough for mere mortals. And we think it's really important. And we're doing a lot to improve it both in its speed and its capabilities and get it further integrated into the rest of the system.

And lastly, in the software technologies, I'd like to talk about QuickTime. We think QuickTime's a really big deal. And we have QuickTime 3 that is now just about ready to ship. What is QuickTime about? We are moving into the era of digital video. And as we move into this era, it's a mess. We've got standards coming out our ears. We've got a standard for digital video discs, right, DVDs. We've got a different standard for digital television. As a matter of fact, multiple ones. We've got a different standard for digital camcorders, the digital video standard that you can buy camcorders now today with.

We've got different standards for the Internet. We've got different standards for the videos we put on CD-ROMs and games. We've got digital conferencing standards. We've got video editing standards. We have image editing standards. We have different standards for audio CDs and music creation. And there's more. How do you manage all this stuff? How do you create content, manage it, and repurpose it to these different areas? Because these areas are not only sources of content. They're also destinations of content. And QuickTime was developed at Apple starting 12 years ago. And at that point in time, people wanted to put video on PCs.

And most people were saying, let's plug in these $1,000 boards, and we'll do it analogly, and we'll put video on PCs. And a bunch of people at Apple, or a few people at Apple actually, realized that this was a bad idea because no one would ever write applications for something that required a $1,000 add-in to the computer. And they realized they could do this in software, which meant free. They could actually do video compression and decompression in software. And at first, it only gave you a tiny little window. But it had, again, two major attributes. One, it was completely digital. And two, it was free. And as the processing power grew over the last decade, that window got bigger and bigger and bigger until it fills up the whole screen now. And the quality got better and better and better. And these guys were really smart. They realized that the coming digital revolution probably would be a Tower of Babel, as we just saw in terms of standards.

And what could they do to insulate the applications from that Tower of Babel? And what they did was a lot like what the genius of PostScript was. If you recall back a decade before PostScript, every application needed to know about every printer. WordPerfect, when they were in their ascendancy, 500 people writing printer drivers. And this was really a strange state to be in. What PostScript did was a complete, not only did it provide the applications a ton of functionality, but it isolated them from needing to know about the printers. Printers could come and go and the apps didn't have to know about it or change.

And that's what QuickTime does. It provides a ton of functionality to the app developer, but it also completely isolates you from all of these formats. And we can add codecs and change things and broaden out the platforms that QuickTime supports and the apps don't even know and they just get to take advantage of it all. As an example, QuickTime 3 has full digital video support, so you can just plug this thing in through FireWire to your Sony camcorder and all the apps just have it. They don't have to add a line of code to their applications. So that's what QuickTime is. And, again, if you were going to say it in a formal way, it's a unifying format and platform for multi-source and multi-destination content creation and consumption in the digital media age.

It's a mouthful, but it's really important. Now, ISO, International Standards Organization, these are the guys that came up with MPEG-2, which is the standard for every digital video disc now. It's a standard that satellite broadcasting is moving towards. They are working on the next MPEG. They skipped over 3 for some reason. They're working on MPEG-4, which is going to come out in 4 or 5 years. And it's going to be the next standard to hopefully unify a lot of this stuff. And they recently picked QuickTime as the basis for the MPEG-4 standard. This is a really big deal. It was hotly contested. It was hotly contested between two camps.

One was Microsoft. They had their own stuff, which isn't really real. And on the other hand, Apple, IBM, Sun, Oracle, SGI, and Netscape all submitted QuickTime 3. And the ISO committee picked it about a month and a half ago. It's a really big deal. So QuickTime is also multi-platform. As a matter of fact, QuickTime 3 is exactly the same source code on both the Mac and Windows. Exactly the same. Because if you're going to create a standard on computers, it's got to be completely multi-platform. So what I would love to do now is introduce Phil Schiller.

Phil is Apple's vice president of product marketing. And Phil is going to give us a quick demo of QuickTime 3. Thanks, Steve. Well, I'm really proud to be able to show you QuickTime 3. There's a few technologies that we get to show off with as much enthusiasm and real pride in what it's become. Because QuickTime has moved very rapidly ahead as the technology has advanced. And we take advantage of it all. Just like the original idea of leveraging the technology and software to make it easy to work with digital video and audio. And now with QuickTime 3, we've moved dramatically ahead of anything anyone has ever seen with software, audio and video before in the personal computer marketplace. So let's start right away by looking at some of the things we can do with video.

We've brought in some new codecs with QuickTime 3. Expanded what you're able to work with in all of your applications that leverage QuickTime. There's standards for the new Indio codecs from Intel. There is the new video conferencing standards, H.263. And one that we think will become the most commonly used codec in digital video. It's called the Sorenson codec. It's a codec that we work together with the Sorenson company on to bring to QuickTime. And it is only available in QuickTime. Now, one of the popular mediums for video will become the Internet. Now, as you all know, the Internet is like trying to suck a big ton of bits right down a tight little hose. So we don't expect tremendous quality. But what we're able to do with this Sorenson video codec is enhance the quality beyond what's available today.

And get it out to people with something as simple as a 28.8 modem. So here is QuickTime playing from a 28.8 modem speed. And this is using streaming. So the movie starts to play as it comes to you. Which means you can play long movies without a long wait. Apple Computer would like to apologize for toasting the Pentium II processor in public. But the fact remains, the chip inside every new Power Macintosh G3 is up to twice as fast. Not bad for a 28.8 modem. Now, what if you're on an Internet or you want to go to other media like CD-ROM? This new Sorenson codec scales the speed of the Internet.

And it's not just about the speed of the Internet. It's about the speed of the Internet. It's about the speed of the Internet. It's about the speed of the Internet. It's about the speed of the Internet. Now, what if you're on an Internet or you want to go to other media like CD-ROM? This new Sorenson codec scales very, very well. In fact, better than anything we've used to date. So let me open up a video that's the same video you could do on a CD-ROM or on an Internet site. And show you what it looks like, again, all in software using nothing but a Power Mac. Apple Computer would like to apologize for toasting the Pentium II processor in public.

But the fact remains, the chip inside every new Power Macintosh G3 is up to twice as fast. So that's the quality of video that we can all work with on our Mac or fast Pentium II machines and do completely in software simply by using the new QuickTime 3. Now, working with video is great, but of course, the audio quality has to be equally good. In fact, particularly over the Internet, you may want to drop video frames, but you certainly want to drop audio. It's a much more jarring experience. So, of course, we want to work with Internet and audio, and we have new codecs for that as well. We have Qualcomm's voice codec, which brings dramatic industry-standard voice quality.

And we have a new codec for music audio called the Q-Design codec that we worked in conjunction with a company called Q-Design. And again, this codec is designed to work with audio, but it's also designed to work with video. So first, let me bring up a 14.4. Now, 14.4 is only available in QuickTime, and it dramatically increases the quality of audio over the Internet. So first, let me bring up a 14.4. Not bad for a 14.4 modem.

But if you saw my links here, I also have a 56k quality piece. So let's bring that up and see what we can all look at and listen to with 56k modems. So I hope you agree that the Internet experience is about to get a lot more exciting and a lot more interesting with QuickTime 3 and the kind of media it can bring to it.

The next thing I'd like to show is a connection now between two very important technologies that Steve talked about, QuickTime and ColorSync. First, I'd like to open up a video that's, again, a video you've seen already, but a video that I received from someone else working on their computer, and you'll notice some slight differences in the color because they had a different gamma correction on their portable. Now, the whites are not as bright as the whites we saw earlier. We took out the audio so that I could talk through this. And as we get to our bunny, you notice all of a sudden it's no longer blue, it's pink. And this is a problem people who work with video have run into before, which is sharing digital video across different computers without any realization that the colors can change.

Now, with QuickTime 3, we have a tremendous number of new filters that are supported, and one of those filters is ColorSync. So I can open up the same video file, select ColorSync, and just like in the Illustrator demo you saw earlier, I can change the profile. I know this came from a PowerBook, a PowerBook 540, and I've already set up my profile for my monitor, so I just leave it set for current monitor. I don't have to tell it what my output is. Say OK, and let's give this a name. Now it has saved a new version of the same movie with a filter in place for my ColorSync profile. Let's open that up, rewind these two movies, and look at them side by side. Now you see the corrected movie, of course, is back to the right white point, as it should be.

And has the correct blue bunny suit again. Now, what's really amazing is this is happening on the fly. We haven't recompressed the movie, put it through any kind of engine to change it. QuickTime and ColorSync is able to do color correction on the fly in real time with video, something no one has seen before. Now, the last thing I'd like to show you about QuickTime 3, and there's a tremendous amount to it. You can see it in our booth. But something that a lot of people do is to work with frames directly inside Photoshop. So I have four frames of this movie, we're going to open up Photoshop 4, and we'll open up each individual frame, and you'll see what's been done here is we've done a little bit of painting on top of the frames, something that in the video world they call rotoscoping.

And as you see, in these individual images, we have layers, and each of the painted elements is in a different layer on top of that Photoshop image. So let me close these images, and save that little blue dot I threw on one. And now go to the movie player application, the QuickTime 3 movie player, and I'm going to do something that was never done before, which is open a sequence of images, of Photoshop files, apply a timeline to it, and now we've opened up Photoshop images, and as I play it with the rotoscoping effect, it reads the native Photoshop files, it doesn't squash them down, it retains the separate layers and file format information, makes a movie from them, and I can go back and change those images again, nothing has changed, my movie will automatically be updated.

So now those of us who work with Photoshop and QuickTime, you can move back and forth very quickly and very efficiently. So with that, Steve? Thank you. So now when we order our Intel bunny suits on the web, they'll be sure to come in the color we expect. Okay. Thank you, Phil. Okay. So four software technologies that we are focusing on for publishing, and we've gotten rid of a lot of cruft, and there's a lot of energy being focused on each of those four technologies, and I think you're seeing some of the progress we're making today. And three of the four are cross-platform today, and we're announcing that we'll deliver them by the end of this year where they don't exist today.

Hardware. We got four things I'd like to tell you about today. First, it's a flat panel display, second, some RAID disk drive stuff, third, some FireWire stuff, and four, it's some really fun stuff on the G3s. So first, I'm very happy to introduce the Apple Studio Display here today. It's Apple's first flat panel display, and it's very hot. It's got a 15.1-inch viewable area, which is equivalent to what you get on about a 17-inch CRT. Okay? This is big. It's 1024 by 768 dots resolution. It's got no flicker. It is incredibly bright.

This is one of the brightest LCDs we've seen. We've worked tremendously hard on the engineering to get this thing incredibly bright and incredibly sharp. Much different than you've ever seen on a CRT. And this is shipping in May. And we're very happy about it. I've got one right here, as a matter of fact. This is what it looks like. You can see it in the booth. It's really gorgeous. And we can get the lights down. You can see how bright it is. Get the lights down up here. Stage lights. There we go. This thing is very, very bright. And it's incredibly crisp. So you should go check it out where you can see it up close.

Now today, today these kinds of displays are priced at around $3,500 and up. Compax is, as an example, about $3,500. We have spent a lot of time value engineering this product, and we're pleased to be able to bring it to you for $1,999. You're going to see us doing a lot more in the flat panel area. We believe that we are about to see certain crossovers in terms of quality and even cost to be able to bring some of these things to the publishing market. And we're doing a lot of work in this area. The second thing I'm really happy to talk to you about today is Firewire. As you know, Apple invented Firewire, and Apple has not been leading the march to bring it to market.

And that's all changed. This is our first Firewire product. You're going to see a lot more of them over the coming year. And this is, of course, the IEEE standard that was adopted based on Apple's Firewire technology. This allows us to plug in this card and suck in digital video from our Sony camcorders directly into QuickTime. There's an Adobe Premiere plug-in that comes with this card as well, and it's $299, and it's shipping next month. We've had a lot of interest in faster disk support. And we love the G3s. They're screamers, and we want to keep making them faster and faster and faster. So this is our first RAID product. It's based on some software from Connelly called SoftRAID, which is incredibly interesting stuff.

You can put more than one disk drive on, and this thing, without having to suck all your data off in a backup and reformat your disk and everything else, on the fly reformats your disk to give you in-place striping or mirroring. It's really nice. And so this product is an ultra-wide SCSI card, two 4-gigabyte fast drives, the SoftRAID software, and it costs about $1,000 over the G3 standard 4-gigabyte drive. And it's very, very fast. It's available today. You can go see it in the booth. And lastly, I'd like to talk about the G3s. We've got some fun stuff to show you today. So as you know, our G3s have a new kind of chip in them.

And that chip is the PowerPC G3 chip. We've been incredibly successful with the G3s so far. We had planned to ship around 80,000 of them the first quarter, the first 51 days they were introduced last quarter. We shipped about over 130,000 of them, and we're doing very well this quarter. I can't release the results because the quarter's not over, but we're shipping a lot of them. And the PowerPC is a collaboration between Apple and Motorola and IBM, and all three companies are doing great together on this. There's some really good stuff that you'll see in a minute. But I've read some rumors that this group of companies has had falling outs and stuff. Couldn't be further from the truth. I don't know who makes this stuff up. But Apple and Motorola and IBM are working very closely together on this, and you'll see some of the results today.

So this PowerPC G3 chip is really interesting. It's hard to believe, but you've seen our commercials. It's literally twice as fast as this one. Twice as fast as the Pentium II. Now, people are having a hard time believing that. They go, geez, Intel, Intel inside, how could it be twice as fast? It is. It really is. The fastest one that we have shipped up till today is a 266 megahertz G3, and that literally equals the performance of a 500 megahertz Pentium II, which, of course, you can't buy because they can't make them. But that's how fast it is. It's literally twice as fast. Now, how do we know this? Well, we look at benchmarks.

One of the most respected benchmarks in the industry is one published, created and published by Byte Magazine, the oldest computer magazine and most respected technically, called Byte Marks. And if you run the Byte Marks tests, here's what you get. A G3 266 is 9.0 Byte Marks. The fastest Pentium II you can buy, for love or money today, runs at 4.6. And you see a 2.6, a 266 megahertz Pentium II is 3.9. So when we say we're twice as fast at each frequency, as you can see, we're being conservative. Okay? It's pretty interesting. So what I'd like to do now is just show you this.

We've got two screens on either side. So let's do a bake-off. So Phil, can I get Phil Schiller to come on stage? Phil and I are going to try to do this at the same time here. And what we've got is we've got on your right a power Macintosh G3 running at 266 megahertz. And on your left, a Compaq workstation, a 6100. This is the fastest computer Compaq makes. It's got a 333 megahertz Pentium II in it. It's the fastest thing they make. It sells for 4,300 bucks. As you can see, the G3 at 266 sells for $2,169. So half the price. Let's see which one's faster.

Now, the demo that we're going to run is a very simple demonstration, which we thought would be relevant today, Photoshop. It's a bunch of Photoshop tasks that, as you'll see, is very relevant to the type of materials that many of us create every single day. And we're just going to run it. Exactly the same Photoshop file, right? Exactly the same Photoshop file running on both these platforms with Photoshop for Windows and obviously Photoshop for Mac. So identical situation. Let's see which one's faster. Okay. Three, two, one, go. Done.

Power Mac's done. You can see a little gold plaque at the bottom that says, shwee, and it's done. Done. Okay. A machine half the price of Intel's fastest processor. Great. We have more. So, I am very pleased today to announce that we have a new product. 300 megahertz. On sale as of now. This has got a 1 megabyte cache, 1 megabyte level 2 cache running at 2 to 1. So that's running at 150 megahertz. That's a very fast cache.

This product is 20% faster than the 266. It, on another benchmark, Macbench, breaks the 1,000 barrier for the first time. This is incredible. I mean, if you go back four years ago, you know, with the first Power Mac, the first Power PC Max, right, this is 10 times faster than the first Power Macs four years ago. And it's available today. And this thing is equivalent to a 600 megahertz Pentium II, which, of course, you can't make today. And take a look at the bite marks. 10 for the first time. 10.2, again, compared with what you've seen before on the Pentium. And we'd like to show you this one. So we're going to use the same setup.

Compact system on the right. Power Mac G3 running at 300 megahertz on the left. Okay. This one. Three, two, one, go. Done. We all better blow in the Pentium's direction here.

Okay, done. So, as you can see, dramatically faster. And if you're doing this stuff all day long, this can add up to several extra hours with your family each day. So these are available today. And, again, I think our speed lead is increasing. But I've got one last thing I want to show you. And this is a technology demonstration. This isn't available to purchase yet. But we want to show you some future technology in the PowerPC roadmap. The roadmap looks beautiful for the next several years. And what I would like to demonstrate to you today is a 400 megahertz system running today.

And this thing is fabricated with copper technology that you've heard about, you know. And that's going to be coming from Motorola and IBM. These guys are very aggressive. They are very at the leading edge of the technology curve. We're going to be selling systems with this processor in it in early next year. And there's even faster processors coming on the roadmap throughout next year. So we're incredibly excited about this. And, again, this is equal to an 800 megahertz Pentium II. Okay. This is a screamer. I don't know when, if ever, they'll be able to make an 800 megahertz Pentium II. But until they do, this thing will be faster. And, again, the bite marks on this thing are just off the charts.

13.7 compared with, as you see today, it's about three times as fast as the Pentium 33. So let's find out if it really is. Let's go back to our setup again. We've got a Power Mac G3, 400 megahertz on the right. And we've got our compact, fastest Pentium II available for love or money, 333 megahertz on the left. Okay. Three, two, one, go. Uh-oh. Done.

Done. You want to see that again? Let's just show you that again. Okay. This is on. I want to go to image, right? File. File. File. There we go. Okay. Great. Ready? Three, two, one, go. Done. Okay.

Now, if this thing ever finishes, we're going to show you something really cool now. Okay. Just about. Just about. Getting close. Getting close. Getting done. Ooh. Okay. Since we have four screens today, we're going to ask you to twist your heads a little bit, okay? And here's what we're going to show you. We're going to show you all four of them at once, right? And what we're going to do is over on this screen, the far left screen, we're going to have the fastest Pentium II money can buy, the Pentium II 333. On the screen next to it, the inner one on this side, we're going to have a G3-266. On the inner one on this side, we're going to have a G3-300.

And on the outer one on this side, we're going to have the G3-400. And we're going to run them all at the same time. So let's just take a look at that. Okay. You ready? Yep. Three, two, one, go. Okay. G3-400 over there is in the lead. And it is done. G3-300, done. G3-266, done. Pentium II, just getting started. Done.

Okay. We got one last thing to show you that's kind of fun. One of the other applications that people use a lot is Macromedia's director, right? How many of you use a director here? All right. A lot of folks. So we prepared a director script actually for our own use to help us market our own products. This thing is about a 32-megabyte director script, nothing big by director standards. And we're going to run it, exactly the same script again on all four products. Again, the fastest Pentium II money can buy over there on the far left. G3-266 on the inner screen, G3-300 on the inner screen, G3-400 over there on the outer screen. And we're going to run this director script as soon as we're all set up here.

Bill, are we ready? Almost, almost. All set. Okay. 32-megabyte director script, exactly the same on all four products. Here we go. Three, two, one, go. Go. Done.

Done. Done. Let's see that one last time. So would you like to see that one last time? Okay, you ready? Sure. Again. I wonder how it'll come out this time. Yeah, I wonder how it'll come out this time. Okay. Three, two, one. Okay.

Thank you, Phil. And thanks to the team that put these scripts together for us. We really appreciate it. So this stuff's really real. And what it means is hours in the day. And we think that we care deeply about publishing. We listen to a lot of folks in publishing, probably many of you, very carefully about where we ought to be spending our resources. And I hope we're spending them in the right direction. We know that there is a need for speed. We will be delivering that, as well as the wide array of technologies we have a chance to cover today. We really are trying to think different. And we welcome your suggestions. And we look forward to dialoguing with you in the future.

So thank you very much. Thanks for the chance to be with you today and share some of this stuff. Thank you.