Introduction

Welcome to MacWorld. Tuesday morning, Steve Jobs announced that he was changing the company name to just “Apple” instead of “Apple Computer.” This marked not only a change in the name of a company, but a change in the company’s focus. Slowly but surely, Apple has been reinventing themselves to be something more than just a computer company, they have been trying to sell the Apple lifestyle; so far this is a mission which they have been quite successful at doing.

Ironically, in the recent Apple TV ads, they have been trying to portray themselves to be very different from the PC world, using a “nerdy” looking actor portraying a PC, while using a young trendy looking guy to play the Mac. Funny thing though, at today’s event, there were more people who looked like the PC dude than the Mac dude walking around. In fact, at this event the majority of the exhibits were not for computers, but for audio and video accessories.

Even with this urge to be different, today’s Macs run Intel processors, use SATA interfaces, and are all the faster and more efficient due to this. Imagine where Apple would be today if they switched to the x86 platform earlier. What kept them from doing this is unclear, it is probably the same thing keeping them from putting more than one button on a mouse or a scroll wheel on a mouse…

In my visit to the MacWorld Expo, I wanted to give you guys a sense of the atmosphere, of what people were interested in. This week is a big one for trade shows, you have CES in Vegas, MacWorld in San Francisco, and the Detroit Auto Show. With all that, the biggest announcement of the week has probably been the iPhone.

iPhone

From all the hype yesterday, you would have thought that Apple invented the telephone. They called the act of making a phone call the “killer app,” and that the iPhone had figured this secret out.

That said, this is a device that I would probably want.

I see it as a phone that is linked to my personal information manager, i.e. my contacts and calendar. Current solutions from Treo and Blackberry have been okay, but not great. It is my hope that the interface of the iPhone will take from the iPod the simplicity and make it a great device.


A few downsides are that this thing is reported to cost $600 for 8GB of flash ram. I can get a full featured laptop for that price! They did not have any prototype to play with or to touch on display at the show. The information available on Apple’s website was more than what you could directly get from the conference.