MacWorld Day
Today is the keynote address at the annual MacWorld Expo in California. For Apple users the world around (and with the proliferation of iPhones and iPods, that number is growing by leaps and bounds), this is traditionally a big day. The iPhone was launched at a MacWorld keynote. The iMac, Powerbooks G3 and G4, Mac Mini, MacBook Air, Intel-based Macs, Apple TV, Time Capsule; all (okay, most) revolutionary Apple products launched during the keynote address of MacWorld…
…by Steve Jobs.
Now say what you will about Apple and Steve Jobs and fanboyism, but the fact is that he’s given every single MacWorld keynote since 1997. That qualifies as an institution. This year, not only has Apple announced that Steve will not be giving the keynote (apparently for health reasons), but that after the 2009 show, Apple will no longer appear at MacWorld. Waitaminute. It’s a Mac show, right? Yes and no. The conference is not an official Apple event, it’s produced by IDG World Expo, a spinoff of IDG, a media corporation who owns, among other things, MacWorld magazine. It is a forum for Macintosh developers, not necessarily Apple itself. Apple runs their own show, WWDC, held at the same location (the fabled Moscone Center in San Francisco) in June. But as the WWDC is a conference for software developers, most of the new products announced there are software applications.
So what’s their plan? Will Apple start making major hardware announcements at WWDC? Will they morph WWDC into a more global conference? Or will they (my prediction) ditch MacWorld for the far more news-friendly Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Vegas a few weeks after MacWorld? With Apple vying for a more mainstream market share and global adoption of their products, this seems a likely choice. Time will tell. Meantime, I’m all giddy. 90 minutes til keynote! 
friar tuck Says: January 6th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Fan boys will be in tears that their night in black sweater and jeans wont be there. Hopefully all of this madness for all thigns apple will die down without the biggest fan boy of them all (Jobs) egging the crowd on.
This does show that Apple is trying to create an image of their company without Steve Jobs. Which is something that most people can’t imagine, but will happen. Jobs is good at enthusiastically presenting concepts and ideas in ray of clean and minimalistic light that makes the crazies want to stand in line for days to get a product. So it will be interesting to see if Apple tries to continue this tactic with a “new” Jobs, or switch up their marketing a little bit.
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