Inside the crowded halls of the Moscone Center the buzz runs steady today, as hundreds of products for Apple users make their debut from the third party community. Apple has limited its product announcements to a new suite of iWork and iLife apps, many which have significant upgrades. People are raving about the person and place identification in iPhoto ’09.
Of course, the most significant missing element is CEO Steve Jobs, who skipped Apple’s final MacWorld keynote. The vendor says it won’t participate in the 2010 edition of the conference, but some attendees and industry veterans here say that might change by next January. I doubt it, since Apple keynote address included the fact that Apple Stores bring in the equivalent of 100 MacWorlds every year, some 3.5 million.
Nobody here on the expo floor is bemoaning Apple’s exit, at least not in any public way. There are 40,000 attendees at this conference, down about 15 percent from last year. But putting 40,000 people in an expo center for three days generates a vastly different kind of energy, enthusiasm and optimism. The take-away walking out of these halls is a quantum leap of power over leaving an Apple Store, even after a One-to-One class, personal shopper session or a business consult.
Much of that is because of the vast range of solutions the Store knows little about. In a 300 square foot section of the expo floor I found four different document scanning and data storage solutions. Ways to capture business cards, store receipts. Some advertised integration with Filemaker, (Intelliscanner Mini) others could read data off a PDF created by an included scanner (NeatReceipts), and other offered communication using the auto-sync features of Address Book. Then there’s the mailing solutions, all demonstrated by people who answer questions without hesitation or reference to their company’s experts.
That’s a range you will never find in an Apple Store, because there’s 40,000 customers waiting to walk the aisles of two halls. The keynote, the classes — they’re just the icing on the cake and between the layers. As with any in-person conference, the networking and even listening to other customers questions at the booth teaches so much more than any Apple Store.
Best of all, arriving here on a $45 expo pass can earn that much in a discount for a single purchase, like a renewal for Lynda.com, the premier training Web site for applications and Macintosh and iPhone basic skills. It’s $250 for Lynda for a year, but just $200 here. And signing up got me a free $40 MacBlast ticket for tonight’s party. Perhaps it was the media badge, but perhaps not.
Apple is clearly finished with a quarter-century of expo releases, but the MacWorld Expo will go on for at least another year and probably more. It’s bound to be a smaller event, but one that still dwarfs most other computer conferences. And since the third party community provides most of the training, Apple’s exit won’t be changing that much, either.
The Apple booth is much downsized from last year’s, mostly a collection of lengthy tables of iMacs, the new 17-inch MacBook Pros and the unibody MacBooks. There’s a serious area of iPhones stocked with the thousands of applications for users to test and covet. So much of what’s offered new here is not the heart and soul of the Mac — no mention of Snow Leopard, no Apple TV upgrade, no beefed up Mac Mini. Instead, the users hear about Apple’s Work and Life suites, the Greenest Array of notebook computers, and a new scheme to reclaim MP3 music business from Amazon.
Apple is a mammoth company that become more vital to the consumer with every month. iPods did this, followed by the iPhone. If MacWorld 2009 is about any Apple computer, the vendor has made it about the iPhone and its cousin the iPod Touch. With applications all under $25 on these platforms, the volume and push on the growth of Apple is assured, even after the vendor skips out of these halls on Friday.
The third parties will remain to make the Mac into the small business and creative veterans’ platform of choice, growing even as Microsoft reaches into new visual and graphics aspect of Office Suite and the expo floor fills up with RAID backup solutions and enterprise grade backup clients into clouds and remote volumes.
Recent Comments