Hello, slightly late from WWDC - we've been having connectivity issues. You haven't missed much - it opened with a rather good comedy routine from Siri ("I'm really looking forward to the new Samsung. [beat] Not the phone, the refrigerator. Welcome to Silicon Valley, the ATM for the US. Hey, if you're a developer looking for funding, I found 356 venture capital companies fairly near you.")
Now we're getting a video showing how iOS devices are used.
Also stats: $5bn paid to developers, 650,000 apps, 225,000 for the iPad - "compared to a few hundred for our competitors". Susurrus of pleasure from the developers.
Hello, slightly late from WWDC - we've been having connectivity issues. You haven't missed much - it opened with a rather good comedy routine from Siri ("I'm really looking forward to the new Samsung. [beat] Not the phone, the refrigerator. Welcome to Silicon Valley, the ATM for the US. Hey, if you're a developer looking for funding, I found 356 venture capital companies fairly near you.")
Now we're getting a video showing how iOS devices are used.
Also stats: $5bn paid to developers, 650,000 apps, 225,000 for the iPad - "compared to a few hundred for our competitors". Susurrus of pleasure from the developers.
"Exciting new changes in our notebook lineup". And iOS and Mac OSX. And here comes Phil Schiller.
(So we've been expecting updates to the laptop line for a long time, because they're in effect overdue.)
MacBook Air: going to update with Ivy Bridge, up to 2GHz i7, up to 8GB memory running at 1600MHz (which devs had been praying for). And you can get 512GB of Flash (don't ask how much that will cost. You don't want to know.)
Also faster Flash read (that will be the result of the purchase of Anobit, an Israeli company, in December.)
Adding USB3 - catching up to the PC companies. He's showing how others do it, colour coded. "That's not how we do it." USB 3 and USB 2 will be the same port.
$1099 for the 128GB model. Starts shipping today. You'll know the developers will be on that.
Next: MacBook Pro updates.
MacBook Pro - 13in....15in.. wait, weren't we all expecting "retina displays" for these? Hasn't been a word about that.
"So what's next?"
There seems to be something new at the high end.. "with the MacBook Air they did something really bold. Aggressive in embracing new technologies, discarding legacy technologies" [optical drives, wired networking]. "So we've been asking the team to think about what would be a next-generation MacBook Pro?"
"You want a killer new display." Oh, wait, this will be the retina stuff then. "You want it radically thin and light." (This is hitting the developers' G-spot - they just love a great laptop with an amazing display.)
"First thing you're going to notice is it's dominated by an amazing new display.." Rotates it. Looks like a computer to me. "It's thinner than my finger!" OK, that's ..nice.
It's much thinner than the existing MacBook Pros. In fact about as thin as the MacBook Air. Weighs 4.46lb. But with 15in display.
"Breakthrough in display. Yes, it is a retina display." Developers explode in delight.
15.4in, pixel density - "are you all sitting down?" - 2880x1800, which is 220 pixels per inch. 5.18 million pixels. "The world's highest resolution display."
Less glare and reflection - "by 75%". That's a blessing - glossy screens really aren't much fun.
Ships with Lion, but updated to take advantage of the extra pixels.
He's dissecting the machine - giant battery. Up to 768GB of Flash storage (better get the mortgage application in there), claimed 7hr of battery life.
I suspect Apple has just sold about 5,000 of these to all the people in the room - if developers like these things, they absolutely love these.
A new version of the MagSafe power connector (ah, so the old ones won't work - drat). Not included: Blu-ray. Or in fact any optical drive. Burning DVDs is sooo 2000s.
Adaptors from Thunderbolt (the high-speed Intel technology that hardly any PC makers have adopted) for Firewire 800 and for Gigabit Ethernet.
And now a video. This might not work very well in the liveblog, so we'll pause briefly.
Yeah, so, anyway, that's the video. Um, but he hasn't mentioned the price yet. This suggests that it's going to be pricey. Will Schiller do the classic "we could have priced it at $5,000... we could have priced it at $4,000..." which is the classic "anchoring" method - set a high price and any lower price sounds like a bargain.
Wait, the developers are clapping the fact (in the video) that the fans contra-rotate at different frequencies so it's quieter. That's clever, actually, isn't it?
Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference gets underway Photograph: Charles Arthur for the Guardian
So here comes the configuration and pricing... quad-core i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB Flash.... $2199.
How do you compare that to Windows PCs? You can find the Flash drives built in if you try, but the "retina display"? That's still a standout. "And it's going to start shipping.. today." All the devs are going to be on the Apple Store BUYING. This is basically Apple herding its best customers into a big room and making them hand over their money and feel happy for it.
OK, now on to Mac OS X. Craig Frederici. 66m Mac users, triple what there was five years ago.
50% of Mac OSX users using Lion after nine months; took Windows 7 27 months to achieve that. (Really? That many people are using Windows 7?)
iCloud... Messages, Reminders, Notes. And coming up.. "documents in the cloud". So that your documents get saved in the cloud too?
Looking at this more broadly, Apple seems to be suggesting that it will start pushing documents to the cloud... which carries a hint that this is where it's all going.
..Messages....send them a message... to their phone or "the other legacy messaging applications" (ie AIM etc). Devs laugh, Federici shrugs - "come on, it's all about iMessage." There's a sort of dialogue between the audience, who are really knowledgeable developers, rather than the people who used to come to MacWorld keynotes, who were far less sophisticated in their knowledge of the industry wrinkles, and the implications of what things meant.
Notificaiton Center/re is coming to the Mac - from iOS. "Used to be that each application had its own way of telling you something was happening.. which could be disruptive". Instead going to have banners which will come in from the right hand side. (Sounds a bit like Windows 8 and Charms.) Also "alerts", which don't go away until you react to them. Neatly: connect a projector and it turns off the alerts.
Bringing dictation to the Mac. This is Siri coming into Mac OSX, except just in the natural language element, not the interpretation element.
Sharing: ability in Safari or Preview or other apps - you can share to Flickr or Twitter... "support for sharing services is built right into the OS." It's not quite the Intents model of Android. Much more explicit.
Safari gets an omnibox - like Google Chrome has had for a while - start typing and you can get search results. Safari does iCloud tabs - so that tabs you have open on other devices will be shared. Again, that's catching up to Google Chrome, except that Safari in iOS 6 will (probably? Certainly?) be the default browser, while Chrome isn't (yet?) the default browser on Android. (Is that coming at Google I/O? Seems sensible.)
Oh, a quick thought about Schiller's unveilings: things that weren't updated: iMacs and Mac Pros. Is the desktop dead? Discuss.
Federici just used dictation to dictate and send a tweet. Couldn't promise that it got it accurate, but that's the definition of condident.
"Power nap" in Mac OSX - it connects while it's asleep. Download app store updates, software updates, refreshes data. Works on MacBook Air (2nd generation) and latest Macbooks.
Airplay Mirroring - "the easiest way to get whatever's on your Mac up to a projector". People are quite excited about this - essentially, it's wireless video projection, which seems like such an obvious thing, but hasn't been done by anyone in any satisfactory way.
Game Center/re - can now work across Mac OS X and iOS. (Thinks: ok, there are lots of games for iOS, but are the equivalents available on Mac OSX?)
Ha - THE STIG (or impersonator - wait, can you do that?) appears to do a race in Game Center. And wins.
Notes new features for China - Baidu as a search option, support for various Chinese video and email services. "Get your apps ready for China," he says, which sounds like wise advice.
Mac OS X Mountain Lion: $19.99 next month via Mac App Store, free for those who buy Macs after today.
It's now iOS time, and wunderkind Scott Forstall (tipped as the next CEO).
Total iOS devices sold to end of March: 365m. (He can't do a more recent number because they're still in their financial quarter until the end of the montn.)
"We have about 80% on iOS 5. Now if you compare us to the competition..." Laughs from the developers. They know what's coming. Forstall quotes those Google stats - that Ice Cream Sandwich has 7% despite being launched about the same time as iOS 5.
1.5 trillion push notifications already via Notification Centre.
iMessage: 150bn messages from 140m users, more than 1bn messages per day. OK, that's big.
Twitter: integrated directly, they have seen 3x increase in number of people on iOS using Twitter. 10bn tweets from iOS 5, 47% of photos coming from iOS 5.
Game Center...130m accounts.
"Very satisfied customers" - very high
Forstall is living on the edge by using Siri in a live demo. Brave, brave man. Or does it work better in the US? It's really fast, unlike the UK where you ask it a question and it takes forever to answer. He's asking questions and it's coming back within a second or two.
So there are various other services that Siri seems to be integrated into - it knows about US football and baseball data. "Siri knows about sports."
Next: "Siri's learnt a lot about restaurants." Asks for restaurants, gets lot of data - and I can't emphasise how quick this is. It's what Siri ought to be like, but never is in the UK, where it's like talking to someone who is having to translate through two languages. If Siri worked as fast as it's working for Forstall here, then everyone would use it all the time.
Siri will be able to launch apps. "Play Temple Run". And it launches it. We had expected something like this. "Those are just a few of the things that Siri has learned in iOS 6."
Launching apps is big, but can it do things like changing settings?
Also: "Eyes Free": "We want to integrate Siri even better with a car... use a button in the steering wheel to activate Siri. Keep your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road to operate Siri." Coming in the next 12 months for some cars. BMW, GM, plenty of others.
"Making Siri much more international." Adding in iO6 to Canada - "eh" - Spanish, Mexico, Italian, Switzerland (Italian, French, German), Korean (big whoop!), Mandarin for Taiwan, Cantonese for Hong Kong, and both Mandarin and Cantonese for mainland China. That's going to be huge.
Plus taking local search which was previously US-only around the world.
And: Siri comes to the new iPad (in iOS 6).
"Next. Facebook integration. We're integrating Facebook right in to iOS 6" - you'll put it into Settings. Post photos, websites, locations, app store, iTunes, Game Center/re.
(Does this mean our hopes of Friends Reunited integration are dashed?)
Can tweet and Facebook post directly from Notification centre. Cool, though incremental. Notificaiton Centre is becoming a one-stop shop for all sorts of stuff.
Ah, and App Srore shows what people like too - that will be some of the integration of the rethinking of App Store recommendation.
Facebook events will now appear in Calendars.
Missed or refused calls: you can reply with a message, or ask to get a reminder later. And the messages come from a selected list. Or the reminders can have "remind me when I leave" which uses a geofence - so when you leave your current location it reminds you.
And now: "Do Not Disturb". Lots of applause for that. People are really liking this: it's all feeling like the phone element - how you use the device for phone calls - is getting more and more refined.
DND lets you set times when you don't want calls, or you can accept from "Favourites" - or if people keep phoning you in short periods, they will be allowed through.
Have a feeling that there's something like that in some of the high-end Android phones - certainly Samsung (and HTC?) let you send automessages.
And: Facetime over mobile networks, not just Wi-Fi. No doubt you're not going to get it on Edge connections though.
"Safari: around two-thirds of mobile web browser usage worldwide comes from MobileSafari". Hunt down the source of that if you can.
Safari tabs - saves your tabs to iCloud (that's the Chrome thing, but will have been in development for at least as long - you don't add that functionality overnight).
Smart app banners - can show a banner if you go to a website linking to App Store. Devs are lapping this up.
OK, we're about 90 minutes in so far: question: is Apple TV app store coming? Feels like there's about half an hour to go.
iO6: Shared Photo Streams, so that you can share pics with your friends. (It's more iCloud shenanigans.) Essentially, they get pushed to the friends.
Next up is Mail, with "VIPs" - lets you be notified about messages from particular people. Oooh.... and it gets the Twitter "pull to refresh".
"Passbook". All those boarding passes and store card apps that are barcodes of various shapes and sizes. "The problem is when you get to the movie theatre or airport you have to fumble around for them."
Templates for developers. And can be geofenced so that when you get to the movie/airport it pops up in the lock screen so you can just continue.
VEry fun animation when you've done with a card - the animation shows it getting shredded. Har.
Plus the cards are live (if there's a gate change then the pass will notify you). That's really very spiffy. Personally, I'd say that looks pretty helpful. Those cards are murder if you have more than about two of them - they get buried in email.
On to accessibility.
"We've been surprised by the number of children with autism who have been flocking to the iPad. Guided Access effectively limits the device into a single-app mode so hitting the home button doesn't exit the app." Also you can set which buttons aren't active.
Single-app mode (kiosky mode, as it's more commonly known) looks clever.
"Next.... is Maps." Ah, there's huge interest. "An entire new mapping solution from the ground up. And it is beautiul. We're doing all the cartography ourselve.s New York. San Francisco. Italy. New Zealand. Singapore. Norway. This is a world effort."
"Now part of maps is local search. We have ingested more than 100m business listings for local search. Integrated with Yelp" (remind us, did Yelp have a dispute with Google? Think it did) "and traffic forecasts.
"We're using anonymous real-time crowdsourced data from our iOS users to keep this up to date.
And turn-by-turn navigation.
OK, this is going to be very big. Maps is a significant loss for Google. "Works from the lock screen if you have it plugged in your car..."
And integrated with Siri "ask Siri to take you somewhere". "You can ask questions - where cna I get gas - and the kids can ask the age-old question." (Yes, the "are we there yet" question.)
Now demoing Flyover, which is the 3D overflight stuff.
The maps stuff actually needs a little more.
Ah, vector-based maps, and you can rotate them to your orientation (yes, Google Maps on Android has had that). Rather cool 3D rendering.
Flyover looks fun, but equally it looks like one of those things you'll try once or twice and show off at a party and then be stuck for uses.
"Turn-by-turn directions... gives three options, you choose one."
Siri reads it out. Notably, you could use this for walking directions - just listen on headphones. That's Siri coming to some usefulness.
"And that is turn-by-turn directions."
A beta of iOS 6 will be released for developers today, with the consumer release coming in the Autumn.
Cook comes on to wrap up, but will there be a "one more thing" moment for TV apps, as has been predicted? He makes the audience wait if so.
"The products we make, combined with the apps that you create can fundamentally change the world," he says. "And really, I can't think of a better reason of getting up in the morning."
That's a no then.
This is Stuart Dredge (Charles is off to find a power socket for his laptop) – one last thought. Disappointed at the lack of a TV apps SDK? My takeaway from today – particularly the CSR Racing demo – is that for now, Apple sees iPhone and iPad AirPlay Mirroring, via an Apple TV set-top box, as the key conduit for apps on television screens.
So, no SDK to put apps in an Apple TV box, but instead encouragement for developers to use AirPlay Mirroring in their apps.