KEY POINTS:
It didn't take Macworld long to once again blow the much larger and lavishly produced Consumer Electronics Show out of the water.
But the Steve Jobs Show, which I watched via the internet, left me feeling a weird mix of awe, frustration and disappointment.
First, let's deal with the awe. The MacBook Air is the laptop I would buy tomorrow if I had $3000 to burn on a new computer. It looks beautiful with its thin profile and machined aluminium.
It is lightweight. But importantly, it doesn't limit you to drastically lower specifications.
I travel a lot, I use my laptop on my knees a lot, I need good processing power and I'd love to get five hours' battery life with Wi-Fi switched on. The multi-track pad incorporating the pinch and swish movements of the iPhone is a fantastic addition.
I was dark on the fact the Air doesn't have a built-in optical drive until Apple revealed the solution to this - other than buying the $99 external optical drive on offer. Software called Remote Disk will let you borrow the disk drive of another computer on your network to load software on to the MacBook Air.
Regarding the iPhone, the new embedded Google Maps feature, allowing your position to constantly be plotted on the map, will be incredibly useful if it works well. Without a GPS module on the iPhone it will rely on triangulating positions from cell sites.
Apple appears to be doing very smart things with its Time Machine box (from US$200 ($256) for a 500GB version), a little wireless-enabled device that syncs with the Time Machine software on a Mac to automatically and remotely back up the files on a computer.
PC users can do this already, but the Apple implementation looks to make it easier.
Now the frustration - the fact Apple is asking for US$20 from early iPod Touch buyers for a software update that will give them full email capability and access to stock quotes and weather updates. Buyers of new iPod Touches get the update for free, so why shouldn't early faithfuls?
The flawed Apple TV device gets an overhaul which removes its dependence on the computer. Users will be able to download movies via an interface on their TV screen directly to the Apple TV box, using their home internet connection.
But it is still a locked-down box, not the fully-fledged personal video recorder and media hub I hoped Apple TV would turn into. Apple will have to do better to capture the living room.
Oh, and by the way, we won't have access to the iTunes movie download service here in New Zealand until God knows when.
And on to the disappointment. What I really wanted to hear about in the Macworld keynote was detail of the software developers' kit Apple intends to release to allow the software industry at large to more easily develop applications tailor-made for the iPhone.
Why am I getting so excited about a bunch of software tools for tech geeks? Because it is this under-the-hood stuff that's going to make the iPhone even more useful than it is now.
The first time I used Google Maps and YouTube on my iPhone, I knew Apple was on to something. With the slick, high-resolution interface, the fast loading over a Wi-Fi connection and touch interaction, web services that are fiddly to use on other expensive phones are a joy on the iPhone.
Despite the MacBook Air's aesthetics and the healthy ties Apple has forged with the movie industry to allow those movie downloads from iTunes, Macworld was still all about the iPhone.
Apple said it had sold four million iPhones, which wasn't enough for Wall St, and there was no new iPhone with a faster data connection to stoke up demand.
The lack of detail on the developers' kit didn't go down well.
Which all goes to show just how much the technology industry, Apple investors and consumers alike are looking to this one company, which has seen a 38-fold increase in its share price in the last decade, to plot the way forward in the digital landscape.
