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Jobs Not Giving This Year's Macworld Keynote
Many readers including thermopile wrote in about Apple withdrawing from Macworld Expo after this year. The other bad news for Apple fans is that Steve Jobs won't be delivering the keynote in 3 weeks — we may have seen his last "one more thing." Apple VP Phil Schiller will be doing the honors. He's "an Apple executive notably lacking in Jobs's showmanship and star power," according to the Fortune blogger. Apple's press release states that "trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers." While this may be true, the keynote addresses have been a critical venue for major new product announcements. Apple's stock is taking a 6% hit in after-hours trading, possibly on concerns about Jobs's health. Reader Harry has gathered together YouTube clips from most of the Macworld keynotes Jobs given since 1997.
I have been following Apple for more than 20 years, including stints at MacWorld and today's headline is a repeat of the mini-drama that Apple has been having with the Expo for decades. But today is different.
Ignore the dispute about who controls MacWorld Expo's agenda. Apple feels like on top of the world (always has) and they want absolute control. But they also had found a great recipe for success. Two years ago, on the cab from the caltrain station to Moscone, the taxi driver asked us if we were there for this new "iPhone thing". The hype was just so big, the distortion field so powerful, the force was with Apple.
Somehow, no cab driver ever asked me about Android.
Think of the history: the iPod, the MacBook Air, the iPhone... By having someone else present the keynote this year, our collective expectations just sunk by an order of magnitude. I, for one, don't expect anything amazing this year. But on the other hand, it's only fair: even Apple can't pull off revolution after revolution, year after year. Give them a break, they are doing so much already by showing everyone how boring other products are.
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Nooooooooo!!!
Fearless Leader, why have you forsaken us?
I promise not to bitch about the lack of firewire in the new Mac Minis, unlike my faithless ranting about the new MacBooks! Just come back.
If I don't get my regular of RDF rays I go all wonky and think about buying crap from Dell! Or running Darwin on a home built system as a back end media server!
Help us Steve Jobs, you're our only hope!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
This article about Job's not doing the keynote says the worries this is generating about his health are hurting Apple stock. Is there any other company with it's perception of viability so closely linked to a single living individual? I'm unaware of any right now. It's makes this whole thing pretty interesting. He is a human and can't live forever, regardless of how his health is right now. It seems maybe they have seen that with the earlier rumors about his health and have realized they need to start building a transition while he is still around so the company wont take as big a hit when he is gone.
Or maybe it is all much more mundane than that - but I've never seen this type of announcement gain so much press before. It's on every MSM news outlet as well as all the tech sites.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Somebody think up something that includes the term "beleaguered".
That's why the imagineers invented animatronics.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
> "trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers." While this may be true, the keynote addresses have been a critical venue for major new product announcements.
Maybe they don't have anything.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
... checkout this presentation from OpenStep Day, 1995 in which Jobs applies the famous reality distortion field not to iPods and Macs, but to Corba, OLE, Web Objects, and other Enterprisey Middleware.
And the "One More Thing" moment? Using Netscape 1.0 to demo Web Objects and Windows NT 3.1 interoperability.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
We know Steve is going to die, someday.
Why do you hate Apple? Hater.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
... don't be too hard on Phil. NO ONE has Steve's "showmanship and star power." At least he's kind of fun and entertaining. Should still be good. And as fun as it is to watch him Steve present, what will matter after the RDF wears off is what was announced. The only difference between Steve and Phil presenting is that with Phil, you'll notice the one secret sucky thing Apple builds into every product within 30-90 minutes instead of the customary 6-36 hours.
Just remember to buy on the rumor, sell on the announcement, and start the framework of your "This product is the BEST THING EVER except for the (crappy battery life/DRM/Apple lock-in/no wireless)" blog entry so you can just fill in the blanks and be the first one to share your oh-so-valuable opinion with the world. Be sure to talk about how Apple is going to be out of business in 3 months because they didn't listen to you.
In other words, just sit back and make the usual preparations and get ready to enjoy the Last Big Show.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Well, there goes AAPL's stock price. Now the thinking on Wall Street will be that Steve Jobs is going to kick the bucket at any moment.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's 2008. Steve Jobs has already delivered the keynote at Macworld 2008.
Next year is 2009.
...and watch the stock crater tomorrow.
Unfortunately, ever since Jobs lost significant weight as a result of his surgery (an obligatory side effect for the type of surgery he had), MacWorld keynotes have become a "Steve Jobs Death Watch" for the press. Before, during and after the keynote, more ink is spent on speculations regarding his health than the product announcements.
I think one side benefit of Apple's abandoning MacWorld is the press can no longer turn it into a morbid event.
Steve Jobs doesn't care about Mac people.
The cookie told me to.
We know Steve is going to die, someday.
Even if it's only for three days.
The 2009 keynote has happened. As expected, no revolutionary products revealed. Nothing of note. Just a refresh of the Mac Mini. Just as the mac faithful are just about to pour out of Macworld, downtrodden, a voice rings out of the microphone.
"Just one more thing."
Steve Jobs, healthy and fit and in his trademark turtleneck, stands with his hands clasped together at the podium. He smiles as the audience members fall silent, taking their seats. "We aren't quite done yet... Say 'hello' to the..."
New CEO of APPLE... (thunderous yet slightly confused applause dies down)
Jobs in a slightly coy flirtatious voice...."Come on out Steve"..
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Apple doesn't need Macworld because Apple doesn't need fanboys any more.
The Apple fanboy crowd is totally irrelevant to the iPod/iPhone line - those are mass-market consumer products. The laptop product line is aimed more at the status-conscious crowd. Neither market is the Macworld demographic.
Consumer electronics are never seen for its technical merits. It is all about user interface, always has.
What good is having the latest tech where you have to dig it out a seven-level-deep menu structure to use it? Having a clean, simple interface is the key to succes.
And I'm not a Machead by a long shot, either.
I'm going to guess that Apple is backing out of Macworld SF because it's so poorly run that no one wants to go. $20k for a table? sure. five 30" Cinema displays 'go missing' from the loading dock? sorry, not our fault, not our problem. Need a new outlet? You have to hire one of our electricians. How many hours do you want him for? oh, we don't know how long it'll take, you have to figure that out yourself.
The company that runs Macworld runs it half-assed, they don't care about attendees because they know they're the only game in town and people will pay regardless, and they don't care about vendors, because again, you need the exposure or your competitor is going to get it first.
If we're lucky, Macworld will die off and be replaced with something better.
no doubt next year will be the year of the Inetbook. A little white netbook that everyone can carry around with them. Oh wait they already exist as eeepc's et al, but this will be the first one with MacOS and will be super trendy. They will revolutionise portable computing
He's "an Apple executive notably lacking in Jobs's showmanship and star power," according to the Fortune blogger.
Nonsense! Behold and rejoice! The era of Schillermania begins! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Woooooooooot!
Want to know something... Gapless playback and album art is an advance. This is what gets me with geeks and programmers. Instead of focusing on what the client wants, they focus on what they *think* the client wants.
And guess what the client wants album art... This is why Apple is a rocket and Google with its android a dud...
The day of the techie and their ueber geek arrogance is gone, they need to start delivering products clients want...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Are you serious? I have had nothing but touch screen phones since 2001.
The models I used actually started out as pure touch screen and then added keyboards (retaining the touch screen) because you can type faster with buttons (and the Xerox graffiti lawsuit). You can also touch-type with buttons.
The iPhone has nothing really new except that it was marketed to everyone and not just PDA users. Suddenly smartphones are "cool" because Apple makes one. That's fine.
I've been a Mac user for over 20 years. I'm typing this on a Mac. I'm glad Apple is doing well.
I'm also glad that people still make real smartphones like Treos, because I am a PDA user and I refuse to give up meaningful features for marketing fluff and looks. My four-year-old Treo model has many, many features that the iPhone lacks, including multimedia features like stereo bluetooth support and over a decade's worth of third-party software available directly from the people who developed it.
By saying that you show that you completely misunderstand the mindset of the Apple customer.
People that buy Apple products are not concerned with motherboards, chipsets, memory speed, CPU or other technical details so much (except perhaps MacPro buyers, esp. if they come from PC background).
People that care about that build their own PCs (I have certainly).
People who buy Apple want their computer to be transparent, they don't want to tinker with it endlessly (like that guy fixing old cars in his garage and never having it actually working, he just enjoys tinkering - kind of like Linux people early on).
If you say macbook is just like any other laptop then you don't get it. Look at any other laptop and just look at the level of "noise" on the keyboard designs these days. Find me one keyboard that doesn't scream at you with 5 things written on each keyboard with different colored letters, keys non-standard width or position etc.
That's just one detail, and then look at the beauty of simplicity of classical Macbook keyboard. It just disappears, and doesn't scream at you.
Macbook aluminum case feels so solid and sturdy, better than any other laptop I have ever held. And it does not have things written on it all over the place (certainly not stupid metal labels like Intel Inside or built for Vista), or things glued to it at the bottom containing certain product key.
The computer is sophisticated and simple, understated like luxury European sedan (think BMW, a lot of people don't get that one either, that's why you see idiots that put chrome wheels, and fart exhausts on their BMW).
And then we get to other soft things like the OS. That one is a topic on its own, but the joy of using OS X would be worth it to me even without these other things.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
She's right. Apple is the AOL of mp3 players and has dumbed down the interface and lowered expectations so much that people think gapless playback or album art is a major advance in the state of the art.
Guess what: most people who buy "mp3" players want to (duh!) listen to music on them. Apple have provided a nice, clean, clear way of doing this, something which many other players (especially the cheap'n'cheerful ones) have made a complete pig's ear of (Windows Mobile, anyone?)
Geeks don't like having to use iTunes but obviously haven't spent enough time on the Helldesk to understand that lusers aren't always very good at copying files around, or working out what drive letter their USB device has appeared on.
Apple actually understands the difference between a general purpose computer that geeks can program and customise and a domestic appliance which "just works".
If you buy a general purpose computer from Apple these days, it comes with a complete set of developer tools and all the Unixy command-line goodness that a geek could want (or you can just slap Linux on it). Buy an iPod, however, and, shock horror, it works like an appliance in that is a bit closed with a simple interface, for much the same reason that TVs haven't come with vertical hold and convergence knobs since sometime last century.
gapless playback or album art is a major advance in the state of the art.
Yeah, I know - if only all those iPod customers realised that if they'd only applied the kgpzdzi patch to their lame tarball and re-built it with --enable-no-session-margin, then added the knobwurst repositories to their apt.conf and done apt-get upgrade xine that (provided they re-ripped their CDs with the -qZpxt options to cdparanoia) they could have had these features months before the iPod.
Plus, sadly, you only really need gapless playback for prog rock and the people who make Apple's money for them seem to prefer Britney.
Even the Amarok player, despite being named after a prog album with a single 60-minute track, seems a bit biassed towards track-based music.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
With so much information available online, and with the ability to purchase things with just a few mouse clicks, why would I go to such a trade show today? For me, that's easy.
So I will once again show up at Macworld SF and will hope that IDC will find it profitable to continue running the show. That gives companies the chance to show their stuff rather than struggling to get their product stocked and displayed by the Apple retail store or other merchants (who show only a tiny percentage of what's available out there). I'm likely to show up at future Macworlds, too, since my purpose for attending isn't to see Apple's products, but to see everything else.
Its not so much the "day of the techie" but shifting markets.
In some way this is similar to the way the Wii has dominated this generation of console development. It hasn't brought better graphics (barely improving on GameCube level), it bundled in a Gimmick of a controller, but what they DID was appeal to a much larger audience that normally wouldn't have even bothered buying a console.
Buy enlarging the market, and taking all of those new users as their own, they retook the console lead.
Likewise the market for handheld and smartphones is blossoming from "techies" and pure business users, to everyone. Techies and business users each have one set of requirements. A device that appeals to everyday users has another set. Ultimately what powers the iPhone's appeal is two things. The first is a simple and elegant interface design. When the first gen iPhone came out people were talking how it didn't have more features than other smartphones, but it made the features it had more accessible, so more people were using them. The second thing the iPhone has going for it is the App Store. The success of getting people to develop applications for the iPhone help transfor the generic device into something that can fit what each user needs. The fact that Apple acts as gatekeeper also tries to keep a consistent level of quality in the apps (even if you don't agree with their decisions about what Apps are allowed in the store).
For android to match that, they'll need to match both things. I haven't seen the interface live but the demos I've seen look functional but slightly less "polished". The thing they can't match though is the App Store. Until they develop enough of a critical mass of programs, they won't be able to, and without some central and easy way for micropayments to happen that developers buy into, its tougher to gain the momentum.
The other thing the iPhone has going for it is just what you said "Gapless playback and Album Art". Lots of people own an iPod. An iPhone integrates directly with their iTunes library which, for many people, is a big plus right there.
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