Schillermania!

Dude, Phil was on fire yesterday at the WWDC Keynote! While the Keynote itself may have been a little tame, I knew we were in store for a great Schiller show when John Hodgman’s PC character claimed to be Phil.

In the humorous opening video in the style of the rest of the “I’m a Mac” ads, PC Guy at first posed as Steve Jobs but then thought better of it when confronted and claimed to be Phil Schiller. I don’t know, it was funny when they did it.

But the real meat came 54 minutes later. After the Keynote had been rolling along without much life or energy, Phil popped on iChat AV as Steve’s only buddy. For the next several minutes it was pure Schiller hi-jinx as Phil demoed the many cool new features coming soon to Leopard’s video chat. First he showed the new iChat Theater, but he really hammed it up for the fun special effects. Schiller hanging upside down arms waving and then sipping coffee! Star Wars hologram Phil! But he saved the best for last, pulling a Conan O’Brien mouth cutout, first with George Washington and then with Steve Ballmer. It killed, plus it brought a lot of energy back to the Keynote.

Go Phil!

John Siracusa (love that guy as long as he’s not talking about the freaking spacial finder) has posted his latest Keynote Bingo card. This year’s WWDC Keynote Bingo is pretty weak though. Maybe he got tired of no one winning, but I think there are way too many softies in there.

Firstly, the top row is almost a guaranteed Bingo!, which really takes the sails out of even reading the rest. I mean,
B) Steve has just promised .Mac improvements at the D conference.
I) Bertrand only comes out at WWDC and he’s in charge of freaking software, which might be interesting to developers!
N) The Leopard secrets can’t stay hidden forever, and since their existence was revealed this time last year, it makes sense that they will be enumerated this year. Oh yeah, and a feature complete Beta was also announced as coming at WWDC. Come on!
G) This one’s the least guaranteed by my way of seeing things, but the only reason I can explain why iLife ’08 missed it’s recently routine introduction in January is because it has Leopard specific features and/or is bundled with Leopard. I say iLife will be the vehicle that shows off all the new Leopard features the best and provides an example to developers of how best to take advantage.
O) Of course Leopard will be the star, WWDC is about showing off things to developers. They already have 8 core Mac Pros, so what else is left but all the latest APIs and other development magic coming real soon with 10.5?

I won’t go into the rest of the chart, but here’s a graphic indicating my opinion of the relative likely hood of the predictions. Four more notes:
1) It’s sure a lot easier to comment on other’s predictions than make your own.
2) I’m pretty pissed that there is no mention of Schiller. Is it just too obvious that he will be on hand to demonstrate the new iChat features? If “Boom” is there, “Schiller iChat” should be too.
3) I don’t know what illuminous refers to.
4) I guess we’ll see soon enough what the truth will be.

UPDATE: Argh! So wrong again! I can’t believe I fell for it again, I’ve never been good at predicting Apple’s moves, only at loving and understanding them after the fact.

Schiller-maniacs, check out the new Fake Phil blog. Could go somewhere, though it hasn’t yet: Fake Phil Blog

Also, breaking up to the minute coverage at CARS of course: Crazy Apple Rumors covers Fake Phil Blog