Auckland forum brings brand's followers together for expert sessions on tech giant's products.
It won't quite be on the scale of the annual Californian love-ins attended by thousands of software developers, but local devotees of Steve Jobs will gather in Auckland today and tomorrow to pay homage to Apple.
AUT University is hosting CreativeTech, at which Apple computers and other gadgets, and Mac software from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft, will be on display. A series of talks will cover how to use Apple gear for everything from movie-making to running a business.
Leavening the technical sessions will be two speakers from Australia, both originally from North America: Mark Pesce and Matthew JC. Powell, who both have solid Apple credentials.
Pesce styles himself as a futurist, having made a name years ago as co-creator of VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language). He did a stint as a software developer on contract to Apple and then studied social media, which will be his main topic at CreativeTech.
Powell is a long-time Apple follower as a journalist at Australian Macworld, and for the past couple of years has run online publication MacTheMag. He is not, he hastens to point out, a fanboy - an Apple faithful who hangs on to every word uttered by His Jobsness.
Powell has covered plenty of Apple events and remains pretty clear-eyed about the company, unlike the American press, who routinely rise to their feet and applaud Jobs when he reveals some new item of Mac goodness - or even badness.
He remembers a Macworld expo in New York at which Jobs told journalists that a hitherto free product, iTools, was to be rechristened .Mac and would henceforth cost US$99 a year.
"I wasn't one of the people on my feet cheering when Steve Jobs said iTools wasn't going to be free anymore. While I have a certain preference for the Mac platform and have found Apple a fascinating company to follow ... I wouldn't like to be called a fanboy."
Powell has twice met Jobs. On the first occasion he got into a conversation with him at a product launch without the CEO knowing he was a journalist, only to have him turn on his heel when he found out.
While another high-profile business boss might have been unfazed, Jobs is notoriously touchy about how the company communicates with the media, to the extent that his perception of reality might be questioned.
The hoo-ha following the arrival of the iPhone 4, with its apparent antenna problem, is a good illustration. When the media zeroed in on the issue, Jobs reluctantly fronted up to a press conference.
When Jobs said "maybe we should have a wall of PR people keeping us away from this stuff but we don't", Powell says, there was "a sense of unreality about it.
"Apple does have a wall of PR. It has a 12ft-tall impenetrable stone wall of PR ... the whole culture of Apple is of very, very tightly controlled communication."
If that's one side of the cult of Jobs, the other is the influence he has wielded in making Apple an innovator, Powell says.
"Apple doesn't just create computers, Apple doesn't just write software - Apple makes systems. The product Apple creates is innovation." The latest example is the iPad, which Powell predicts will be central to Apple's future. For him, the killer application is iTeleport, with which he connects to his Apple laptop from anywhere, allowing him to use the laptop's programs on the iPad.
Needless to say, Powell is also an iPhone owner and, like Jobs, thinks the antenna issue was overblown.
Mark Pesce is another owner of the Apple iMac, iPhone and iPad holy trinity, and admires the way the company does its homework on product design.
"Even though everyone thinks it's the word of Jobs, it doesn't work that way. Steve gives an overall design and direction and will say whether things feel right but then they go down to the Apple testing lab and those things are tested endlessly."
Not that everything about Apple is perfect. "The one complaint I have is that, as a programmer, I want to be able to program the iPhone in the language I choose, not the language Steve chooses.
"I want the best tool for the job, not be handed a spanner and told to make the best of it."
Applefest
* Mark Pesce speaks this morning and Matthew JC. Powell tomorrow at CreativeTech, AUT University, Wellesley St, Auckland.
* Tickets and information: creativetech.net.nz
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist.
