The new iMac 27" should have a nice 5120x2880 screen. That would sure justify the hype.
But I bet we'll just get a 4.7" iPhone, Apple catching up to where Samsung has been for three long years now with a medium sized phone instead of a tiny chiclet. (I love the chiclet, but bigger would be better.)
And we'll probably get another lousy "smart" watch that needs charging every day and doesn't do anything you can't do by pulling out your phone for a second. Maybe fanatic runners like Apple's CEO will find it almost as useful as a fuelband or fitbit.
Note: Downvoters really hate the idea of a retina iMac.
Correct me if I'm wrong. IIRC, there isn't a status code for temporary moved *with a timeout. If you use 307, it means the browser will always still check the original apple.com first, then get redirected to apple.com/live. Using 301 would make browser go to apple.com/live directly which improves response time. When the event is finished, they can do a 301 on apple.com/live back to apple.com to overwrite the rule.
Or lazy about their redirecting. 301's are supported by pretty much every browser, indexer and wget/curl whereas 302's sometimes fail on those. Its also pretty easy to reissue another 301 from /live to com/
I'm fairly certain they just want you to land on the live page, even if you can't view it in the current browser. It's about eyes on page to spur you to either stay tuned or move to a browser that works with it.
I wonder how much outside the realms of possibility a VR headset could be...? They have patents and seem to have become more serious about 3D graphics lately. Maybe I'm just dreaming though. Maybe a wearable could be something to allow an iPhone/iPod type device to function as headset?
An alternative explanation to a very confident Apple is just that they changed their attitude about all this, thinking there is not really much of a difference between them providing a countdown or others doing it (before the last Keynote this countdown webpage got pretty huge), between them providing a liveblog or others doing it (there are always many liveblogs with often crappy photos, so why not shot beautiful photos and provide them directly?), unaware that would hype up the event.
I don’t think it’s that, but if they are sufficiently tone-deaf that could be the case. Apple historically hasn’t really been, definitely not when it comes to their events, but who knows …
I don't think the big deal is them providing live coverage, it's that their homepage is redirecting to the stream 24 hours before hand. Considering how many hits apple.com gets per day that's a big decision indicating a huge event.
Why a countdown? Probably because they're launching a watch. Wait and see. My guess is they hint at the why during the event, probably in the opening minute or so. They will also probably use time-based headlines in the slides.
Probably not. People are going to post the links to Apple's announcements which makes sense. I don't want to read the discussion of the iWatch along with everything else in one thread.
>> "Maybe the time coefficient should be stronger for days like today, though."
I disagree. The reason the front page becomes full of Apple is because Apple launches all their stuff at once. There are only maybe 2 or 3 times a year that Apple releases new stuff. The discussions of these things are important. They shouldn't be penalised for happening at the same time.
Well, still, for a company that tries to make everything "simple and beautiful", why don't their video streams just work everywhere out of the box? That is the question.
Everything is simple and beautiful if you are already embedded in the ecosystem/walled garden. If you are an outsider, it is another matter... Isn't it more or less the goal of every tech giant ?
What Apple's live streaming does, is in a CDN friendly way dynamically adjust the bandwidth going to a stream consumer. It's a great invention and there's no reason other people haven't adopted it. It's not being proprietary, it's simply being smart, because it's not trivial to do this kind of broadcast on the internet.
Here's the reality of video, and this goes for a lot of things that Apple makes "simple and beautiful". They fundamentally aren't. Video is a fundamentally difficult mess, a PITA, and the only way to have it work really smoothly is to have enough control over the entire stack to ensure that things work they way they are supposed to... and even then it doesn't always work. People adopting MP4 as a standard has gone a long way towards making things "just work" generally, but it's not sufficient by itself for a quality live stream.
I remember trying to watch a previous live stream from south america and the difficulties I had, even though I was using Apple devices and software the whole way.
Simple and Beautiful is a contradiction from "everywhere out of the box".
Those are two opposite goals.
This is an important thing to understand about software broadly, but with video it borders on impossible.
The thing is that any cable company in the US and Canada that streams content to their customers via the Internet is using adaptive bitrate streaming either using HTTP Live Streaming, MPEG DASH, HTTP Dynamic Streaming, or Microsoft Smooth Streaming.
It is far from impossible.
Apple fans can justify anything - so don't expect anyone to say, yeah they are behind the curve on this.
The better answer is probably: "They simply don't care". No ifs and buts. Probably making it a bit exclusive and hard to get to only adheres to their marketing philosophy.
They probably use https://developer.apple.com/streaming/ , an HTTP streaming mechanism that's implemented by Safari that didn't get adopted by any other browser.
Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s, they've done a great deal to make it better, first for CD Roms and in a proprietary fashion. But when the net came around they opened up their proprietary format to become a standard-- the Mpeg4 file format is the old MOV format. They've also proposed a lot of improvements along these lines for other people to adopt.
Like Bonjour, I really don't understand why other companies don't adopt these open standards. They don't benefit Apple particularly. It's not like Apple has some competitive advantage in HTTP Live Streaming. Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash. How many years ago did they first trial MP4 streaming? Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Why would you want your browser to be bad at streaming video?
What, what? YouTube has been doing an HTML5 based web player for quite some time now[1], and I believe it supports FLV video as well, though I can't find a reference for that.
I have uninstalled Flash from my system. A great many videos on YouTube give me the "you need the latest flash player to watch this video" error.
Yes, several years ago, I was getting MP4 video, and today, a portion (say %30-%40) just launch with MP4. But most of the time I get the "you need flash".
It's really weird. Using the built-in HTML5 player, half the videos don't load. But those videos do exist — Google just doesn't want you to be able to access them easily. I can watch them on my iOS devices, I can download them using dirpy.com, and I can watch them in my browser using the YouTube5 plugin.
None of those things are open standards. Both Mpeg4 and "Bonjour" require a licence to utilise. Maybe that answers your question, people don't want to pay Apple oodles of money?
> Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash.
Everyone can turn on HTML5 for YouTube if they wish. They offer both. They give you the choice, the default is Flash (but Flash still has the widest support on older platforms).
> Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream (e.g. sender and receiver both have to pay $$$, sometimes the sender, browser vendor AND OS vendor have to pay $$$).
> Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
And Apple copies everything their competitors do also. Just look at iOS 8, that was just copying some of the best features from their competition (not that I blame them, they were right to do so).
The new keyboard (Android), third party keyboards (Android), "Handoff" (everyone else), Spotlight web-search (everyone else), etc.
Apple hasn't done anything original since Jobs died.
> Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s
I think that honor befalls the ITU with their H.261. It's only a few years difference and it definitely was never as wide spread as Quicktime but that's the first format that I remember that actually worked. It never succeeded on the web though there were a couple of companies that tried to do this using so called browser plug-ins.
Live streaming is mostly the domain of RTMP these days, HTTP doesn't lend itself well to live (but works just fine for streaming stored content).
As for why browsers don't all do MP4, you could ask why browsers do not natively support RTMP, that would solve the whole problem in one go.
Twitch uses HLS with a Flash front end. No idea about the others.
HLS is nice because it doesn't require any new servers or protocols -- it uses vanilla HTTP, and can be served up by basically any web server. As a result, it's much easier to make it work with a CDN.
I guess the reason of having such poor support outside Apple browsers, despite the benefits, has to do with licensing issues and the complications of embedding ads, as someone pointed out.
There are many protocols, including HTTP Live Streaming, RTSP, RTP, MMS, used by multiple browser plugins, such as QuickTime, Flash, Windows Media Player. A comprehensive list of such systems is on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_streaming_media_s...
Because it ultimately doesn’t matter. Those who really want to watch it already have some device that can play it and the rest doesn’t care about it anyway so much to watch a 2hr commercial and will just read about it somewhere or see it on TV later. I think it’s as simple as that. That’s why Apple doesn’t really try to make this work for as many people as possible.
Yep, I noticed that the other day on their developers site. Couldn't watch a video on Swift because I'm not on OSX Safari! Something Microsoft would do 15 years ago.
Historically, the new iPhone becomes available on Friday a week and a half after the event and the new iOS is released for older phones at the same time.
It always goes GM immediately but only dev program members can get it. I think for the public the update has varied between phone launch day and a few days after the event.
I can't reproduce this in either Chrome or Firefox. All of the requests I see are to the http://www.apple.com origin. I also can't find any hard-coded https://www.apple.com URLs in the HTML+JS sources. Maybe they fixed it already, or maybe you have a browser extension that's modifying the requests on your end.
I use a macbook air all day for work. I built my windows box when I was doing .NET development, but I've long since switched to ruby -- ideally I'd like to have both running the same OS (which I guess could be a flavor of linux, but I'm too lazy for that).
Well, I share my desktop machine with my girlfriend. I could easily get by with a clean desk at home and just the MBA -- that said, it's not completely up to me. :)
Apple has a pattern before keynotes where they push out the less glamorous products. They keep them ready to go in the keynote in case something happens with a glamorous announcement they have filler. But when they are confident that they can announce the next iPhone, or whatever, they push out the minor rev of the iMac or whatever.
I'm worried. This is the machine I want to buy next. A modern mac mini would be ideal.
They should have shipped one early this year but didn't. That's ok, the mac pro took a lot of resources and is a major redesign.
So, then the next expected time is last week.
So, either the Mac Mini is significant enough to talk about today (with two phones and an alleged watch? that seems doubtful)... or it might be effectively cancelled.
Seconded! I've been wanting to replace an older iMac with a mini for a some time now. The mini is in dire need of a refresh given that it's been since 2012 that the guts were updated and 2010 since the design was updated.
Uhmm, did you not notice that HUGE countdown timer?
That pretty much covers entire world.
And, no, whole world doesn't use GMT (talk to Indians and Chinese about what time they use). Also, entire US doesn't use PDT time. You know, some people live on east coast.
> Uhmm, did you not notice that HUGE countdown timer? That pretty much covers entire world.
It want's there when I visited. :-(
> And, no, whole world doesn't use GMT (talk to Indians and Chinese about what time they use). Also, entire US doesn't use PDT time. You know, some people live on east coast.
But they must most certainly know their GMT offset, since it's the worldwide reference.
The screen is filled with a huge countdown. You can't add the countdown to your current time and get the answer? If someone is holding an event I would expect them to announce the start in local time - the people that need to know the time the most are the ones that are going to be there, why make it more difficult for them?
I'm getting older, so maybe my desires don't match up with the majority of tech people's anymore, but does anyone really want an iWatch (or whatever it ends up being called)? I am just not sold on the usefulness of such a thing.
It's not just you. I don't get the whole smartwatch thing either. For $400 (or whatever it ends up costing), I can just pull my phone out of my pocket.
I didn't see the point of the iPhone or the iPad before they announced them. I haven't worn a watch for 20 years... but if they do announce a watch (I expect it will be a wearable more than a watch) I bet I will buy it.
Because I don't think they'd make it if it weren't worth making. Apple has never tried to create a new category when they didn't have something substantial to offer.
Any newer entries? Post-iPhone, Apple (i.e., not Apple Computer) has been a very focused company.
There was an interesting presentation that Tim Cook gave where he said that every product Apple currently sold being was on a single table in front of him at the presentation - can't find the link now.
People do not want a watch like the current crop of i-watches. They hope that Apple will create a watch the masses want to buy.
That's what the excitement is all about, either pro-Apple people that want to see Apple creating another iPhone/iPad/iPod market, or anti-apple that want another Apple TV to finally prove that Apple could not recover from Steve Jobs death.
Best of all, unlike monads, this is a topic everybody can have an opinion about, that's weeks worth of traffic guaranteed. Apple announcement themselves are valuable product for the media.
Many moons ago I ran a research study for Microsoft on their SPOT watch initiative, and despite countless focus groups among many different consumer audiences, absolutely no one wanted a smart watch. Granted, their smart watch had some fairly large deficiencies due to the lack of mobile tech infrastructure available at the time.
I'm very intrigued to see if Apple can pull it off...
That's the weird thing about fashion, which is precisely what this is. If Apple can make this thing fashionable so that people want to show it off, it will take off.
It's incredibly hard to predict whether they will succeed or not (although after the fact most people will say what happened was incredibly obvious beforehand). They'll bomb or they'll take off.
I think there's going to be some sort of breakthrough using it as an authentication device. Possibly using heart rate as biometric identification combined with a clever universal challenge-response mechanism (using audio, maybe). That's my prediction. :)
I'd love for it to be able to be an input device for macbook & imac. Something like the Leap Motion but worn on the wrist and auto linking with the nearest device.
I didn't get the point of a watch either, then I started surfing and needed to know when to stop to make it to work on time :)
There is a whole market of people that want apps for running, surfing, and other things that are nice to have in wearable form, but cumbersome to use in a phone form factor--assuming the phone is even waterproof.
Personally, I'm not interested in an iWatch. I haven't looked at the specs, but I'm assuming the iphone connects to it. If it can notify meetings, texts, alerts, phone calls, etc. it might be really useful gadget for my wife when she is busy running behind kids around the house and at work.... bonus if it gave her an insight into how much energy she spent throughout the day, haha.
I was. I refreshed and it got me the keynote, but with the audio for multiple languages at once (maybe the same root cause as the multiple songs on the TV truck screen), so I refreshed again. Now I'm back to the TV Truck schedule.
I'm not even sure what the strategical advantage of limiting the stream in the first place. People who can't access it still want information about Apple, and often resort to 3rd party blogs, or someone else streaming the stream. I understand why apple has a closed door stance on technology, but limiting people from participating in a live event about Apple seems foolish and with no obvious benefit
It's not Safari-only, it's just a Quicktime RTMP stream, like all their streams have always been. You should be able to watch it in any browser with a Quicktime plugin.
It uses Apple HTTP-LiveStream library which only Safari has support for (even though its opensource and unencumbered)... It has little to do with lock in
396 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh
It's a little sad that the Mac hit 30 this year and all it got was a special web page to commemorate the event.
But I bet we'll just get a 4.7" iPhone, Apple catching up to where Samsung has been for three long years now with a medium sized phone instead of a tiny chiclet. (I love the chiclet, but bigger would be better.)
And we'll probably get another lousy "smart" watch that needs charging every day and doesn't do anything you can't do by pulling out your phone for a second. Maybe fanatic runners like Apple's CEO will find it almost as useful as a fuelband or fitbit.
Note: Downvoters really hate the idea of a retina iMac.
Sorry, I'm not rich. :P
Here's a test stream http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbopgear1.html
EDIT: Nvm it worked after waiting for a couple minutes.
I'm pretty sure compatibility isn't the reason of that choice.
I still expect Apple to do something very, very big with TV.
An alternative explanation to a very confident Apple is just that they changed their attitude about all this, thinking there is not really much of a difference between them providing a countdown or others doing it (before the last Keynote this countdown webpage got pretty huge), between them providing a liveblog or others doing it (there are always many liveblogs with often crappy photos, so why not shot beautiful photos and provide them directly?), unaware that would hype up the event.
I don’t think it’s that, but if they are sufficiently tone-deaf that could be the case. Apple historically hasn’t really been, definitely not when it comes to their events, but who knows …
I'll admit he's probably mostly prescient, but we won't know for another hour or two.
The ranking algorithm will drop them off soon enough. Maybe the time coefficient should be stronger for days like today, though.
I disagree. The reason the front page becomes full of Apple is because Apple launches all their stuff at once. There are only maybe 2 or 3 times a year that Apple releases new stuff. The discussions of these things are important. They shouldn't be penalised for happening at the same time.
Why would they only allow already-customers to watch their presentation?
Locking out non-customers seems not the best way to get some.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8290769
Here's the reality of video, and this goes for a lot of things that Apple makes "simple and beautiful". They fundamentally aren't. Video is a fundamentally difficult mess, a PITA, and the only way to have it work really smoothly is to have enough control over the entire stack to ensure that things work they way they are supposed to... and even then it doesn't always work. People adopting MP4 as a standard has gone a long way towards making things "just work" generally, but it's not sufficient by itself for a quality live stream.
I remember trying to watch a previous live stream from south america and the difficulties I had, even though I was using Apple devices and software the whole way.
Simple and Beautiful is a contradiction from "everywhere out of the box".
Those are two opposite goals.
This is an important thing to understand about software broadly, but with video it borders on impossible.
The better answer is probably: "They simply don't care". No ifs and buts. Probably making it a bit exclusive and hard to get to only adheres to their marketing philosophy.
Like Bonjour, I really don't understand why other companies don't adopt these open standards. They don't benefit Apple particularly. It's not like Apple has some competitive advantage in HTTP Live Streaming. Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash. How many years ago did they first trial MP4 streaming? Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Why would you want your browser to be bad at streaming video?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/html5?gl=CA
Yes, several years ago, I was getting MP4 video, and today, a portion (say %30-%40) just launch with MP4. But most of the time I get the "you need flash".
> Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash.
Everyone can turn on HTML5 for YouTube if they wish. They offer both. They give you the choice, the default is Flash (but Flash still has the widest support on older platforms).
> Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?
Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream (e.g. sender and receiver both have to pay $$$, sometimes the sender, browser vendor AND OS vendor have to pay $$$).
> Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.
And Apple copies everything their competitors do also. Just look at iOS 8, that was just copying some of the best features from their competition (not that I blame them, they were right to do so).
The new keyboard (Android), third party keyboards (Android), "Handoff" (everyone else), Spotlight web-search (everyone else), etc.
Apple hasn't done anything original since Jobs died.
I turned on HTML5 video for youtube and I still have this problem, because they don't encode all videos in MP4.
> Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream
Many groups have spoken out about the licensing issues with pictures, video, and audio. That's what has created this mess.
I think that honor befalls the ITU with their H.261. It's only a few years difference and it definitely was never as wide spread as Quicktime but that's the first format that I remember that actually worked. It never succeeded on the web though there were a couple of companies that tried to do this using so called browser plug-ins.
Live streaming is mostly the domain of RTMP these days, HTTP doesn't lend itself well to live (but works just fine for streaming stored content).
As for why browsers don't all do MP4, you could ask why browsers do not natively support RTMP, that would solve the whole problem in one go.
Twitch, Google Hangouts, any "live" sport event what protocol/technology do they use ?
A mix of HLS and flash ?
HLS is nice because it doesn't require any new servers or protocols -- it uses vanilla HTTP, and can be served up by basically any web server. As a result, it's much easier to make it work with a CDN.
I guess the reason of having such poor support outside Apple browsers, despite the benefits, has to do with licensing issues and the complications of embedding ads, as someone pointed out.
But I'm really just using it as a countdown timer before I start up the VLC stream.
I'm worried. This is the machine I want to buy next. A modern mac mini would be ideal.
They should have shipped one early this year but didn't. That's ok, the mac pro took a lot of resources and is a major redesign.
So, then the next expected time is last week.
So, either the Mac Mini is significant enough to talk about today (with two phones and an alleged watch? that seems doubtful)... or it might be effectively cancelled.
Considering that the entire world uses GMT, and that only US citizens use PDT, they could have bothered to use GMT.
Or better still, they could have detected your location/system time and just put a countdown or your own local time.
And, no, whole world doesn't use GMT (talk to Indians and Chinese about what time they use). Also, entire US doesn't use PDT time. You know, some people live on east coast.
It want's there when I visited. :-(
> And, no, whole world doesn't use GMT (talk to Indians and Chinese about what time they use). Also, entire US doesn't use PDT time. You know, some people live on east coast.
But they must most certainly know their GMT offset, since it's the worldwide reference.
Because I don't think they'd make it if it weren't worth making. Apple has never tried to create a new category when they didn't have something substantial to offer.
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-old-apple-products-that-to...
There was an interesting presentation that Tim Cook gave where he said that every product Apple currently sold being was on a single table in front of him at the presentation - can't find the link now.
That's what the excitement is all about, either pro-Apple people that want to see Apple creating another iPhone/iPad/iPod market, or anti-apple that want another Apple TV to finally prove that Apple could not recover from Steve Jobs death.
Best of all, unlike monads, this is a topic everybody can have an opinion about, that's weeks worth of traffic guaranteed. Apple announcement themselves are valuable product for the media.
I'm very intrigued to see if Apple can pull it off...
It's incredibly hard to predict whether they will succeed or not (although after the fact most people will say what happened was incredibly obvious beforehand). They'll bomb or they'll take off.
There is a whole market of people that want apps for running, surfing, and other things that are nice to have in wearable form, but cumbersome to use in a phone form factor--assuming the phone is even waterproof.
http://www.apple.com/live/2014-sept-event/
Edit: Now getting "Access Denied" on http://www.apple.com/live
Edit- Getting it now, but I'm hearing a translator talking under Cook. Get it together.
Edit2 - stream keeps cutting out. Disaster.
Edit3 - Access Denied. And we're done.
Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://www.apple.com/live/2014-sept-event/" on this server. Reference #18.1e111cb8.1410283041.b76d50
http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/14pijnadfpv...
EDIT:
I shouldn't say fine, the stream keeps dropping out completely or just has audio. But I think even the Safari people are having that problem.