Well, I finally watched the keynote. Streaming with the new codecs in QuickTime 7.0.4 has improved amazingly, I had almost no skipping or stalling at over double the size and quality of last year’s keynote.

Unfortunately the first hour of the keynote was extremely dull… all that US-centric stuff about “bowl games” and “SNL” (both of which I had to look up)… or long demos of messing around with iMovie and iDVD (which I’ve never used) or .mac (ditto)… or podcasts and photocasts. Apparently I’m no longer inside Apple’s main user demographic, and receding further away from it at high speed. I suppose I should be grateful cellphones were not mentioned.

That said, things picked up considerably when the new Macs were shown. No “Otel Inside”, oops, I mean, “Intel Inside”, quite predictably but still a relief. Otellini’s entrance was well-scripted and his mentioning that they had “over a thousand people working on this” was very interesting. (I skipped over the Microsoft part, though.)

Better still, from my standpoint as an investor, AAPL stock climbed steadily throughout the keynote and even gained in after-hours trading, probably a first. It used to fall on both bad news (“told you so”) and good news (“they can’t keep this up!”). While I write this, it’s up over $4 beyond the coincidental $80.86 it closed at on that day.

Regarding the new Macs themselves, I’ll post detailed comments soon. For now, it’s interesting to note that choosing the iMac and the PowerBook/MacBook Pro for refreshing now looks quite logical… the mini wouldn’t have weathered the “same design, same specs, same price” idea as well, for instance, and they couldn’t have done an iBook/MacBook non-Pro for the same price either. Developer discounts on the new Macs dropped to 10% for the iMac and 20% for the MacBook, which indicates that margins are slimmer for now.

One thing which nobody else has commented on yet is that all the new Macs have very customized motherboards. This was of course to be expected for the MacBook, as space in laptops is always at a premium, but the iMac is now fully laptop-like in its internal construction. The last iMac G5 looks completely different internally from the 2nd generation one, and I expect the iMac Core Duo (I suppose that’s the official name?) to be different again.

The effect of that will probably be that people will have little or no luck trying to find a standard-Intel motherboard to run pirated Mac OS X 10.4.4 on. We’ll soon know more details, but I’m reasonably sure that Apple is using their own controller chip, as they always do. Also, both models use EFI instead of BIOS or Open Firmware… as far as I know, there’s no standard 32-bit motherboard out with EFI either. More on that later.