Jobs unveils new iPod Mini, GarageBand software

SAN FRANCISCO - The iPod now has a sibling. Apple Computer Inc.'s Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs unveiled a slimmed down companion to its iPod portable music player during a keynote address at Apple's user conference here in San Francisco on Tuesday. The announcement came at the end of a wide-ranging two-hour keynote during which Jobs covered Apple's broadening range of commercial ventures in the realms of online music, digital media editing software, and even supercomputing.

The iPod mini, which will begin selling in the U.S. this February for $249, will be about 1.3 centimeters thick and about the length and width of a business card. With a tiny 4G-byte hard drive, it will be able to hold about 1,000 songs -- about one tenth as many as Apple's current top of the line iPod, which ships with a 40G byte hard drive, Jobs said.

The iPod mini will target the 31 percent of the digital music player market that is now dominated by flash memory player vendors like Digital Media Networks Inc.'s Rio audio player, Jobs said.

"We looked at this high end flash market and we want to go after that," said Jobs.

Jobs said that Apple sold 730,000 iPods during its most recent quarter, and that it shipped its two millionth iPod sometime in December.

Apple's CEO began his keynote by playing Apple's famous "1984" television commercial, which launched the Apple Macintosh, and saying that Apple's current transition to the Unix-based Mac OS X was a similarly important milestone in the company's history. With 40 percent of Apple's installed base of 9.3 million users now running OS X, he said, this transition was "now over," he said.

Jobs also touted new software for Mac OS X, such as Microsoft Corp.'s Office 2004, Macromedia Inc.'s Director MX, and Bakbone Software Inc.'s NetVault as proof of the success of this transition. The Mac OS X platform now boasts approximately 10,000 applications, according to Jobs.

Jobs unveiled some of his company's new software on stage, including a new version of Final Cut Express video editing software, called Final Cut Express 2. Jobs also demonstrated the latest version of Apple's iLife multimedia editing suite, iLife '04, which will begin shipping free with the Macintosh, or for $49 separately, effective January 16.

The suite is designed to be as essential to the management of multimedia files as Microsoft Office has become for business documents, Jobs said. "iLife '04 is like Microsoft Office for the rest of your life," he said.

iLife '04 will include a new music editing application called GarageBand, which Jobs demonstrated onstage with the help of musician John Mayer.

GarageBand can be used to digitally mix up to 64 music tracks that can either be recorded live or created with the 50 software "instruments" included in the program. "It turns your Mac into a professional quality musical instrument and complete recording studio," Jobs said. "One half of all households have at least one person who currently plays a musical instrument," he added. "This is a really big market and we think GarageBand is going to appeal to these folks."

On the music consumer side of things, Jobs announced that Apple's iTunes music service has now sold its 30 millionth song, and is now distributing close to 1.9 million songs per week, out of a total catalog of half a million songs.