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!

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

This is what I’m talking about: Phil Schiller getting some major air time … well at least his fingers and velvety voice get some air, check it out:

Today Apple introduced the iPhone and Phil Schiller became the second person to publicly take a call on one. Also, Phil was carefull to warn people not to read too much into his movie date with Steve later; they are just friends.

Phil played his customary right-hand-man role during the keynote, demonstrating AppleTV’s ability to stream video from a MacBook (did Schiller like that clip because of it’s market demographic content?), as well as the phone call stuff from the iPhone. Phil apparently rocks a black MacBook, which is a sweet ride. It shows that he has no pretense about what he is using a computer for, but the upgrade to the black confirms his sense of style. On a sad note, Steve apparently uses Apple’s lame official marketing pic of Phil for his Address Book contact and has no candid shots.

Schiller’s contributions can be seen elsewhere too. Steve closed the Keynote with a quote from the great Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” and proclaimed it similar to the principle Apple tries to follow. I trust I will not need excessive evidence when I suggest that this quote could have come from none other than Apple’s most senior Canadian Executive.

More on the way.

MacWorld reported recently on the new Poker game for the iPod, noticing that some of the opponents bear a striking resemblance to Apple Execs. Phil’s name is apparently Killer, and and Greg Joswiak is cleverly named Shark (Jos, Jaws, Shark: get it?).

Schiller the Killer though, that has a hell of a ring to it, no?

If anyone out there doubted that Phil was the king of demos, check this out:

YouTube Video from New York MacWorld July 1999

To the usual applause and enthusiasm his appearances generate, Phil took the stage near the beginning of the Keynote at the World Wide Developers Conference. He announced the final and best Macs to make the transition to Intel processors: the Mac Pro and the XServe.
Phil didn’t waste any time before getting dirty with technical specifications, much to the delight of the nerdy audience, but he also elegantly described the decisions that lead to the more subtle improvements inside the Mac Pro and Xserve: 2 optical drives, 4 internal hard drives, a double wide graphics card slot, and redundant power supply on the Xserve.

“In addition to amazing performance, we’ve also added some highly requested features. With more space in it now, thanks to the better thermal environment of the Xeon, we get to add redundant power.” The crowd goes wild!

Phil is great at rattling off tech specs while making a larger point, and those skills were well used at WWDC. But while this Keynote gave many usually hidden Apple Execs the chance to stand in the limelight, Scott Forstall and Bertrand Serlet both deservedly got to make many new fans, Phil got the juicy segments when he announced the MacPro (and XServe) and also took a dig at Dell when he showed that their most similar config to the Mac Pro costs a clean $1200 more.

Awesome Phil, can’t wait to see you in January!

At a Special Event held by Apple in the California Theater in San Jose, Steve Jobs held court and introduced new iMacs, new iPods, and new features of iTunes.

While demonstrating the new iMac G5′s built in iSight camera, Steve called on his main man Phil Schiller for the iChat AV video conferencing demonstration, as usual. Phil has a special affinity for this demo, have participated in every demonstration to date.

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With news of Apple “Switching” to Intel barely on it’s way to the presses, Phil turns the gossip level from intense to ultra–max with his comments on Windows support for future Macs!?!

Stunning Apple fans used to the company’s typically tight lipped policies, Schiller went way beyond non-denial on the topic of running Windows on the just-announced, forthcoming Intel-based Macs. After stating the expected; that Apple has no plans to sell or support Windows, Phil continued:

“That doesn’t preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will.” … “We won’t do anything to preclude that.”

Luckily, Phil took steps back toward sanity and finished with:

“We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac.”

Which I guess means we are still going to be Mac users after all, even if PC gaming just got a little bit closer. Let’s hope we can all survive in this scary new world where Windows can literally pollute our beautiful happy Macs.

We admit, we had high hopes for Phil during the MacWorld Keynote, and he was magic as usual! Schiller not only reprised his role as one of 3 remote video chatters, he also demoed the brand new Pages with wit and charm.

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