Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

22 July 2001

MWNY: Keynote and Expo Summary Notes

This year's Macworld Expo in New York will likely be forgotten, as the show simply didn't deliver on the hype that had been flowing around the Web for weeks. That being said, it wasn't completely a non-event either. There were some really good things this year that were never present at the show before—mostly vendors new to the Mac world that have taken a serious and important interest in the platform. A good example of this is Alias/Wavefront, the maker of Maya.

Jobs and the Keynote

Jobs came on stage in his regular fashion but right from the beginning it seemed there was something wrong. As stated in an earlier prediction it was assumed that Jobs would begin right away with one of the anticipated new hardware items. Instead he introduced "Ten on X" or ten key developers with some neat OS X software. Despite the stuff shown that segment of the keynote was quite a bore. By the time we hit developer number eight folks were getting restless in their seats.

Next up was a preview of Mac OS X (10.1) and the major emphasis there was all about speed. Jobs however seemed disappointed that they could only preview 10.1. And at one point the demo failed and he even through (or was it a rough toss?) a dead digital camera off stage to a tech to try to get it revived again. Eventually he came back to this moment to show off a particular feature of OS X.1 which will let a digital camera automatically recognize your photos and dump them into your Pictures folder where you can neatly see them in icon view. Pretty handy stuff.

When it came time to introduce new hardware the keynote was more than half way over. Not a good sign if you have attended keynotes before. But within minutes Jobs was touting the new speed of "QuickSilver", the internal code name of the new Power Mac G4 towers.

Perhaps the coolest moment of the keynote came when Jon Rubenstein came out and talked about the "Megahertz Myth" and provided a little narrative movie that graphically explained how processors work in terms of speed and megahertz. It was a wonderful introduction to the "pipeline" in chips.

After Jobs introduced the speed-bumped iMac line the keynote was basically over. No predictable "oh, I almost forget....one last thing". Too bad because by this point we were all in need of just such a surprise.

Exposition

Wouldn't be nice if not only every major Mac developer came to expo but we got new developers to come as well? At the same time?

Pipedream, you say? Perhaps, because this year was different. While there were cool new exhibitors this year like Alias/Wavefront and others, big boys like Adobe and Palm were nowhere to be seen. Adobe blamed economic hard times for its no-show, but the expo just felt different without Adobe there, even though its main rival, Macromedia, was there in full force.

Despite that buzz kill feeling of not having Adobe present, there were some cool exhibitors present. Fujitsu had a good booth with some great new gear. And the Newtek booth was completely packed with folks checking out Lightwave 6.5 under Mac OS X. And, of course, the Alias booth was a huge hit (more on that later).

Overall attendance numbers seemed good—especially on the first day—but by the end of the second it seemed that the life of the show was a bit weaker than the years before. Could the lack of any original new hardware announcements have something to do with this? Perhaps.

We have a lot to cover in our detailed reports (published today) and later in the week. So check back often. And we have show pictures as well!