A closer look at Phil’s iPhone Calendar shown during the presentation also reveals that he routinely schedules time to think up new Apple rumors. Clearly there are no limits to the wizardry of his marketing strategies and even Apple fanboy bloggers are merely pawns in his game of puppetry. How’s that for a mixed-metaphor?

In reference to yesterday’s discussion of future Apple leadership, Phil once again demonstrated his competency and comfort announcing new products. No need to worry about the other guest host; Scott Forstall is only ever brought out in front of the geeky developer crowd and just doesn’t have the laugh to be the top dog. We’re all better off with him working with the smart people anyhow.

Phil’s sense of humor was sprinkled liberally throughout his piece: he cracked jokes about older generation phones in reference to BlackBerries, amongst other quips. His best joke was when he dead-panned to that everyone should just “take our word for it, it works” before actually demoing Exchange syncing. What a ham.

Pretty awesome that the first thing out of interviewer Ryan Block’s mouth when he got the chance to speak to Phil was to ask about Schiller-mania. Maybe not the best journalistic move to creep out the interview subject right off the bat, but flattering to us. Phil went on to downplay his fame and give a good personal interview while of course staying on message about the awesome new iPods, iTunes, and the like. I recommend Schiller fans and everyone else take a look.

Daringfireball immediately trashed Engadget of course. Something about a history of bad reporting?

“It’s not just about Intel Inside. When you buy any off the shelf PCs, the boxes are covered with confusing logos, and messages, and icons. You open it up: there’s stickers to peel off displays and keyboards; they’re all over the place. And then you start it up and you find junkware all over your desktop and in your menus that they’ve littered with it trying to up sell you on junk and that whole philosphy: we try to just give you a great product that you’ll love and you don’t have to peel stuff off to make it look better.”

Link to audio of the question and answer on MacWorld.

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.

“I think you’d have to really be looking for a couple of penises to see that in the Shuffle button,” Schiller said, squinting at the screen of his MacBook Pro.
“I’ve been looking for about a half an hour and all I see are two arrows.

We’re just glad to see Phil in the press some more.

“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!

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.

“Apple just had their most successful quarter in years. The very same quarter that Steve Jobs was hospitalized. Makes you wonder who the real leader of Apple is, doesn’t it? Clearly Schiller is the Svengali behind Apple.”

Well we couldn’t agree more. Steve is insanely great and all, but the real passionate core of Apple is that smooth Canadian dude with the blue shirt on. Basically, this whole story could be summed up in one sentence: Phil Schiller is super cool. It seems like a waste of everyone’s time to dilute this message with any anecdotal evidence at this point.

Okay fine, here’s some fluff: why was Apple so successful this quarter? Clearly the iPod and the new iMac were huge factors. The iPod is getting Apple huge publicity for it’s cool factor, and cool factor is clearly something that Apple’s Marketing Department is responsible for. Who’s the Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing? Hint: it’s the guy who introduced the fabulous new iMac G5, too!

How cool is Phil Schiller?! He’s Super Cool, that’s how cool Phil Schiller is! Give him $106 Million!

Apple’s Q4 2004 Financial Results

Phil made his first appearance right at the beginning of Steve’s address, coming out to demo the first software announcement (the first overall new announcement being Burton’s AMP iPod jacket). Final Cut Express couldn’t have had a better intorduction than at the skillful fingertips of Schiller, who demostrated to the crowd not only that the app was cool, but also that he was a master of video editing. Where do Schiller’s skills end, or do they have a limit at all?

Steve went on to make many more awsome announcements and do some killer demos of his own, but Phil came back just like he always does: in video form. The intro video for the new PowerBooks was a classic Schiller piece; with him setting the scene in only the way Schiller can. It can’t really even be described, you just have to watch it. Nice body language Schiller!

The Keynote was just the beginning of Phil’s activities at MacWorld though. After the big festivities of the Keynote, Schiller got to throw his own party. This year’s Power of X was a strictly Schiller event, unlike last year’s which was co-hosted by Apple’s foremost programming wizard, Avie Tevanian.

Despite the absence of Avie this time, the Power of X presentation was much the same in format as the last time. Phil spent a little time talking about some of the new features of OS X, like Safari’s WebCore and Force Feedback. Then he demonstrated his ability to rock out at video games. His Nascar demonstration was totally righteous of course

In the end, the second Power of X may not have equaled the first in excitement level, but it was certainly enjoyable and we hope it becomes a regular feature of MacWorld.