A Mad Magazine cartoonist's guide to the 111th Congress runs afoul of Cupertino's censors

Illustration: Tom Richmond

UPDATE: Apple relented. App approved. See here.

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Someone at Apple (AAPL) needs to take a refresher course in American history — and maybe a lesson in libel law.

Last summer Tom Richmond, one of Mad Magazine's top illustrators and two-time winner of the National Caricaturist Network's "Caricaturist of the Year" award, began drawing a likeness of every Senator and Representative in the 111th Congress — 540 caricatures in all, including non-voting members from Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.

The idea, he explains, was to create an illustrated database for the iPhone and iPod touch that would allow users to find the name, party affiliation, phone number and website of their senators and congresspeople via zipcode or GPS. Each head was placed on one of 12 cartoon bodies and would bobble when shaken or flicked with a finger.

The project was the idea of Ray Griggs, director of the movie Super Capers (rated PG for mild language, rude humor and brief smoking), for which Richmond did the art. Griggs had shown the finished app around and stirred up some interest. He was booked to appear as a guest on Fox News next week with Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee.

You can probably guess what's coming next.

Illustration by Tom Richmond

Dear Mr. Griggs,

Thank you for submitting Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states:

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

A screenshot of this issue has been attached for your reference.

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition does not violate the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program

What someone at the iPhone Developer Program doesn't seem to understand — not to get too Glenn Beck about it — is that ridiculing public figures by caricature is one of those rights honored in American history and enshrined in the Constitution.

"The really sad part," writes Richmond, "is that here is an app that might get people interested in who represents them in Washington, especially kids and young adults, and connects people to their senators and representatives via fun and PARTISAN FREE way.

"Please spread the word how stupid this rejection is. Apple of course does not care what its customers think… they consider us morons at best anyway, but it’s worth a laugh and a shake of your head."

Are you listening Phil Schiller?

To see more of Richmond's subversive bobble heads — and links to an extensive portfolio of his cartoon work — click here.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Apple's Schiller and Microsoft's Turner. Photos: Apple, Microsoft

Apple (AAPL) is awesome. Microsoft (MSFT) is muscular. Apple execs speaks in adjectives; Microsoft's in gerunds. Cupertino wants to show us how cool its products are, and how easy-to-use. Redmond wants us to know how hard it's going to compete to grow its market share.

That's the take-away message from the pair of videos pasted below the fold.

The first — Apple's Sept. 9 "It's only rock and roll" presentation boiled down to just the adjectives — has been viewed nearly half a million times since it was posted last week by justanotherguy84.

The second — which we put together Sunday morning at the suggestion of TechFlash's Todd Bishop — is Microsoft COO Kevin Turner's July presentation to analysts boiled down to just the buzzwords. Turner is, as Bishop promised, a modern master of techno-business jargon.

Let's go to the videos. Each is less than two minutes long.

See also:

• Apple's amazing, incredible Phil Schiller
• Boiling Apple down to its adjectives

Apple's Schiller and Google's Eustace

In the letter to the FCC that Google (GOOG) released Friday — the one that flatly contradicts the story Apple (AAPL) told the government — there's an interesting timeline of events.

At the heart of the case, for those who haven't been following every twist and turn, is an application called Google Voice that Google had been trying since June to get onto the iPhone App Store. Google says that Apple rejected the app. Apple says it never did.

This would be funny, as Brian Caulfield puts it, if the Feds weren't involved.

What interests me today is the three weeks following the telephone call in which, according to Google's newly un-redacted letter, Apple's top marketing executive — Phil Schiller — told Google's senior engineering guy — Alan Eustace — that Apple was rejecting Google Voice because it duplicated the iPhone's dialing function. Here's the sequence of events, as Google has it:

• June 2: Google submits Google Voice for approval
• July 5 (a Sunday): Google and Apple begin "a series of in person meetings, phone calls and emails" to discuss the approval status of the app. Schiller and Eustace are the primary points of contact between the two companies.
• July 7 (two days later): Schiller informs Eustace by telephone that Apple was rejecting Google's application
• July 27 (three weeks later): Apple pulls three previously approved Google Voice-enabled applications from the App Store. A Google spokesperson complains to the press.
• July 28: The series of meetings, phone calls and emails between Apple and Google ends.
• July 31: The FCC launches an inquiry into the matter; asks Apple, Google and AT&T (T) to explain what happened.

So here's my question: If Schiller, as Google claims, rejected the app on July 7, what did the two companies talk about for the next three weeks?

If instead, as Apple claims, Schiller alerted Eustace that Apple had problems with the app but was still considering approval, what happened three weeks later that caused the company to pull those other Google Voice-enabled apps and send Google's PR team squawking to the press?

It's possible that there's enough wiggle room in the two versions of events that both sides are telling the truth. It's also possible that either Apple or Google dissembled in their letters to the FCC — although Google has less reason to do so than Apple.

There's a way to get to the bottom of this. The FCC has subpoena power. If chairman Julius Genachowski is serious, as he maintains he is, about getting the necessary "facts and data," he can call Schiller and Eustace to Washington, put them under oath, and ask them directly who said what to whom.

An Apple spokesman has declined to comment directly on Google's claim that Schiller rejected Google's application. He said instead that Apple did not agree with all the statements in Google's letter to the FCC. And he reiterated that Apple had not rejected Google Voice, but is, in fact, still considering it.

See also:

• Google spills the beans on Apple
• The FCC is asking Apple and AT&T all the right questions

Image: FCC

"Contrary to published reports," Apple (AAPL) told the FCC back in August in response to a government inquiry about why it rejected Google's (GOOG) famous voice management app. "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.” (link)

What Google had to say about that was unknown because unlike Apple, which made public its response, Google asked that key portions of its letter to the FCC be kept confidential to protect "sensitive commercial conversations" between the two companies.

Now Google has spilled the beans. In a blog post Friday, Google attorney Richard Whitt announced that rather than fight several Freedom of Information Act requests, the company asked the FCC on Thursday to release the unredacted version of its letter.

You can read the full letter on the FCC's website, but the thrust of the previously undisclosed passages is that Apple's top marketing executive personally told Google that its app had been rejected. The key section is this one:

"The primary points of contact between the two companies were Alan Eustace, Google Senior Vice President of Engineer & Research, and Phil Schiller, Apple Senior Voice President of Worldwide Product Marketing. On July 7, Mr. Eustace and Mr. Schiller spoke over the phone. It was during this call that Mr. Schiller informed Mr. Eustace that Apple was rejecting the Google Voice application for the reasons described in 2(a)."

[The reason offered in 2(a): "because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialing functionality of the iPhone."]

Not only does Google's version of events flatly contradict Apple's, but its letter provides names and dates that could presumably be supported by phone records.

For what it's worth, Google's letter also supports the version promulgated by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who, citing sources at Google, had pronounced Apple's public response "untrue," "misleading," and "a total lie."

In response to a request for comment about the specific passage quoted above, Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling replied instead: "We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in its letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application.  We continue to discuss it with Google."

Dowling declined to specify which statements the company does or or doesn't agree with.

See also:

• What did Apple and Google talk about for three weeks in July?
• Arrington to Apple: Liar liar pants on fire
• The FCC is asking Apple and AT&T all the right questions

Steve Jobs. Photo: Apple Inc.

Last week we counted how many times Apple (AAPL) marketing chief Phil Schiller used the words "amazing" and "incredible" in his presentation at the "It's only rock and roll event." (Answer: an incredible 15 times each.)

Now someone who calls himself justanotherguy84 has taken the exercise one step further. He (or possibly she) has posted a 2-minute YouTube video of the entire Sept. 9 event stripped of just about everything but the adjectives.

Ever wonder how Steve Jobs and company leave the indelible impression that Apple's products are really great, really easy and just plain awesome?

Check it out below the fold.

Thanks to reader Urs in Zurich for the tip.

See also:

• Apple's amazing, incredible Phil Schiller

Phil Schiller. Photo: Apple Inc.

The day after Apple's (AAPL) "It's only rock and roll" event, Erik Sherman asked on CBS's BNET why the media missed the strategic importance of the gaming announcements that were made that day.

He has a point. Apple spent nearly a third of the hour-plus long presentation talking about the iPod touch — the "funnest iPod ever" — and how it stacks up against handheld game machines made by the likes of Sony (SNE) and Nintendo.

Yet the attention of the press seemed to be on everything else: the return of Steve Jobs, the video camera on the iPod nano, the camera missing from the iPod touch.

I went back and reviewed the podcast video of the event and I think I've found the reason: Phil Schiller.

Schiller, for those who don't recognize anyone on Apple's executive team beyond its famous CEO, is the company's senior vice president for worldwide marketing and Steve Jobs' regular stand-in at events like this. He gave the Macworld keynote in January, when Jobs was too sick to attend, and emceed last June's World Wide Developers Conference. He ran the show for nearly 20 minutes Wednesday — longer than anyone else, including Jobs.

Listening to Schiller the second time, I realize that he actually made a strong case that Apple, with the iPod touch, is finally getting serious about competing in the multi-billion dollar videogame market. He had the numbers — and the demos — to prove it.

But by that point, I had mostly tuned Schiller out — and I was not alone. As Sherman notes, it was roughly 40 minutes into the event — while Schiller was on stage — that Chris Nuttall from the Financial Times blogged, “I’m sorry, but can we get to some news.”

I can't speak for the rest of the media, but after reviewing Wednesday's video I think I can finally put my finger on what it is about Schiller's presentation style that loses me: his tireless, repetitive use of the same handful of adjectives.

In Schiller's world, everything Apple does is great, cool, remarkable, unbelievable and, more than anything else, amazing and incredible.

In the space of his 20 minutes — much of which was ceded to game developers — Schiller repeated the words "amazing" and "incredible" an incredible 15 times each. I would go back and count the times he said "really great," but I don't think I can take it one more time.

Enthusiasm for one's products is a must for a marketing man. But so too is being able to communicate that enthusiasm in a way that doesn't lose the audience.

If Steve Jobs really wants to drive home the message that Apple has, in the iPod touch, its first world-class game machine, maybe he should do it himself.

UPDATE: Some enterprising soul has posted a 2-minute YouTube video of the special event cut down to just the adjectives. See here. I wish I'd had it when I made my word count.

Thanks reader to Urs in Zurich for the pointer.

Senior VP Phil Schiller. Image: Apple Inc.

The tech press is buzzing this week with the news that a senior Apple (AAPL) vice president took the time to e-mail a blogger.

The senior VP was Phil Schiller, one of Steve Jobs' top lieutenants. The blogger was Daring Fireball's John Gruber, one of Apple's staunchest defenders. The issue was Apple's apparent censorship of an iPhone dictionary called Ninjawords that included some four letter words you won't find in Webster's Collegiate.

But this isn't really about a bawdy dictionary. It's about a public relations problem that has already triggered a federal investigation and now threatens to spin out of control.

The problem is that Apple Inc. has two faces, and the mask that hides the side that's not so nice has started to slip.

The computer and gadget-buying public sees Apple, by and large, as well-managed company extraordinarily attentive to its needs, from Apple's user-friendly operating systems to its legions of hand-holding retail and support staff.

Apple's suppliers know it as something quite different: a tough, no-nonsense, hard-bargaining client that demands total secrecy and takes no prisoners when things go wrong.

It has always been thus with Apple, at least as long as Jobs was running the show. What's changed is that the iPhone App Store has dramatically expanded the population of Apple suppliers to include thousands of independent software publishers — 16,765 of them, to be precise, as of Friday morning.

Suddenly we're hearing a lot more about the darker side of Apple.

Trouble in the App Store

We've covered some of the developers' complaints in the year that the App Store has been open — the overcrowding, the unexplained delays, the arbitrary approval process, the summary rejection of programs that might compete with Apple's own.

Ninjawords' problems were the least of it. They weren't even Cupertino's fault, which may be why Schiller — in a rare moment of Apple's transparency — decided to tell Gruber what had happened.

What Schiller is not talking about is the far more serious issue of Apple's rejection of Google Voice, the voice-mail management system that threatened to cut into AT&T (T) revenue stream and upset Apple's relations with its overseas carriers. That's the issue that triggered an inquiry by the Federal Communications Commission and may have precipitated the resignation of Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple's board of directors.

The FCC is asking Apple and Google all the right questions

To get a feel for how serious a PR problem this has become, check out the tone of New York Times columnist David Pogue's latest e-mail newsletter.

Pogue is a huge Apple booster. He gets preferential access to Apple's newest products and makes millions from his Apple Hidden Manual series. He was also a great fan of Google Voice; he predicted it would do for telephony what Google search did for the Web.

On Thursday Pogue wrote angrily about the behavior of Apple's not-so-nice side. It's not just ham-fisted, he says, but futile:

"[W]hat Apple and AT&T have accomplished with their heavy-handed, Soviet information-control style is not to bury these useful apps. Instead, Apple/AT&T have elevated them to martyr status—and, in effect, thrown down a worldwide challenge to programmers everywhere.

'Get around THIS,' they're saying.

But guess what? It won't take long. They've put a rock in the river, but the water will just find a way around it." (link)

Reconciling the two faces of Apple may not be so easy.

I was surprised Monday when Apple (AAPL) vice president Phil Schiller announced that there were 50,000 applications available on the iPhone App Store.

He was giving the keynote at the World Wide Developers Conference — a role usually played by Steve Jobs — and he used the statistic to show how far ahead of its competitors the iPhone had drawn.

In the bar graph displayed on the Moscone Center's oversize screens, the iPhone's 50,000 apps towered over the

• 4,900 Google (GOOG) Android apps,
• 1,088 Nokia (NOK) Ovi Store apps,
• 1,030 Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry apps, and
• 18 apps for "somebody else, I can't read it …  it's small," Schiller joked, referring to Palm's (PALM) App Catalog.

I was surprised, because I had been waiting for the App Store to hit the 50,000 mark — getting ready to write a post when it reached that milestone. I'd been watching Jeff Scott's automated count at 148Apps.biz — a source that has proved time and again to be considerably more reliable than Apple in these matters.

You see, Scott has a program that scans the App Store every day, counting the apps that are available for download and checking that number against previous counts. He can tell you — for any day since the store opened — how many applications have been approved and how many are still active. He will even send you, on request, a list of the several thousand apps that were approved but are no longer active — including such best-forgotten gems as I Am Rich and Baby Shaker.

I had checked Scott's site on Sunday, the day before the keynote, and I remember that the number of active applications was still stuck somewhere above 47,000.

Could nearly 3,000 apps have been approved overnight?

"These numbers are from this weekend," Schiller claimed at the keynote. "We looked up on the store."

Well, we looked the numbers up on Wednesday morning, two days later, and this is what we found:

Forty eight hours after Schiller made his claim, the number of active applications was still 1,657 shy of that nice round 50,000 mark.

There's no question Apple's App Store has a huge lead over its competitors. And Schiller is perfectly within his rights to ridicule their puny offerings.

But when you have that kind of lead — when you are a giant among pygmies — claiming that you are bigger than you are doesn't show a lot of class.

UPDATE: Reached between sessions at the WWDC, Jeff Scott suggests that Schiller may have included apps available in the roughly 60 overseas App Stores. But that raises other questions.

"One of the problems with the other app stores," he writes, "is that there may be the same app [that's] available here in the U.S. with a different ID due to localization. I'm leaning toward counting these as different apps, but it would be nice to be able to count them as one.

"I have a couple theories about why they announced 50,000 apps. They could be counting all unique apps worldwide across all stores. But my guess is that this would be more than 50,000.

"My main theory is that they just wanted to quote a big number and used that. After all we are likely only a couple weeks away from 50,000 anyway."

UPDATE 2: Sharp-eyed reader Alex Kynikos from Chicago notes that Apple's U.S. store — the one whose numbers they usual report — past 50,000 available apps on Tuesday, nine days after Schiller made his claim at WWDC.

See also:

This is the spot for our live coverage of Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference.

The keynote started at 1 p.m EDT (10 a.m. PDT). All times below are EDT unless otherwise indicated.

3:05 And that's a wrap.

There is a new iPhone, coming June 19, about a month earlier than expected. There is a $99 iPhone, available now, which is not good news for Palm (PALM). There are new MacBook Pros and price cuts on the 17-inch MacBook and MacBook Air. And we have ship dates for iPhone 3.0 (June 17) and Snow Leopard (September, a month before Microsoft's Windows 7).

But there is nothing from Apple to compete with those hot-selling $300 netbooks.

And there is no Steve Jobs.

His name never came up and there was no news about his condition or his plans to return to Apple.

I would expect that to get a mixed reaction from Wall Street, and as the keynote ended the stock was trading at $141, down about 3.6 points (2.5%). (It recovered somewhat later in the day to close at $143.85, down 0.82 points, and climbed o.1 points in after hours trading.)

Below the fold: The rest of the keynote.

3:03 Phil Schiller is summing up the day's news. Will Steve Jobs be his "one more thing"?

Starts talking about the 129 sessions scheduled this week for developers, the 1,000 engineers on hand to help them. Thanks the teams that got this all ready. Asks for a round of applause.

2:59 Schiller announces the price points for new iPhone:

• 16 GB $199
• 32 GB $299

In addition, Apple is keeping the iPhone 3G on the market for

• $99 for 8 GB

That 8GB price starts today. CNBC's Goldman calls it "a huge shot across the bow" of Palm.

When does the iPhone 3G S become available?

June 19 in 8 countries (including U.S) and then rolling out to 80 countries. Plays new ad, which gets a big laugh.

[UPDATE: Apple has issued an iPhone press release, available here.]

2:46 Schiller introduces the iPhone 3G S for speed. (Yes, there is a new iPhone today.) How much faster? 2 to 3.6 times faster. Not everything is as fast. Average two times faster. Open standards gets applause. Built in 7.2 Mbps HSDPA.

Amazing features (most of which we've heard in the rumors:

• Built-in camera. 3 megapixel, not 3.2 as expected. Autofocus, whitebalance, exposure, tap to focus (big applause). Low light sensitivity better. Automacro as well, as close as 10 cm away.
• Also captures video. New switch that says still or video. 30 frames per second. autofocus etc. (No second lens for easy iChat, as rumored.)
• Edit from the iPhone.
• Tethering. Can share your iPhone Internet connection with your Mac or PC (if your carrier allows it; big laugh because the room knows that AT&T doesn't yet)
• Voice control. Hold down the home button. Commands you can use are scrolling by. Call Scott Forstall. What's playing now. Play more songs like this (makes Genius playlist on the fly.)
• Built-in digital compass.
• Accessibility features.
• Support for Nike +
• Hardware encryption (for the IT guys). Makes for instantaneous remote wipe.
• Improved battery life. Up to 9 hours surfing with wifi, 30 hours of audio, 12 hours of 2G talk time, 5 hours of 3G talk.
• Fastest, most powerful iPhone yet

2:44 Phil Schiller is back on stage. The anticipation in the room is palpable. Waxes on about how much the iPhone has changed things. Quotes latest Net Application numbers: 2/3 of mobile Web browsing is done on an iPhone. Chart of 50,000 apps against 4,900 Android apps. 1,088 Nokia apps, fewer BlackBerry apps, 18 Palm apps.

2:42 Forstall is back. iPhone 3.0 is free for iPhone owners, naturally. $9.95 for iPod touch owners. Available worldwide June 17. Free iPhone 3.0 gold for all developers.

2:40 We're on the last demo (the guitar amplifier app that crashed in mid demo). If we're going to see Steve Jobs and/or a new iPhone it should be soon.

2:08. Forstall on the some of the major new developer improvements (most of these we've heard before as well):

• In app purchases (e.g. magazine subscriptions)
• Peer to peer connectivity (for games, mostly)
• Accessories (glucose level readers best example)
• Maps. Embed Google Map services into your app. Turn by turn directions
• Push notifications. ESPN score alerts. Instant messages. Numbers (like how many messages are backed up). Sounds.

Invites developers to the stage. Some games. An impressive medical app. A bookstore with magazines and textbooks. tomtom for turn-by-turn GPS directions (with optional car kit). A Zip car app that honks the horn and unlocks the car remotely. A guitar amplifier app that crashes in mid demo.

Around 2:00 The blog ate one of the coolest improvements: Find My iPhone. It's available only for Mobile Me customers and may be the best reason yet to buy that service. If you lose your iPhone, you can go to Mobile Me and it will bring up a Google Map that shows where your iPhone is (as long as it's turned on). You can send a message to the phone and it will display a message and sound an alarm, even if you left it in silent mode. If you've really lost it, you can remotely wipe all your data (the IT guys will love that). And if you later find your missing phone, you can plug it into iTunes and restore all your data.

1:54 Forstall back after video. Now he talks about iPhone 3.0. This we've heard before. 100 new features, starting with …

• Cut copy and paste. Works with all apps, built in or downloaded from App Store. Undo gesture; shake and it undoes the last thing you did.
• Landscape and landscape keyboard to Mail, Notes and Messages.
• Speaking of messages, MMS. Send and receive photos, contacts, audio in real time over the cell network. 29 of carrier partners in 79 countries will launch around the world. But not AT&T; they won't do it until later this summer. Boos!
• Search: Search contacts, notes, e-mail, not just messages downloaded to phone, but also the ones back on your mail server. Adding Spotlight — a single location on homescreen to search across phone, including apps.
• iTunes: Can rent and purchase movies right from your phone (getting scattered applause because this was announced at the launch of iPhone 3.0.) iTunes U as well (this might be new).
• Parental controls: Added control of movies, TV shows and apps.
• Tethering: Allows to share iPhone's Internet connection with computer. Works with PCs. 22 carriers support. AT&T not on the list. Laughter because Forstall skips right over that.
• SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark: 3 X faster than iPhone 2.
• HTTP 5 streaming audio and video. (But not Adobe Flash)
• Auto fill passwords. (Finally!)

1:47 Scott Forstall starts on the iPhone. An incredible year for iPhone. Response staggering. More than 1 million SDK downloards. Now more than 50,000 apps on the App Store (not all are active, I believe.) We've already sold more than 40 million iPhones and iPod touches. On April 23 crossed 1 billion apps downloaded in 9 months. I'd like to say Thank you! To customers and mostly to developers. Video of stories from developers.

1:46 Serlet. How should we price Snow Leopard. Leopard was $129. Snow Leopard priced at $29. Huge cheers and applause. Family pack for $49. Available this September and a "near final" version available for developers today. That concludes the event on the Mac and Snow Leopard.

[UPDATE: You can get Apple's MacBook press release here.]

1:45 Serlet is back. Points out that Apple is throwing in Exchange support for free, while Microsoft usually requires you to buy a new product.

1:40 Serlet on fitting into business. How to get the Mac into enterprise. What was missing was Exchange. So Exchange support is built into Mail, iCal and Address Book. Just fill in email and password and you are set. Federighi comes back to demo Exchange. Lots cool ways to move stuff from calendar to exchange.

1:34 Scalet is back to talk about how Snow Leopard is taking advantage of advances in technology: GB of memory, MHzs of processor speed. Multicore CPUs. 64 bit. Threads. Open CL.

1:28 Craig Federighi, vice president of Mac OS, went over details of refinements. Lost an update.

1:23 Serlet is going over the refinements. Faster. Less space. Smarter cut and paste. Here's news: Shipping Safari 4 today for Tiger, Leopard and Windows (big laugh, applause.) 100% Acid3 standard (whatever that means. IE 8 is 21% standard. Included in Snow Leopard. Crash resistance in Snow Leopard. The No. 1 cause of crashes in OS X are plugin crashes. Now they are isolated.

1:17 Bertrand Serlet takes the stage to talk about Mac OS X in a thick French accent. Sharp contrast with Vista — gets a laugh. Microsoft has dug a big hole with Vista. Trying to get out of it with Windows 7. But the same underlying problems. Defrag. User account control. Same old technology as Vista. "Fundamentally just another version of Vista."

We are coming from a very different place. We love Leopard. We are proud of Leopard. Challenge to build a better big cat. Refinements, Powerful new technologies. Exchange support.

1:15 $700 price cut on top of the line MacBook Air. These are pretty aggressive price cuts, but they don't offer anything to compete with $300 netbooks.

1:14 That completes the MacBook pro family.

1:12 The 13 inch notebook also gets the new battery and the SD card slot. (The battery is not replaceable, I believe). Can also expand to 8GB, 500 GB storage, backlit keyboard. Firewire 800 slot gets a huge cheer. Also being called a MacBook Pro. Starts at $1,199. That's less expensive than the 13 inch aluminum that it replaces. Up to $1,499 for the top of the line specs. Available today.

1:11 Also new 17 inch with faster processor and $300 lower price. Both shipping today. 1:08 Still talking about the new MacBook. 60 percent brighter screen. Dropped the PCI slot, replaced with SD photo card slot. Up to 3.06 GHz Dual Core. Up to 8 GB memory. Up to 500 GB hard drive or 256 GB solid state. Starts at $1,699 (but not with all those specs). Shows a graphic with the breakdown.

1:05 Bertrand Serlet and Scott Forstall will follow, but Schiller starts with the Mac. Talks about aluminum unibodies. Insanely thin and light. Customers couldn't be happier. We don't want to stop. Showing brand new version of 15 inch MacBook Pro. Unibody. New battery lithium polymer, like 17 inch pro. Up to 7 hours of battery life. 1,000 recharges vs. 300. Five years of life before diminshed battery life — longer than most laptops live.

1:03 Phil Schiller takes the stage. 5,200 developers. Chart of OS X users to 2007. Over the last two years, has to change the scale of the chart (a la Al Gore). Tripled installed base. No wonder everyone is trying to race behind us.

1:00 Apple all rights reserved sign. John Hodgman, the PC guy tries to wsh the developers welcome. Can't quite get it out.

12:57 "Please silence all cellphones and pagers."

12:51 Video cameras are sweeping the crowd and projecting selected images on the giant screens. The crowd watches, looking for their own faces and waving to the cameras like fans at Yankee Stadium.

12:45 Apple shares are down 3 points (2.14%). Sell on the buzz?

12:40 The developers arrive. They jostle for seats.

12:35 The big metal doors to the great hall open like the last scene of Close Encounters, as TIME's Josh Quittner puts it. You almost expect an unearthly light to shine from within. Rock music blares out. The press rushes forward. The TV crews occupy a platform at stage right.  The room is dominated by three giant grey screens with the big white Apple logo.

12:10 The Apple Store is down, the universal signal that new products are about to be announced.

12:00 With a full hour to wait, the sound of the press eating and greeting and trying to impress has risen to a dull roar.

11:30 There's a long slow line for media registration. I count 52 filthy press ahead of me and another dozen behind. The PR woman who told us to come at 11:30 (8:30 PDT) takes pity and slips a few of us clip-on media badges. As the escalator carries us toward the third floor I count 70 media types still waiting in line. This is as big — if not a bigger –  media turnout as I have seen at a WWDC. They have not come today to see Phil Schiller.

A herd of developers is penned in a second floor hallway behind black crowd-control belts.

11:27 Meet CNBC's Jim Goldman outside the press entrance chatting with Apple's top two PR people. He's shorter than he looks on camera.

11:25 Heading back to Moscone. The developer line is no shorter and has now slowed to a crawl.

11:00 Parked at the 4th St. Starbucks. The developers are still streaming by the window.

10:43 There's a tangle of TV equipment parked outside the press entrance, just in case Steve Jobs shows up and walks in the front door. A newswoman from Fox Business is describing the things she "knows" about the iPhone that she assumes is going to be introduced today. "This is huge!" she says.

10:40 A software hawker at the corner of 4th and Howard tells me they opened the doors to Moscone West at about 10:30. The developers stream by, many of them looking for their apps among the hundreds pasted on the windows.

10:30 The keynote is two and a half hours away, but the line of pre-registered developers stretches up 4th St., down Minna St., and as far as I can see toward 5th St. As Microsoft's (MSFT) Steve Balmer might put it, "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

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Some 5,000 Apple developers have descended on San Francisco for five days of demonstrations, technical sessions and hands-on training, but the keynote — traditionally given by CEO Steve Jobs — is headliner and usually packs the Moscone Center main hall.

This year, with Jobs on medical leave, marketing vice president Phil Schiller and a team of Apple execs are scheduled to lead things off, but a surprise appearance by the ailing CEO cannot be ruled out.

The theme this year is software: Mac OS X Snow Leopard and iPhone 3.0 (hence all the oversized app icons pasted like subway graffti on Moscone West's ground floor windows).

"One year later. Light-years ahead," reads a banner above the registration tables that manages to mix a metaphor (time and distance) and get the dates wrong — unless of course the "one year" refers to the 2008 unveiling of the iPhone 3G and is promising a similar unveiling at WWDC 2009.

If there is to be a grand unveiling, who will do the honors? When we know, you'll know.

See also:

• Apple WWDC keynote Bingo!
• What’s Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?
• Analyst: Apple’s WWDC likely to ‘disappoint’
• Infographic: Color-coded iPhone rumors
• Rumor roundup: All about the new iPhone

The Apple (AAPL) keynote Bingo game — brilliantly parodied in the famous 2008 IBM buzzword ad (pasted below the fold) — has become a fanboy tradition, although as far as we know nobody has ever interrupted a Steve Jobs presentation to shout "Bingo!"

Marketing senior vice president Phil Schiller, not Jobs, is scheduled to give the keynote at this year's World Wide Developers Conference Monday, but that hasn't stopped the Bingo board makers. We've come across at least two board generators, one from the Netherlands (sample board above), the other from Sweden (sample below).

Here are the links:

• Keynote Bingo WWDC 2009
• Stevenote Bingo

This exercise is not entirely frivolous; the game does give developers, reporters and other Apple watchers a chance to consolidate the rumors and share their sense of what Cupertino is cooking up.

The rules are simple: generate a board you like, print it out, mark the squares as phrases are uttered or events occur, and when you complete a row, column or diagonal, call out "Bingo!"

If you dare.

Tune in here at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) for our live coverage of WWDC 2009.

See also:

• What's Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?
• Analyst: Apple’s WWDC likely to ‘disappoint’
• Infographic: Color-coded iPhone rumors
• Rumor roundup: All about the new iPhone

Below the fold: the Buzzword Bingo IBM ad.