Applelinks contributing editor Gary Coyne is on hand at Macworld Expo San Francisco 2003, and he's sent us the following report of yesterday's events.
Starting the morning out feeling like a cow in a hearding session, we press folks waited and waited until we finally were let in to watch the [keynote]. About 10-15 mintues late, Jobs got out there and presented a bunch of statistics on how great Apple was doing. It always sounds nice when he says it--just wish Wall Street believed him like we do.
Apparently, despite the fact that my son wanted a new updated iPod, Jobs felt that new laptops were the focus of the show. They are a tight focus. After the event, getting anywhere near them was veeerrryyyy diffucult. What I was most curious about was how big they are. Sure, 17 screen is big, but how big is the box. I took my tape measure up to one and asked the gentlemen using it if I could get near it long enough to measure the dang thing. He "relented" and let me measure it. (It's 15.5 x 10.25 inches.) After I got the measurement, he looked at me as if "OK, not get the hell out of here!!!!" I did.
I then had exactly the same experience with a young lady who was looking at the 12 inch version. (It's 11 x 8.75 inches). These people did let me measure them, but boy...
Apple does a good job getting the show ready after the keynote. When we left the hall, signs within the convention center are all over the place talking about all the stuff we just learned about. How they get all the signs up so fast, so cleanly, has always bewildered me. By the way, there were about 4,000 people at the keynote, and all of us received a free copy of the new program from Apple, called Keynote. Leaving the keynote address took a long time. No one seemed to want to exit from a side door and fail to get the program. We were good, patient people waiting for free stuff.
Neither of these [new computers] will boot up in OS 9, and that left a big gap for the repair disk industry. Fortunately both the Drive 10 CD by MicroMat will boot in OS X, and DiskWarrior will soon (within a month) have a CD that will boot in OS X. I'll be doing a review of Disk Warrior X as soon as it's released. Symantic is also here, but I haven't gotten to them yet. Their new version is OS X compatible, but, when I did my review of Norton X, it could not boot up in OS X. I'll be talking to them tomorrow and see what the newest status is.
The show is very crowded on the floor, and it seems that there are many, many vendor here. Reality is that Apple has the largest booth I've seen. It's double the size of a normal "largelarge" booth. Exhibit halls normally rope off excess space, but, with Apple taking so much space, this isn't necessary. Either way, it's space well used as there are many, many PowerBooks, iMacs, and towers everywhere for people to try out. Beyond measuring the size of the new PowerBooks, I was unable to get anywhere near anything. My elbows are not sharp enough I guess.
Much new software is coming out, and all of it's in OS X. Some of the software (like Connectix) will continue to be dual OS 9/X compatible because, as they point out, the majority of their sales are in OS 9.
Gary's coverage ended there, but there's certainly more to come. We'll be sure to pass it along as soon as it comes our way.
