No, I wasn't there. But I did read engadget's liveblog, and have some thoughts on what Steve Jobs had to say:

1) Microsoft Bashing
Saith Jobs:

Our retail stores are selling half their Macs to people who've never owned a Mac before. Switchers. More than half the Macs sold in the US are to switchers.

OK, I know he's speaking to a very biased audience, but I'm surprised no one in the press called him out on this. He's suggesting that people who've never owned a Mac before are "switchers" (people switching from a Mac to a PC). But what about people who have never owned a computer before? Like, for instance, high school or college students buying their first machine. I don't have stats readily available, but I'm guessing Mac's market share among this crowd is 3-5 times its overall market share. Which makes his claim about switchers not only wrong, but very wrong.

On a related note, we have this:

We had a new competitor this holiday season, Microsoft's Zune. How'd they do? They garnered 2% market share in November 2006... We don't have data for December. No matter how you try and spin this, what can you say?

This was apparently followed by a video of a Zune bursting into flames. Here's my question: what do you think Microsoft's target penetration was for Year 1 of Zune? I'd be surprised if it was much more than 2%, given the iPod's 60-80% dominance in the space. Heck, later in his talk, Jobs boldly predicted that the iPhone would take 1% of the cellphone market in Year 1, and that market doesn't have a dominant leader like iPod. I guarantee someone at Microsoft has already created the internet commercial showing an iPhone bursting into flames after obtaining 1% of the market...

2) Apple TV
Like all Apple products, the physical device looks super cool. I'm also a huge fan of the onscreen menu, designed to look just like the iPod's. It might not have been the best interface for television in a greenfield, but since it's so ubiquitous now, it's instantly understandable by millions (particularly their target audience). So nice job there.

I think they're going to sell eleventeen billion of these suckers right out of the gate. But I think they're going to be surprised about how people use them. To wit: you can download content directly off the internet, you can synch content with your computer, and you can stream (but not synch) content from 4 other computers. So, question: why, except in rare cases, would you store videos locally on your AppleTV, as opposed to storing them somewhere on the internet? Or, if privacy's your thing, why not just store it on your computer & then stream it to the AppleTV when you need it? Basically, I'm predicting that the 40GB of storage is a bit of a waste. Also, the stream-but-don't-synch rule is the most half-hearted attempt at DRM I've ever seen. Most folks that buy this device will have wireless internet connections, right? So if I want to watch a video on my friend's AppleTV, I can stream it. But if I want to give him the video, I simply have to upload it to a web server, and then have him pull it down off the web with the AppleTV and store it locally. No extra hardware or software needed, and only a little bit of tech expertise.

3) The iPhone (soon to be called the ApplePhone)
Again, this device looks extremely cool. Thin, high-resolution, fully-featured, and with that "just works" quality that Apple is famous for. They'll sell five times as many of these as they do AppleTV's. But I'll never buy one.

Why not? Because they didn't solve my deal-breaker problem: I don't want to listen to music for a few hours, get where I'm going, and find out my phone is out of batteries because of all the music I've been listening to. Also, as a Blackberry user, I've learned very quickly that different applications use the battery at different speeds. With the Blackberry, I'd probably get five hours of talk time if that's all I did. But if I'm surfing the web, I can drain the thing in around two hours. When the battery gets low, I have to curtail my web usage so I still have a phone in case I need one. It's the worst of all combo-unit problems, and someone needs to solve it soon.

Ironically, Jeff Porten predicted what sounds like a perfect solution - two batteries. One for the phone, one for everything else. So one of two things is happening here: either Steve Jobs isn't reading The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy (and really, who's doesn't?), or someone decided it was more important for the device to be paper thin than to have two batteries.

Second point: I'm very, very curious to see what kind of coating the surface of this thing has. They're telling people to touch it all day long, drag their fingers around on it (including all manner of poorly manicured fingernails, dirt, sweat, etc.) AND they're telling them to put it up to their faces, complete with scratchy 5 o'clock shadow beards, more dirt, more sweat, etc. And this is the next generation of a device I wouldn't even breathe on unless it was inside it's clear plastic, protective case! Hopefully, at least one of their 200 patents was for scratch-proof surfaces...

Other things: Cingular as the sole provider. Jeff outlined some problems with this, although as I said in his comments, it doesn't surprise me, since this is how most cellular devices work these days. When iPhone is a huge success, I'm sure you'll eventually see a T-mobile compatible version. Then, we'll first start discussing "exclusive" content & features. That'll be fun.

Oh, and the pricing: $499 isn't so much, given what it does. But this logic about buying a $199 Nano and a $299 phone, combined into one device at "no premium" is pure spin. This thing costs them less to make than two separate devices. They're charging that much because they think people will pay. Plain & simple...

So, to summarize: Great product. Lots of potential pitfalls. Version 2 (or 3, or 4) will probably feature more memory, longer battery life, improved scratch-resistance, etc. and is probably the right move for the money-conscious customer. That said, lots of folks are going to "have to have it" right now, so look for killer success once again...

4) Corporate Strategy
To me, this was the most interesting thing in the keynote address:

So, today we've added to the Mac and the iPod, we've added Apple TV, and now iPhone. And you know, the Mac is the only one you really think of as a computer, and we've thought about this and we thought, you know, maybe our name should reflect this better than it does. From this day forward we're going to be known as Apple, Inc. We've dropped the computer from our name.

I think this is HUGE news. Why? Because it signifies two things:

First, that Apple is finally entering the fray as a world-class technology company. It's computers have always been niche products, hovering below the 10% market share threshold, even though their technology is typically superior to the competition. It's iPods, though, are category leaders, and they target the entire market: Mac & PC. The new products they introduced this year, AppleTV and iPhone, both target the iPod community much more than the Mac community (as a Windows user, I can use all the features & functionality of both devices). That means they're attacking the mass market, and that means the future is very, very bright indeed for Apple. In fact, I can now see the day where Apple gets out of the desktop/laptop business altogether (likely by splitting it off into a separate company & selling it to Dell or HP). Apple can continue to produce OS X and license it to the hardware guys (like Microsoft did with MS-DOS), and then focus on the mass-market, high revenue markets of music players, streaming TV devices and phones. Very, very cool.

Second, it means that Steve Jobs has found a very clever way out of the box the Mac Zealots had put him in. They winced at Intel chips, and mocked Windows on a Mac. But no one complained about the Windows version of iTunes, and no one is even mentioning the non-exclusivity of the iPod, the AppleTV, or the iPhone. Jeff and I have debated many times the reputational disaster that would occur if Apple tried to leave it's niche behind and go mass-market with its computers. We've talked about rebranding new products, sheltering the coveted Apple name, playing up to the zealots while pitching to the Windows crowd (like Disney did with Touchstone, etc.). Jobs has done a truly masterful job of achieving the same thing without changing brands. His new products have been so "Mac-like" in appearance and so undeniably successful, that the mass-market availability of them flew under the zealot radar and is now gone forever.

A couple years back, Apple sold more iPods than Macs for the first time. I'm sure that margin has grown since. And these new devices will expand it even further. In 3-5 years, when people talk about Apple's product line, the Mac will hardly be worth mentioning. And despite the zealot cry, that's a very good thing...