So we're in San Francisco for Macworld Expo 2009, as witnesses to Apple's last hurrah at the venerable expo. Born of the time when people disseminated info face to face at Mac User groups (MUGs), this could be the last Macworld Expo in the US. While we hope that's not the case, without the major presence of Apple and Adobe it will be tough for IDG to keep producing this show (the same thing happened to COMDEX, PC Expo, and Ziff Davis' Digital Life shows). Bookmark this page for the keynote, LIVE on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9am PST (10AM MT, 11AM CT, 12PM ET).

So stay tuned true believers, we're going to give you the usual play by play courtesy of Joel Santo Domingo, Desktop Analyst at PCMag.com and Jamie Lendino, blogger and editor for PCMag Digital networks. Joel has covered Macs since the late 1990s Apple renaissance, and you may know Jamie from smartdevicecentral.com, so both the (rumored) new Macs and iPhones will be covered. We'll try to interject our usual opinionated color commentary in the liveblog stream, so stay tuned and keep hitting F5!

New comments will appear at the top of the post, to reduce unneeded scrolling, then we'll do a post-keynote analysis after Phil Schiller gets off the stage. Look for hands-on reports once we figure out what's really being announced at the show.

[Joel and Jamie are in the audience already; transmissions about to start! Check after the jump for the live blog.]

1:40: Phil is back, thanking his family, friends at Apple, the Academy. "Please enjoy the rest of the show... go down to the booth, check out the new 17-inch MacBook Pro, and enjoy the rest of the week..." And that's it-- lights up!

1:37: This is a strange juxtaposition between a very relaxing song and the fact that we're going to have to write about 20,000 words starting in the next 15 minutes. Standing O for Mr. Bennett!

1:35: "It's my honor to introduce to you, Mr. Tony Bennett!" Tony Bennett is singing with a backing band. Wouldn't it be great if, say, Steve Jobs was on drums?
"The Best is Yet to Come" fitting, considering Apple's new keynote strategy... Is this a subtle hint that there will be an "Apple Special Event" in or future this quarter? "I left my heart in San Francisco..." Figures. Tony's signature song, and again fitting considering Apple's departure from MacWorld Expo.

1:32: Ending on music. "In many of our MacWorld keynotes we come back to remembering why we do this. We love great music. It's fitting we end our last MacWorld keynote with an artist that has some amazing music... and a true legend in our industry." Showing 15 Grammy awards, 2 Emmy awards... over 100 albums, 50 million records worldwide.

1:29: Third thing: iPhone. iPhone has the WiFi music store. iPhone has the WiFi music store. The most popular wireless music store. Now... its no longer the WiFi Store, it now supports WiFi and 3G networks. (Over the air music--they finally did it!)
Same price. Same selection, and same quality -- 256 Kbps over the air! Preview and purchase music. Sync back to computer. "This is a really big step for wireless music and cell phones and that starts today." (This is a first, by the way! No one else is doing that.) DRM-free over wireless networks.

1:27: Shows four major label logos. $0.99 for all songs. April 1, 2009, going to create three pricing tiers. $.0.69, 0..99, 1.29. "More songs will be offered at 69 cents than $1.29" Second thing: iTunes Plus. DRM-free. 256 Kbps AAC. One-click upgrade. New today: all the major music labels -- starting today, 8 million songs are DRM free. That still means 2 million, BTW -- ah, here we go, by end of Q1, all 10 million songs will be DRM free.

1:26: "We wanted to give customers a legal way to purchase music over the internet." iTunes #1 channel in the US for music (we knew this already). Whats' new for 2009? Price.

1:25: "That completes our lineup for the greenest notebooks." Uh oh. One last thing. iTunes. Started the store in April 2003. 6 billion songs sold. 10,000,000 songs in the library. 75,000,000 accounts with credit cards.

1:24: Now playing TV ad, which plays up the green aspect and new battery.

1:22:1,000 recharge cycles. 3X less waste. PVC- and BFR-free. As before, comes in one configuration -- BTO any option. Same price -- $2799. Late January ship date. EPEAT Gold certification. Arsenic free glass, BFR free, mercury free, PVC free, highly recyclable, 34 percent smaller .

1:21: Video is now over. Claiming 7 hours with the 9600GT and 8 hours with the integrated 9400M... We'll see about that. That's a huge claim. Hesitant applause, because who knows until everyone tests it, really?

1:20: "What we did was add a chip in the battery that talks to each cell , and reports back on its state to the system. the system then goes back and adjusts [what is normally a] constant voltage."
3X lifespan. "From an environmental perspective, the 17-inch Macbook Pro is free of harmful toxins and runs on 50 percent of the energy of a single lightbulb. Because this battery can recharge up to 1000 times, its lifespan is extended to five years." You know what this all means... it's NOT REMOVABLE. Watch.

1:15: Battery -- we challenged our engineering team to do something important. Our longest lasting battery life EVER. but keep it just as thin and light. To explain what they've done, and how they've done it, we're going to run a video. Lights dim. Showing graphics of battery cells... creating custom shaped cells to fill all of the space more effectively around the cylinder cells. Lithium polymer technology. Coat them with the active material for the energy storage. Extends lifetime of cells three times the industry standard.

1:13: Right hand side -- superdrive, Kensington lock. Left hand side -- magsafe, gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, three USB 2.0 ports, miniDisplay port, digital and analog audio. In/out, ExpressCard 3/4. integrated battery connector. 39% larger tracking area. Multi-touch for gestures. Glass for silky-smooth travel. Entire trackpad is the button. Multi-button via software (like others). Intel Core 2 Duo. 2.93 GHz. 6 MB L2 cache. 8GB Memory running at 1066 MH. GeForce 9400M and GeForce 9600M GT both built-in standard (same as 15-inch but not 13 inch). hard drive 320 GB standard. 256GB to SSD option.

1:12: Now showing.. the 17-inch MacBook Pro. 0.98 inches thin: worlds thinnest 17 inch notebook. 6.6 pounds, world's lightest 17 inch notebook. 17-inch LED backlit. 920 by 1200 standard. 140 H 120 V degree viewing angle. 700:1. Glossy finish -- some of our highest end customers don't want it -- 17-inch anti-glare option. Actual cheers from the audience, and one sarcastic YAAAAAAAY!

1:11: One more thing...17-inch MacBook Pro! Now overviewing MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro based on Unibody architecture... quoting Ed Baig, David Pogue, Walt Mossberg... the free iPhone contingent.

1:10: Now demonstrating a shared Keynote presentation viewing notes from different people sharing notes. Well, this is certainly *different* than Google Docs and NetVibes. Customers can sign up free for the beta, but there will bea fee for the final service. Beta launches today.

1:08: He switches logins. Shows email from Phil -- tells Tia "She's been invited to view this document on iWork.com." Launches Tia's *browser* -- this can be a Mac or PC. And Tia (his friend, apparently) sees... what looks to be a Preview and edit window within a browser. Tia is now adding yellow post-it note comments on the document. It's like Tracked Changes + cloud computing + iWork, thrown in a blender. I have no idea what to call the result. Other people can leave post-it notes all over the document too. Wow, it's like being edited by committee!

1:07: This is a little weird--seems like a kludge between local and cloud computing. Here's the demo. A button at the top of Pages, Keynote, Numbers -- send a note to somewone -- iWork.com -- "type in email, it sees my address book, type in a subject..." *types message... "clicks share. Now what pages is doing is creating formatted versions of this document for iWork.com and it's done."

1:06: iWork.com: Ahhhhhhhhh, here's that cloud thing, watch. "We're announcing the Beta of this new service for you to share your documents with other people." Notify other people that you're collaborating with them. They can view the documents online. Can add comments and notes. Dwonload a copy.

1:05: Now announcing Leopard deal for new iLife -- since it's a requirement. You can purchase all three in a Mac Box Set -- iLife, iWork, and Leopard -- $169. Which is only $40 more than Leopard by itself. Late January. One other thing with iWork... (arg... still waiting!)

1:04: iLife NEEDS 10.5 Leopard.

1:03: Linked Charts: You can link charts between Pages and Numbers. (Basically demonstrating stuff that Microsoft Office has had for many years; it looks like Apple has filled in some of the gaping holes in iWork's basic office suite functionality.) It's an attractive suite, make no mistake, but this is all stuff that Office has had since the 1990's. The new forumla thing looks very nice though--could get people into using formulas in their spreadsheets. Upgrade iLife '09 -- $79, or $99 for a Family Pack. Purchase iWork with a new Mac -- $49. iWork starts shipping today. So that's iLife and iWork.

1:02: New Chart Options: Mixed chart types, charts with multiple axes, trend lines "important for doing financial charts, for scientific charts, for doing advanced reporting on their spreadsheets"

1:01: "There are over 250 functions now, with a new Function view. With a nice description underneath so you can understand what the function does" -- nice, because I'm usually lost in Excel -- "pass your mouse over a cell and it will tell you what that does, and it's all color coded." People are checking their text messages around me: Phil's losing the crowd...

1:00: Numbers '09: Last year was the first time we brought it out. Customers really liked it because it was finally a spreadsheet done the Apple Way (which is a weird comment considering Excel first hit the Mac before the PC). Now you have Table Categories. Can reorganize table, pull down a column, and choose "categorize by this column"

12:59: Mail Merge with numbers. Integration between Pages and EndNote, MathType. Bibliography: More templates for newsletters, posters, flyers, certificates, business correspondence with envelopes and letters and business cards. That's Pages '09.

12: 58: Dynamic Outlines. Start working on a document in Outline view. Different levels, graphics, font sizes.You can reorg thoughts with drag and drop. Quiet, bored applause.

12:56: Full Screen View (you know, like WordPerfect in the 1980s. Does the whole screen, not just the window). Showing some dual-page views. Little iPhoto-like toolbars pop up on the sides to help you work on your writing.

12:55: Ah, here's something -- the new "Keynote remote" --- shows an iPhone with a new Keynote app. You can set it up to talk over WiFi with your Mac. Set it up in vertical mode to show you your slide with notes. Horizontally shows this slide and the next slide.

Click it with your finger to advance and go back in slides. Now there's real applause. 99 cents in the App Store.

12:54 I know its an important piece of software, but really a presentation about presentation software (Keynote '09)? How meta... Keynote remote on iPhone: so you can control your slides with notes on your iPhone.

12:53: Ha, just demonstrated a "swing transition" to Obama's name. "Read whatever you want into it." Now showing chart animations. Etched metal, cylinder shaped charts and graphs. New stone textures... a zoom "through the z axis" of a pie chart... perfect for inflating all your sales numbers to the VP."

12:52: Showing animations of a deck of cards for Keynote. Or, you could just video screen capture someone playing Solitaire on a 486 20 years ago. Shouldn't Apple be moving this whole suite to the cloud or something? I hear Google Docs is really good... and free...

12:51:Okay, that's iLife '09. Ships free on all new Macs. $79 to upgrade, as before. More than one computer, upgrade with Family Pack for $99 for up to five computers. Ship at the end of this month, late January.

So the first thing was iLife '09, and the second thing is now iWork '09. The third thing had better be a new planet or something.

12:44: Teacher is demoing12-bar blUes in key of A. I already want to play a drum beat under that... drummer nerd in the house. Now is demonstrating piano lesson. Video lesson has the instrument in question zoomed in (guitar fret board, piano keyboard). 9 lessons for piano and guitar, can download the ones you want. "We've enlisted the help of some amazing artists to help teach you their songs."

Artist Lessons. Here comes the list -- John Fogerty, Colbie Caillat, Patrick Stump (Fall Out Boy), Sting. Sting's voice sounds like he just swallowed a cup of gravel. Holy cow. Keyboard: Sarah McLachlan "Angel." Ryan Tedder - OneRepublic, Norah Jones. "We're going to continue to add more and more artistsalong the way." Now there's a new section in GarageBand called "Learn to Play." Phil just dropped a bomb. $4.99 per lesson. Yikes. Wow, I suddenly don't care quite as much. Fogerty is now demonstrating how he wrote a song for Credence Clearwater Revival in 1968."The best that I can remember it" *laughter* The song is Proud Mary, by the way.

12:43: gonna tell us just about one breakthrough feature: "Create a piece of software to help people learn to play a musical instrument." Learn to Play. Uh oh, look out Rock Band enthusiasts... Has a guitar instructor: "Tim, in HD resolution, to teach you how to play the instrument. You're in complete control of the learning experience." Now demonstrating video lesson.
42 minutes of iLife, c'mon Phil, let's hear about the Mac!

12:42: Next up -- GarageBand '09.

12:40: Now demonstrating end credits: "Directed by Phil Schiller." Showing finished product with music. Loud applause... Sounds like the VIP section is a professional cheering section. Much more applause from the VIPs than the media (predictably) and even the general public (surprising).

12:39: Just showed animated Indiana Jones-style map flying from San Francisco to Botswana. Now on a 3D globe. All of this stuff is done in "real-time." I wonder if Mac mini G4 users will be able to use this stuff?

2:38: now is adjusting the speed of a clip - no rendering, no waiting, takes place immediately. Showing "cartoon," x-ray", "aged film" video effects. No rendering for all of them -- all done in real-time. Pretty slick!

12:37: Software image stabilization in iMovie works pretty well.

12:36: Attention starting to drift as minutae of video editing is demonstrated...Ooh, look! gazelles! (just demonstrated a nice video stabilization cleanup... so you could see a gazelle in the distance.) But a lot of this iMovie stuff will interest the proto-Spielbergs out there, Precision editor is a lot more powerful than the previous editor: you can edit and blend audio and video.

12: 34: Basically he's demonstrating edit and scrub points for the beginning and end of two clips. The end result is that he took two examples of someone jumping in the water, and used both clips to make a single clip with two different angles. And now took a clean piece of audio from the clip on the left and had it finish playing under the clip on the right. "In pro tools this would take a lot more steps."

12:33: They're demoing clip where audio is slipped out from one video and put under another clip.
So you can grab audio from one scene and use it in another. Kinda neat. Now using new Action pop-up with Precision Editor, showing a magnified view of clip we're editing. Skimming back and forth and showing edit happen between two clips.

12:32: Half hour point: so far mostly iLife '09.

12:31: Video Stabilization: iMovie will stabilize your video and take away all those jitters, so things that might not have been useable before are now pristine movies to include" (that one will be interesting to test in person). Now bringing up Randy Ubillos -- Chief Architect for Video Applications. Applause... Oh wait, he's over the speaker! He's narrating, It's a ghost! look out!

12:30: Animated Travel Maps ("my new favorite feature") -- can now create t2D and 3D maps. cue the Indiana Jones music...

12:29: "We've now added so much depth and so much power that every customer is blown away."
New Precision Editor. Dan bring up expanded view of timeline, edit audio, edit video, with amazing control. Advanced drag and drop. Drag one video on top of another--context sensitive menus pop up. New Dynamic Themes: Select a theme and iMovie automatically creates titles, transitions, effects, credits, with a single click.

12:28: Of course, this is all still iPhoto. Nice and all, but not why we're here... iMovie '09. Phil is now trying to justify its controversial decision to completely rewrite iMovie the last time around.

12:27: All of these geotags work with Google Maps, so if you're familiar with Google Maps (Web or Google Earth), you can use iPhoto to browse your Places.

12:26: Phil's showing some slick mouse tricks, passing the cursor over the pins on the map, and it's showing the faces and places at the same time. the map seems pretty well integrated within iPhoto.

12:24: Key photo on Faces: you can drag mouse while browsing and hit the space bar to confirm key photo, much nicer than using right-click. Places: you can browse a macro map, say of the continental US, and see all the places you have pictures at once. You can also confirm lots of photos with one sweep of the mouse. And you can browse down at the city level as well

12:23: Now, in a new split screen, the top two faces are confirmed as Ali, but it's showing lots of other photos on the bottom and asking if they are also Ali. There's a "confirm name" button. Zooms right in with face detection. So Face detection and recognition are two different things--finds the location of the face, and then figures out which face it is

12:22: Live demo: Phil is next to a 24-inch cinema display, I wonder if the new Mac mini is under the podium? iPhoto is asking, via Face recognitiion, "Is this Ali?" Phil is now naming Ali's mother Ali and Claire have now been added as new Faces.

12:20: Now showing actual iPhoto 09 on Mac. Faces and Places show up at the top left, right under Events and Photos. Passes mouse cursor over faces the same way it works when viewing multiple photos within an Event.

12:19: New feature --- Travel books. Inside in theme, we have maps that use geotag data to automatically great travel books. The book looks really nice, with page turning animation effects. You can print not only on the sleeve but on the hardcover as well to order them. Hm, i wonder if this will translate to more Apple book sales? Printing on the dust cover and to the hardcover directly.

12:18: "We used the face detection to properly place the photos in the middle of the slideshow.
Now showing Skater theme. Face detection actually does auto-layout to show pics. Next slideshow looks JUST LIKE AN APPLE AD. And of course, slidshows on the iPhone

12:17: New feature -- Slideshow themes. Pick an event--he chooses ballet (that wouldn't have been my first choice) -- press the slideshow button -- you can not only assign music and timing but you can also pick one of the new built in themes. He's showing a ballet show to "Linus and Lucy."

12:16: "We now have support for Facebook and Flickr built right in. If you have a Facebook account set up, you click the Facebook button in iPhoto, and it sends the photo right up to Facebook, and Facebook allows other people to name photos (tags) -- Facebook can sync tags right back to iPhoto 09." Facebook and Flickr support improves, syncing friend tagging back to iPhoto kinda rocks! Phil is now showing Flickr integration -- which supports geotagging, so it reads the data sent up from iPhoto. Applause for Facebook and Flickr.

12:15: "Now when you click on the Event, you click on the event and flip it over and there's a new place to type in the location." iPhoto has a database of thosuands of locations. "In addition to maps, we also have satellite imagery" -- this is all pretty cool, it's still within iPhoto." Applause for Faces and Places. Maps come from Google maps

12:14: Ahhh, new cameras have GPS and of course the iPhone. Now you have a reason to click "use current location" when you use your iPhone's camera. "A geotag is a big version for longitude and latitude. Now, it's not that useful to know that I took this photo at 48 degrees,..." but the geotagging actually figures out that that location is the Eiffel tower. "But what about all those photos I took without a camera with a GPS chip?"

12:12: "When you click on Places, you see a map -- (shows map) --- with pins showing where all of your photos were taken" Places uses GPS geotagging. GPS chips are starting to make their way into cameras. (shows Nikon Coolpix) and the most advanced cell phone on the market (shows iPhone -- ha).

12:10: A third way after Events and Faces -- Places. All of the photos are places --- places we go on vacations and trips. "Wouldn't it be great if iPhoto can organize your photos by where they were taken?"

12:08: You can organize by people, here's social networking in your iPhoto. Face detection tech, nice. "Click on the picture, at the bottom is a button that says 'name this person'." iPhoto not only finds the face in the photo but finds the same person across multiple photos. Single-click confirm, double-click to deny each picture. (Liz is our example person. I wonder if she knows she's being used as a demo for thousands of people.) Tagging by face is a good feature, you can do it manually first, then once you do that, it will auto-detect afterward, with confirmation... it goes out , finds a bunch of photos, and then asks you to confirm if these are, in fact, Liz.

12:07: 3 new things: 1: new iLife '09. Checkbox one, for the bingo players out there. "iLife has become one of the key reasons people buy a Mac today"
"as much as some people up north might think they have some pretty cool things, nothing is as good as iLife," Showing Events, which was introduced last year in iPhoto '08. "For '09, we're adding Faces."

12: 06: "The Mac has had a resurgence and excitement with customers bigger than we've ever had before. Today, I'm going to talk to you all about the Mac. 9.7 million macs sold FY 2008." We grew over twice as fast as the rest of the industry. That's because we have the best product line we've ever had for the mac." Shows photo of all the macs.. they're all... silver.

12:05: "Crowds bringing energy and love. 3.4 million visitors a week to Apple stores; 100 Macworlds a week."

12:04: And Phil takes the stage, Blue business casual oxford shirt, denim jeans. "I can't tell you how much I appreciate you all showing up." laughter... "It is an exciting time at Apple!" Here comes the retail spiel. "Here's our store in Beijing China, we opened last year." Showing more stores in Munich; Sydney, Australia. (Shows gorgeous three-level store in Sydney with crowds lined up against the windows.) A little bloviating about how gorgeous the Apple logo looks.

12:03: Lights are going down. Cheers in the audience. Here we go.

12:01: We've transitioned from Beck to Coldplay.

12:00: "Welcome to Macworld 2009, please silence cell phones and paging devices." Whoooo! I wonder how many people in here have iPhones.

11:59: There's a clear delineation between the general seating area and the VIP and media sections, there are still seats in the media and VIP sections. (VIP is front center, Media is off to the side front,)

11:58 EST: So far no Gorillaz, so at least they've updated the iPod they use to feed the PA system.
The sound system has busted out Beck's "Gamma Ray." Also, everyone who knows how this works is wearing red T-shirts. Can't tell if they're all Apple employees or just some, but they're certainly brightly colored.

11:50 AM EST: So we're here in the Moscone West live, usual pre-keynote Alternative mix on the PA. The usual media are here, I saw David Pogue mixing in the pre-keynote holding area. We're seated next to a barrage of television cameras, lined up like a battalion of archers. Not too crowded from where we're sitting, but the room is still filling up. Lots of "groups" sitting together in the media section.