As expected, Apple dazzled those in attendance at today’s WWDC kick off in San Francisco at the Moscone West convention center.
“We’ve got an awesome morning together, this morning,” Jobs said. “Thank you for coming so much.”
First up in the keynote, which was presented by Apple SVP Phil Schiller, is the upcoming version of Mac OS X, Lion.
Despite the brief tease last October, today’s demonstration of Mac OSX Lion wowed the live audience of press and invited guests as more than 250 new features were unveiled, although only ten were demonstrated live.
Some of the headline worthy highlights include:
- Multitouch Gestures (Makes your Mac feel like a smartphone)
- Mission Control (interface for app management)
- Mac App Store (The store will now be built into Lion)
- Full Screen Apps
- Launch Pad (to display all applications on the screen, allowing efficient launch)
- Resume ( Upon login, all applications, windows, docs will be where the user left them)
- Autosave (no more frantic clicking of “save”)
- Versions (Lion will automatically save the various versions of documents as they were edited)
- AirDrop (so-called peer-to-peer WiFi-based network capability)
- Mail (a new version of OS X’s built-in email client, more similar to the iPad’s native email client)
Mac OS X Lion will be available in July for $29. Other notable milestones pertinent to WWDC and soaring Mac usage include:
- More than 5,200 attendees for WWDC 2011, which sold out in two hours.
- There are now more than 54 million Mac users around the globe.
- Mac sales are beating those of desktop sales and now represent close to 3/4 all notebooks sales.
- The Mac has outgrown the industry every quarter for the past five years
- During the past twelve months, the PC market has declined 1%, while the Mac market has balloon 28%
