Happy WWDC 2011 Monday! Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage at Moscone West in San Francisco this morning to kick off the annual Worldwide Developers Conference 2011 to a huge throng of developers and media ready to hear about Apple’s next-generation software.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs walked onto the Worldwide Developers Conference 2011 keynote to a standing ovation, ready to show what Cupertino has been working on. First and foremost was the disclosure that 5,200 developers sold out the show in a record two hours, ready to rock the company’s more than 120 sessions, 100 hands-on labs and over 1,000 Apple engineers on hand to work with them.
“Today we’re going to talk about software,” Jobs announced before handing the stage over to Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller for a new demo of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
“We now have over 54 million Mac users around the world and growing,” Schiller announced, noting that the Mac has grown 28 percent year over year, while the PC industry as a whole has actually contracted by one percent. Mac sales are made up of nearly 75 percent notebooks -- far outpacing sales of desktop computers.
Following a demonstration of 10 features for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple Senior Vice President of iOS Software Scott Forstall took the stage to talk iOS 5. Citing April numbers from Comscore, iOS is currently the number one mobile operating system with 44 percent of the market -- with Android at number two at 28 percent and RIM a distant third at 19 percent.
Forstall claims that 200 million iOS devices have been sold to date, with more than 25 million of them being iPads. “We’ve created a whole new category of device with the iPad,” the executive touts. Fortsall also revealed 15 billion songs have been purchased through the iTunes Music Store as well as 130 million e-books sold from the iBookstore.
Developers have really taken to the iPad, with 90,000 apps now written specifically for the iPad. “We’d like to thank our developers for these great apps,” Forstall said, citing $2.5 billion dollars paid thus far to its developers. The keynote wrapped up with CEO Steve Jobs back on stage to introduce iCloud, which wasn’t quite the all-in-one streaming music solution many of us were counting on.
Apple will release Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in July directly from the Mac App Store, while iOS 5 and iCloud will arrive this fall, presumably alongside new iPhone (and possibly iPod touch) hardware.
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