Apple's Back to the Mac Show Announces FaceTime for Macs

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Word keeps pouring out of the Back to the Mac show in ever-increasing amounts–watching Jobs and company issue pronouncements on the various new Mac products is almost like watching them try to stop an avalanche with fire hoses. Got to love John Ringo similes…. And frankly, I’m starting to think Jobs et al do in fact have sufficient water for that task on hand as I watch them announce the arrival of FaceTime for Mac.

FaceTime, as you’ll remember, is a hugely popular video chatting app that basically lets you convert your iPhone into a videophone. Some enterprising souls had even managed to get the idea of using FaceTime with iPhones for phone sex, which had to be all sorts of awkward, except for the guy who can’t get enough of role-playing V For Vendetta. And since fully 19 million devices have shipped with FaceTime, the demand is pretty well clear. In that spirit, it probably really was only a matter of time until the call went up from Mac users who wanted to make FaceTime calls to iPhone users.

And now, just like that, they can. Steve Jobs actually demonstrated the system himself from an on-stage Mac with help from cohort Phil Schiller, who in turn made it clear he was on his iPhone, which he always has with him.

Word straight from the show floor says that installation is very simple, with “nothing to set up, nothing to configure”, and that the beta version is actually already available even as you read this. So for those of you wanting to make calls face to face with your buddies online, if you’re Mac users, you’ll want to consider FaceTime more than ever.