The big theme at this year’s Macworld Expo is not a product, it’s a year: 2010. Next year’s conference is touted on banners, information booklets and even the show badges, which come with an ad for next year’s event — the first without Apple, its anchor tenant.
But if you want to see what the show will be like in 2010, sans Apple, come down to San Francisco's Moscone Center right now. Actually, don’t bother. It’s a snoozer, because without Steve Jobs, or any big new product launches, Apple might as well have not showed up today.
“Worst. Macworld. Ever.” said one attendee after the Tuesday keynote. “This sucks.”
This year’s keynote was an epic yawner. No new iPhone. No new iPod. No new iMac, and — despite lots of pre-show hype, rumor and buzz — no new Mac Mini. The big news? It’s a battery. Apple certainly has new hardware offerings in development, but it isn’t announcing them here.
Yet in other slow news years, Apple has shared the stage with some of those developers, even granting Microsoft some time in the spotlight. This year, third-party developers were given exactly zero seconds. It was almost like the company was trying to go out on a whimper.
Indeed, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior VP of product marketing who took over keynote duties from Jobs this year, got in a little swipe at the event itself just after the opening bell. Noting that Apple Stores now serve more than 3.4 million customers a week, he went on to declare “that's 100 Macworlds each and every week going on in our Apple Stores.”
Ouch.
The keynote also ended with a thinly veiled insult: Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” — surely a goodbye middle finger to International Data Group, which owns Macworld Expo.
"We've done plenty of Macworlds without Apple in other countries," insisted Pat McGovern, CEO of IDG, after Tuesday’s keynote. "The Mac community has a lot of people exploring all sorts of different interests. Members of that community and developers will always have a place at Macworld."
However, the 2010 theme is so pervasive that it almost seems as if IDG is overcompensating. And perhaps it is, afraid of what attendance will be like next year without the Apple anchor that’s normally the big draw.
Analyst Tim Bajarin, president of market research firm Creative Strategies, said Apple spends about $25 million on Macworld. That is money better spent on its chain of retail stores, which attract far more customers than Macworld ever could. "It is rational for Apple to pull out of Macworld," Bajarin said. "Apple is right to spend its money on getting more people into its stores."
Bajarin said he took Apple's announcement about Jobs' health at face value. It sounded right, he said, adding if Jobs' health is in jeopardy, Apple's board has a serious financial duty to disclose it. He said he expects to see Jobs in the new year, possibly with a new product line. "For the last decade, if Apple has a new product, Steve is the one to announce it."
Perhaps it was just as well Jobs stayed away. As one Twitterer put it: "The Macworld keynote left me unimpressed. Maybe that's why Steve Jobs didn't present today."
Instead they got Schiller, who launched into his presentation by declaring that the news today was going to be all about Macs, and that he was going to announce three new things. Only one of these turned out to be about an actual computer: a new 17-inch MacBook Pro.
The other two major announcements were software suites — iLife and iWork — and Schiller spent the bulk of his presentation describing them in detail.
The iLife demo showcased some nifty new features in iPhoto: facial recognition and tagging, automated export to Flickr and Facebook, and a geotagging function. He also unveiled iMovie’s new editing features, which look incredibly slick, and finished with GarageBand, which now includes celebrity tutorials (from musicians like Sting) on how to play the piano and guitar.
Next was iWork, where there was no big news. The product announcements centered around new versions of Pages (documents), Numbers (spreadsheets) and Keynote (presentations). Apple also announced iWork.com, essentially a cloud computing version of the desktop software that allows for collaborative editing. Think Google Documents, only Apple-fied.
The last of Schiller’s three talking points was a new 17-inch MacBook Pro with an integrated, non-removable battery that the company claims will run for eight hours and recharges 1,000 times.
Finally, after stepping over Steve Jobs’ traditional "one more thing" line (we’d wager most in the audience barely heard Schiller mumble it) he circled back around with a crafty “one last thing,” which turned out to be iTunes news.
But instead of the final news being the biggest, as per tradition, this was yet another yawner. DRM is disappearing from iTunes, bringing Apple on par with Amazon. Also of note: Songs will have a three-tiered pricing plan, with tracks going from $1.29/$.99/$.69 a pop.
Given that Apple has long resisted variable pricing, the backtracking didn’t come across as fantastically awesome as Schiller tried to deliver it. Topping it off was Tony Bennett, who came onstage and belted out a couple of songs nobody under 60 knows.
In short, this was the future of Macworld Expo: One without any exciting news from Apple.
