KEY POINTS:
It has been announced that Steve Jobs, the charismatic CEO of Apple, will not do the keynote at January 2009's Macworld. Not only that, it will be the last Macworld event Apple will attend at the San Francisco Moscone Centre.
Once upon a time there were multiple Mac shows all over the world - even here, when Renaissance ran annual Apple road shows around the four main centres. I absolutely loved these as it was an opportunity to meet people in the industry, and to meet Kiwis who bought Macs (I worked for NZ's only, and now defunct, Mac magazine at the time). But Apple scaled back trade show attendance and, perhaps partly as a result, the NZ shows were discontinued.
To be sure, Apple has been scaling back on trade show attendance all over the world - it stopped attending the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and the Apple Expo in Paris.
Logistically, any trade show is difficult to stage. Renaissance did a fine job of freighting and coordinating all participant equipment up and down the country for the NZ shows, but I can't help thinking there may have been a few sighs of relief from some staff members when they were stopped.
Not from the punters though. The shows were thoroughly enjoyable, both from the attendee standpoint and from the industry angle. There's nothing quite like the horse's mouth for information, and New Zealand is like one big small town. I made lasting connections and benefited from the most direct feedback possible, both about Macs and my own endeavours, at the shows. Not only that, I got to visit Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington, which I loved.
But the internet has changed everything, and Apple also benefits from the direct interface with users in it's ever expanding chain of retail stores.
Indeed - as Apple posted in its statement: "Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple's Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways."
The announcement has surprised everybody. I have yet to read what this will do to Apple's product roll-out cycle. For a few years now it has been Macworld in January, the Worldwide Developer's Conference mid-year then September, with smaller releases sometimes happening in between.
What about Jobs, though? You'd think he'd want to keynote the last one, wouldn't you? But no...a fact that will inevitably raise the spectre of his health status once again. No, Jobs will not be doing his usual "One last thing" speech - it will be Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, delivering the keynote at the 2009 expo.
And that, said Apple, will be its last keynote. Boohoo for the fans.
Boohoo for me, too - I have never been to a Macworld conference, missing out on this January event for the fourth time due to lack of funds and sponsorship. I had already started saving money with the resolve that, come hell or high water, I would get to the 2010 Macworld, even if it was completely under my own steam. (Apple regularly hosts journalists to Macworld, but the scheme seems to only reach as far as Australia, despite New Zealand forming an important and undisclosed proportion of Apple Australia's sales figures.)
Well, now, I don't need to bother planing and saving. Damn it.
Mark Webster
