This morning kicked off the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California. Thousands of developers and press waited in line for the highly anticipated keynote by Phil Schiller.

Twitter was being flooded by attendees giving minute by minute updates using the hash tag #WWDC. At 12pm CST today, there were 78 new tweets per second with the WWDC hash tag attached. There was a lot of momentum and energy surrounding this morning's event -- people were predicting what was going to be announced, a new iPhone or OS, and rumors started to spread that someone saw Steve Jobs in the building, spawning the prediction that Jobs would make an appearance. When it came down to it, everyone just wanted to hear it from the man himself.

Enter, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

"Thank you, thank you very much. Welcome to WWDC. We have an amazing week planned for all of you, and I mean all of you. Can't you feel the love in this room? This is the best level of excitement for our dev conference yet. I'd like to show you one reason for that."

"This is a chart of OS X users in the first five years, 2002-07. Great growth, adoption, this is active users: up to 25 million. Something incredible has happened in the last two years…. We’ve TRIPLED the number of users. No wonder everyone’s racing behind us and following in our footsteps, so we'd like to tell you what we're doing to continue this market growth."

Today's major announcements:

New 13-inch MacBook "Pro"

• Available today
• Built-in battery that lasts up to 7 hours
• SD card slot
• LED-backlit glossy widescreen display
• 2.26GHz, 2GB DDR3, 160GB Hard Drive $1199

MAC OS X Snow Leopard

• Installs 45% faster
• Over 6GB more space
• Built in Microsoft Exchange support for Mail, Calendar, and Address Book
• All the major system apps run in 64-bit mode
• $29 upgrade for Leopard users, $49 for the family pack
• Apple OS X Snow Leopard - Enhancements & Refinements

Safari 4

• Download today
• Crash Resistance. The number one browser crash cause is plugins. Now, if the plugin crashes, all you have to do is reload the page.
• HTTP streaming, it works with any server
• Fastest browser on any platform

New iPhone 3GS (S for Speed)

• Multimedia messaging support (MMS)*
• Enhanced search
• Up to 2x faster than the 3G
• Improved battery life. Up to 5 hours 3G talk time, 9 hours of WiFI internet
• Rent and purchase movies right from your phone
• Tethering! Share your connection with your computer*
• More than 30 languages supported in OS 3.0
• Find My Phone. If you lose or misplace the phone, you can login to MobileMe and it will show you where the phone is. If it is lost or stolen, you can send a remote wipe command which will delete all of your data
• New camera and video
• Edit the video from your phone and share it instantly on YouTube or send it via email
• 16GB of storage $199, and $299 for a 32GB version.
• iPhone 3G will stay on the market and priced at $99.

*AT&T does not currently support MMS or Tethering. A major disappointment today.

Here are some fun facts that were included today in the presentation:

• There are 75M OS X users (tripled since the iPhone)
• Apple has hit 1 billion apps (in only 9 months)
• There are 50,000 apps in the store
• Apple has sold more than 40m iPhones and iPod touches.

You can watch the full keynote on Apple's website. In the end, Steve Jobs did not make a pubic appearance, but no one was even talking about it. Apple NAILED it today, exceeding media predictions and expectations.

What did you think of Apple's rollout? Did it meet your expectations? Were you expecting something different?

Image Sources:
WWDC 2009 via Flickr by mv10
Waiting in line inside this morning via Flickr by Lucien W. Dupont
Phil Schiller via Wikipedia

Sources:
Phil Schiller Keynote Live From WWDC 2009 by Joshua Topolsky
Live WWDC 2009 keynote coverage by Joshua Topolsky
Live stream thanks to @jmatuk