Apple today announced that 2009 will be the last year the company exhibits at Macworld Expo.
Citing the declining efficacy of reaching its audience through participation in trade shows, the company issued a press release indicating Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo. Schiller’s will be Apple’s last keynote at the show, which held its debut event in 1985.
The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.
With the increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website, the company is able to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in ways a trade show could never hope to.
Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.
Just in time for getting a little bit of the backstory before the 25th Anniversary of Mac kicks into high gear, Computer Shopper has a great look back at the very early years of Apple Computers by Editor in Chief Emeritus Stan Veit. We’re talking early enough that Steve Jobs was willing to give away 10% of the company for $10,000, according to Veit.
The long article is well worth a read for Veit’s inside take on the two young, “long haired hippies and their friends” who eventually revolutionized the world. It’s not an especially flattering portrait of Jobs, though it’s had plenty of company on that score over the years. The article does contain some great early pics of Jobs and Woz and some of the earliest Apple gear.
UPDATE: With thanks to reader James of RetroMacCast, credit is due to the original creator of this and many other wonderful mosaix-technique portraits, Athens, Greece-based artist, Charis Tsevis. You can download and listen to a podcast interview with Tsevis here.
Flickr user mic.imac has a fascinating portrait up of Steve Jobs, comprised entirely of artfully arranged Apple products. The portrait echoes a theme that runs through the upcoming Welcome to Macintosh documentary my colleague Nicole Martinelli wrote about on Monday, which is that the people who work at Apple give themselves entirely to the work of designing and producing the products the company makes.
Of no one is that statement more true than Steve Jobs. As CoM founder Leander Kahney says in the documentary, “Apple is Steve Jobs.”
“Welcome to Macintosh” (subtitle: the documentary for the rest of us) features a mix of history and cult with interviews from ex-Apple employees, engineers and community members, shedding light on the company’s innovations, failures, cultural impact and what the future holds post co-founder Steve Jobs.
As we noted, it was announced out on DVD this fall, but the delay makes this a good bet for the Mac fanatic on your Christmas list. (Word to the wise: pre-order, since it won’t ship until mid-December).
On sale from the official site, the DVD, which costs about $20, offers three hours of extra content including extended interviews, a “making of” feature, trailers and photo journal.
The doc features a number of Macsperts including CoM’s Leander Kahney. In the trailer he speaks on design: “That’s what makes these products so beautiful, that level of comittment and dedication to the thing. To make it the best thing possible.”
UPDATE: Tons of People have signed up already. It will be this afternoon before I can add anyone else. I’ll have an update on the specific prized to be awarded later this week!
For those of you who’ve been following our Greatest Mac Moments posts. We’ve not discontinued them. They weren’t generating the kind of discussion I’d hoped, so we’re moving the format to monthly, where we’ll publish 5 at a time, which ought to spur some discussion.
Also, we’d like to announce another project. Following on the heels of our ridiculously successful “Just One More Thing” timeline, we’d like to create a timeline of Apple Products, complete with Dates, times and announcement videos if we can find them.
We would like Your Help! We’re going to open this one up to CoM readers to contribute. The top contributors will be eligible for prizes like an iPhone, iPods and other cool gear!
The Timeline is Here. It’s blank right now, but we hope to have it complete by the 25th Anniversay of the Mac in January.
If you’d like to contribute, send an email to: CoMTimeLine at gmail dot com, include a valid email address and we’ll get you set up.
A film that looks at the evolution and culture surrounding the Macintosh has been selected to the shortlist of the 2008 Naperville Independent Film Festival which takes place next week.
That exclusive interview was added just before the movie’s European premiere at the Globians Documentary Film Festival in August. The documentary mixes history, criticism and Apple idolatory into an exploration of the early years of Apple as seen through the eyes of Apple employees, engineers, resellers and supporters.
This week’s entry in the ‘Greatest Mac Moment’ series caused a bit of debate in our sacred halls. The contrarians questioned how a piece of software that wasn’t even originally written by Apple could possibly be one of the top 25 of Mac moments ever. Browse the opinions of our staff, and let us know your own!
Pete Mortensen: In many ways, iTunes is the most significant software program ever created by Apple. Without iTunes, there could be no iPod, and without iTunes for Windows, there could be no iPod and iPhone for Windows, which would mean far lower revenues for Apple these days. It showed people that Apple could do more than just make computers, and it opened the company’s first significant new market in years. Without iTunes, there is no third-wave Apple.
On the other hand, iTunes is only really important in retrospect. QuickTime for Windows already existed as a beachhead into the Dark Side for Apple, and MP3 software was widely available and adopted on Macs prior to the release of iTunes (ask any lovers of Audion what they think of iTunes 1 and 2 if you don’t believe me). While it’s clear that Apple had the iPod in mind as it rolled out iTunes, the digital hub strategy was more a hypothesis than a market reality in those days. Though many people credit iTunes for turning iPod into the cultural sensation that it became, I think it’s actually the converse. The iPod drove demand for iTunes. Thanks to the iPod, iTunes matured into the world’s leading jukebox program and helped drive Apple’s last seven years of growth. But for a first-generation program, it was kind of sad.
Leigh McMullen: I don’t disagree that iTunes is important enough to be one of the ‘Greatest Mac Moments’, I just disagree with its position on the list. If anything it needs to be MUCH MUCH Higher. iTunes ought to be in the top 5, and here’s why: it’s a little celebrated fact that iTunes is the most popular piece of software for Microsoft Windows. It is very likely that there are more legitimately licensed copies of iTunes out there than Windows Vista!
With its popularity, iTunes is the official ambassador of the “Mac Experience” to forlorn Windows users everywhere. It is in this capacity, that iTunes is second only to the switch to Intel processors in driving people to switch to Macintosh. Anything that is responsible for that degree of proliferation of our beloved platform has got to be more important that #21 on our list!
Craig Grannell: I think Pete and Leigh have both missed one of the most important aspects of iTunes, in that—for better or worse—it’s driven UI considerations elsewhere on Macs: Finder is, to all extents, iTunes for documents, iPhoto is iTunes for photos, and so on. Therefore, iTunes is pretty much welded to the modern Mac experience and subsequently deserves to be on the list. On the surface, iTunes is just a media manager, but it clearly has plans for world domination; so don’t be caught unawares by SoundJam’s kid, because before you know it, the thing will have taken over the world.
Update: Lonnie’s interview with TalkingHeadTV below.
Although not a Mac itself, iPhone instigated a major shift in the personal computing market not unlike the original Mac, and its arrival has propelled Apple’s remarkable turnaround onward–the one started by the Bondi Blue iMac, itself something of a successor to the original Mac. Therefore, at the very least, iPhone deserves to be on this list, because its success means a healthier Apple, which in turn means healthier Macs. However, it also has to be on this list, because iPhone undoubtedly provides a glimpse of what the future of the Mac will be.
Craig Grannell:
Of our list of 25 Mac moments, this is one of the most contentious for me. The iPhone is not a Mac. Its operating system is OS X, rather than Mac OS X. And the only obvious relationship it has with a Mac is that a typical iPhone user is somewhat likely to plug their iPhone into one at some point.
However, some commentators argue that the iPhone is effectively the next-generation of the Mac, and even if that isn’t the case, it’s pretty clear Apple’s smartphone is in one sense a sounding board for the future of its company, and that technology from the device will eventually trickle down to future Macs. And for that reason, iPhone justifies its place in our top 25 Mac moments.
Pete Mortensen: As an audience member when Jobs took the wraps off the iPhone, the biggest impact that it left on me was this: that Apple’s business plan was not just a pattern of steady upgrades across an established product portfolio. This was a company prepared to not just make the best media players and computers in the world, but one that was prepared to bring about world-changing innovations that are years ahead of the competition. It was confirmation, once and for all, that the iPod was never a fluke, but a signal that Apple could do something far more than what it was doing today.
In short, the iPhone made it exciting to think about where Apple is capable of going in the next five years.
Leigh McMullen: See now, I absolutely believe that iPhone is a Macintosh. It’s more powerful than all but the top of the line Macs from the 2002-2003 era. As we move more towards “cloud computing” processing power “in hand” becomes less important than connectivity and functionality. iPhone may just be a phone / ipod / camera / blender today, but it is also very much the future of both Apple and Macintosh.
Quick Look. Two words that brilliantly sum up one of the most important and yet least celebrated additions to the Mac experience. When stripped down to basics, Quick Look is merely a document preview. But what a preview! Using it, you can preview the majority of documents on your Mac by selecting them and hitting space, without opening the documents’ parent applications. Quick Look showcases the best of Apple and the Mac, highlighting how it’s sometimes the most obvious things that can be used as the basis for innovation and making the computing experience better.
Craig Grannell:
People use a whole lot of files, and Quick Look has the potential to save Mac users a lot of time every single day, by providing a full and simple preview to a selected file that doesn’t take ages to render, doesn’t require parent apps to open, and is often actually preferable to using apps at all. (I certainly rarely use Office now, preferring to read Word and Excel documents in Quick Look.) It shows how much Quick Look has become ingrained in me that I spent a good ten seconds dumbly hammering space on my iBook yesterday before realizing that, no, it doesn’t actually have Leopard installed.
For me, Quick Look shows what the best thing is about the Mac experience: it’s not about bells and whistles, and it’s not about flashy, showy gimmicks–it’s about doing something in the simplest, most efficient and intuitive fashion, in order to improve the experience for the user. And even though each use of Quick Look may save only a few seconds, it’s often the little things in the Mac user experience that leave the biggest impressions.
Leigh McMullen:
It’s hard to image that a simple OS feature could be considered one of the top Mac moments of the past 25 years. Nevertheless, Quicklook is truely a game changing feature, all the more so for its incredible subtlety. The implementation is so Apple. Take a feature (document preview) and make its implementation so seemless that it disappears. It’s like two-finger scrolling on Macbook Pro trackpads, you don’t even notice you’re doing it.
If you work with a lot of documents and doubt this feature’s importance, take the Tiger challenge: try using 10.4 for a day.You’ll be banging on that space-bar with so much frustration your colleagues will think you’re playing Quake.
For those of you following along at home, we’re counting down the greatest Mac Moments of the past 25 years. This week’s is sure to be controversial.
We’ve got no idea what the 25th Anniversary of the Macintosh will bring, but we certainly know what we’d like it NOT to be. The 20th Anniversary Mac was a trifecta of bad, underpowered, overpriced, And while it was a beautiful machine, it looked like it was designed Bose instead of Apple.
For more thoughts on the topic, Craig’s interview with TalkingHeadtv.com is below.
First off, we don’t want to take any heat about this entry’s placement in our list. Certainly the “1984” commercial announcing the original Mac is more important than to place dead last. So don’t read anything more into this week’s entry than we wanted to begin our list where this whole adventure began: on January 22nd 1984.
Pete Mortensen:
I have to confess something here: I never had the opportunity to see the original “1984” commercial when it originally aired. I was, after all, 3 years old, and my parents, clearly thought I should go to bed before it aired on the East Coast. I did, however, seek it out in 1995, the darkest days of Apple’s history and the apex of my Mac fanaticism. I read countless summaries of the spot, clicked through very slowly loading galleries of screenshots, and finally, sometime around January of 1996, I got to see it on TV in my parents’ basement during a rather insufferable “Greatest TV Commercials of All Time!?!” special on CBS. I loved the ad, but I had built it up in my mind to an experience comparable to transfiguration. It wasn’t. That didn’t happen until “Think Different” came out, the first signal that Apple wasn’t just going to lie back and take it anymore. The birth of a new era…
Lonnie Lazar:
In 1984 I was 2nd year law student still using IBM Selectric and Smith-Corona electric typewriters. I thought spooled white-out correction tape was a great invention! By the dawn of the 90s I had a friend on the SF peninsula working for a custom PC maker and it would be over a decade after the debut of Macintosh before I used my first Apple, a Color Classic II in 1995. I remember being very impressed with the dramatic effect of Mac’s introductory commercial when I saw it live during the Super Bowl, but as a bit of a political radical and anti-Reaganite, I read more of an underlying social statement into it. It’s significance as a harbinger of change to come in the realm of the personal computer went right over my head. After all, those Selectrics were the gold standard at the time.
Leigh McMullen:
I remember the commercial vividly, we had been studying Orwell in school that fall, and so its timeliness and visual impact were stunning. That said, I was an Atari guy when the Mac launched, and to be honest the allure of a computer that lacked color graphics, or bad-assed arcade style games eluded me for quite some time. It really wasn’t until a few years later, playing the original SimCity at the Drake University computer lab, that the little beige toasters started to grow on me.
Here at Cult of Mac we’re not content just to report other people’s rumors we occasionally start our own. Hence this post’s title (The question mark makes it A-Okay, right?).
To be clear, we have no specific information that suggests this might be true. No rough voiced informant leaking this news to us from the bowels of some dungeon in Cupertino. No circumstantial evidence (like a Chiat/Day media buy) dug up through hard-nosed investigative reporting.
Nothing, Nada, Zip, Zilch, Zune.*
Yet here’s the post anyway, what gives?
First, I’m making up this rumor because I really, really want it to be true. Not only does it have a certain symmetry to it that OCD dictators like Steve would gravitate to, but it would be the perfect forum to unleash something truly game-changing on us. Something that would upset an entire industry, something as profoundly impacting as the original Macintosh.
Secondly, because it is exactly 25 weeks until Superbowl Sunday, and while this year’s Superbowl doesn’t fall on the same date as the airing of the original “1984 commercial”, it marks a symbolic milestone for that Anniversary. To that end we’re going to use the next 25 weeks to count down the Greatest Moments in Mac History. Culminating (I hope) in an announcement from Cupertino that will change everything forever, just like the last one 25 years ago.
(*Thanks to Rip Ragged for letting me borrow that line).
