Sigh.

Well, that was about the most disappointing Macworld expo I've ever been to, brothers. It was douche-chill-a-rama. I kept wanting to make that whistling/bomb exploding sound whenever anyone at any booth opened their mouths.

To give you an accurate idea of really how lame it was, I have to say this: the most interesting booth was friggin' SPYMAC. Spymac. The overdesigned, overmerchandised Mac blog site with the noir theme. The place I think Ilene Hoffman ended up... not sure if she founded the place or what. I could write my whole expo review on that booth. It was a total metaphor for the state of the Mac. For me, the expo was Spymac, and Spymac was the expo. Cheezy, dumbed down, and tawdry. A huge con job.

It's hard to describe it, but let me try. It was a jet-black, wet-look vinyl structure, almost fetishy... with a white scrim surround. Then video screens and cycling spotlights were set up, so you'd see spotlights moving on the white cloth. Prominent Spymac Logos... and when you enter the structure, you see all their crap. Tote bags, sunglasses, T-shirts, a whole line. Unbelievable.

But the thing that nearly made me wet myself was the video loop they were playing. Some joker in--I kid you not--jet blackface and red lipstick and a fedora, talking about founding Spymac. The vibe was kind of queerly iron-chefy... "if memory serves me..." Hammed up and goofy. I wish I could remember some of the dialog. It was priceless. I was laughing so hard I thought I'd give birth to a kidney. Hands down the friggin' strangest and funniest thing I've ever seen. And it wasn't clear if they were trying to be funny.

But like I said, total metaphor. Marketed up the living wazoo, but the site, as we all know, is basically a Mac Blog site. An X-Man grabass clique. I kept thinking, holy crap, thalo.net should be selling T-shirts. We have to set up a booth at the next Expo. But lord knows, if it's in Boston again this century, I'll be very surprised.

Brothers, I tried to report live from the venue, they had eMacs set up as an internet cafe, but it was too tough to get on them. Plus, I didn't want to blow my cover. The Version Tracker booth wasn't that far away.

I breezed by it, and saw some of the MFI guys hugging each other. I didn't get a real good look at their badges, so I ain't sure who they were. They were there hawking VT pro subscriptions. There really wasn't much to their display.

Of course you all know, Apple wasn't there, Adobe wasn't there. Quark was, and I wasted no time ripping into them, telling them to get off their asses because InDesign was in the process of kicking them.

The Expo was friggin' dead. Nothing like the crowds or energy of years past. Lackluster and halfhearted. Everyone walking around with hangdog, defeated looks. Like almost EMBARRASED to be Mac Faithful. I was embarrased FOR everyone there, including me.

My favorite booth: Linotype. The german font foundry. They were giving away 3 free posters with all their faces shown on them (which I think are well designed). But that wasn't the reason I liked it. The real reason was the hot chick with the german accent. Flirting with her made the show for me. Winner of the thalo Miss Macworld contest. Runner up was Belkin girl. Belkin made a nice showing too. And not just thanks to blondie there.

The coolest new piece of hardware in the joint: Wacom's new tablet MONITOR. That won thalo.net best in show. Retails about $2400. An 18" TFT that you can tilt and spin and work right on. They only had G4s driving the display models, and still it was the closest thing to working with real art tools I've ever seen. Very responsive and accurate. The pressure-sensitive stuff was just perfectly implemented.

I kept saying I wanted them BIGGER, but apparently, they're not structurally strong enough to go any biger than the 18". They get warp and such... so the guy leveled with me that R&D wasn't even going there.

OK, the next lamest thing was all the stupid music shit. Maybe it was iPod heaven for digis, but it all came off like lead-balloon stuff to me. The show was dominated by large booths by companies that did sound... and another showing you how to hook guitars and crap to garageband. A few guys got up to play and oh. my. bad. Again, it was kind of this eye-rolling embarrasing lameitude. Sheepish Mac apologists grasping onto straws of musical coolness in a turbulent sea of desperate shared hallucination that OS X is actually worth a damn.

It made me sad and angry.

I saw pretty much everything there was to see in 45 friggin' minutes. The whole expo didn't take up half of the exhibit hall they were in. I was grooving more on the expansive empty spaces behind these ugly red, white, and black curtains, than I was on the show itself.

Hey, but where else can you get a 16 oz. bottle of water for $2.75? There was a food court, but it was all pretty much inedible. Terrible. I remember the old days at the World Trade Center, the food being pretty decent.

Anyway, I was planning to spend two days there, but I said screw it, and headed west to go fishing in the Berkshires. That's where I'm writing to you from. When I get home, I'll see what more I can remember.

But Macworld was a total dud for me. I used to look forward to the expos like they were rock concerts... this one was like going to a yahtzee tournament at a trailer park. Oh how the Mac Mighty have fallen.

Aw had I known you were coming here I'd have baked a striped aqua cake and some round-mouse muffins.

Guess who lives 10 minutes away from the convention center, is unemployed and had plenty of time to go to Macworld but didn't? *raises hand*

Macworld in Boston was fun back in the day because Apple showed up as well as Adobe, period. A show without them and a keynote is nothing more than an oversized MUG meeting. Worse.

Nah, I could not bring myself to go.

Well, truthfully I was tapped out from buying too much the previous week anyway. So I might have gone had that not happened.

But I now prefer New York Macworlds and agree with Steve wanting it to stay there. Apple needs to control that, not a 3rd party.

I want Javitz center or else just SF. Having been to Javitz, I can't go back to a Boston show. I can't. I wont. (Kramer)

I can well imagine the douch chill. I actually wonder if I have ever heard someone just start playing music without it being horrendous or cheesy. There is a lack of refinement and subtlety in music nowadays to match the GUI.

I think if it's Boston next year and if Apple attends it could be ok again. We'll see.

I do miss taking busses between Boston's WTC to the Bayside. The dual nature made is seem enormous and healthy (and I got to go to parts of Boston I never goto).

Hynes would be best, near Newbury/Prudential.

Hell, they should put an Apple store on Newbury, near Berkeley.

NYC still depresses me, since I haven't been there since 9/14/01. No real motivation to go since the blackout either.

I get my Manhattan fill now by playing Spiderman 2 XBOX. (The developers tastefully worked around the WTC site, it's all flat but with the dual spotlight rectangles. Looks great at night. I wish Libeskind's letter-opener edifice wasn't chosen.)

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For me, the expo was Spymac, and Spymac was the expo. Cheezy, dumbed down, and tawdry. A huge con job.

The Expo was friggin' dead. Nothing like the crowds or energy of years past. Lackluster and halfhearted. Everyone walking around with hangdog, defeated looks. Like almost EMBARRASED to be Mac Faithful. I was embarrased FOR everyone there, including me.

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Somehow I don't think that's going to make it into the official press release.

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Brothers, I tried to report live from the venue, they had eMacs set up as an internet cafe, but it was too tough to get on them. Plus, I didn't want to blow my cover. The Version Tracker booth wasn't that far away.

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Did you suppose that lights would go off, sirens would blare, and blue-suited men riding Segways would try and hunt you down?

That's actually a very scary picture.

I like the idea of Segways as being militarized, fully automated, with tasers, stickyfoam guns and flashbang launchers and used as Apple Sentinels, which whiz around looking for people not wearing iPods, trap them and drag them to the nearest Apple store where they are taken to the back room and outfitted with black mockneck bodysuits and iPod minis on non-removable armbands and then are electro-prodded to dance in front of a neon color backlit wall and endlessly force-videoed to supply new silhouette dancers for iPod ads.

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I like the idea of Segways as being militarized, fully automated, with tasers, stickyfoam guns and flashbang launchers and used as Apple Sentinels, which whiz around looking for people not wearing iPods, trap them and drag them to the nearest Apple store where they are taken to the back room and outfitted with black mockneck bodysuits and iPod minis on non-removable armbands and then are electro-prodded to dance in front of a neon color backlit wall and endlessly force-videoed to supply new silhouette dancers for iPod ads.

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Or you can sit them down in front of OS X.

Zing bang.


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The management wishes to apologize for any offense committed by the moderator. He has been disciplined. Should a further offense occur he shall be forced to sit down in front of OS X.


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The management who disciplined the moderator has been sacked for offensive conduct. Please excuse the insults to this otherwise fine bloberating system, OS X.


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We apoligize for the management who disciplined the moderator who...


[And I apologize for the Monty Python rip-off. I assure you , there will be some sackings involved with this offense as well.]

By the way, that was extremely funny, John.

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I like the idea of Segways as being militarized, fully automated, with tasers, stickyfoam guns and flashbang launchers and used as Apple Sentinels, which whiz around looking for people not wearing iPods, trap them and drag them to the nearest Apple store where they are taken to the back room and outfitted with black mockneck bodysuits and iPod minis on non-removable armbands and then are electro-prodded to dance in front of a neon color backlit wall and endlessly force-videoed to supply new silhouette dancers for iPod ad

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Oh yeah baby, that's definitely going on the homepage.

The only cool thing was the entire Expo was hotspotted, so if you were crazy enough to bring your laptop, you could have sat around in this giant space and used it. Again, I was really impressed with the size and scale of the architecture. It really would have been a GREAT place to have a GREAT Macworld. The problem was, it was a terrible place to have a terrible Macworld. It dwarfed it, made the event seem unworthy of its grandeur.

I did see an awful lot of people with 12" powerbooks, and they are pretty sweet looking. A far cry from the luxury-car vibe of the 17 incher, but when not in the hands of a giant like Yao, they look cool and efficient, compact.

Another thing I noticed. I talked to a lot of people. Got the kind of word on the street... people ARE crap settling. They do know OS X is slow. Pros DON'T really care for the interface. Many are still using OS 9. I landed a few X-Man types, and they began to recite party line, almost word-for-word from the Apple site. Like brainwashed. It was actually humorous.

But developers? Christ, they were to a man or woman, gung-ho OS X. As if it was the best thing since oreo cookies and sex. A couple actually got flushed with an almost seratonin-overload excitement. Or they were just so panicked that somebody would poke through the con, that they were really hyping the shit out of everything. I came to the conclusion that OS X really is a developers dream. Which means it must be so EASY to develop for. That means doing no work, providing beta quality, and still getting a paycheck. That's gotta be it.

There was a big, roped-off section called "Geeks and Gadgets Stage" or somesuch. And the speakers there were pretty screechingly awful. Unprepared. Instead of highlighting the strengths of anything, they ended up highlighting its weakness and lack of usability. I swear, watching guys struggle with the INTERFACE like that, while nobody in the joint pretended to notice, the whole shared lie of pretending stuff was fast when it was slow, was really depressing.

Party line?

Just say the following mantra:

accelerated, advanced, amazing, astonishing, automatic, award-winning, beautiful, best, best possible, breathtaking, compelling, comprehensive, convenient, customizable, cutting-edge, delicious, drag & drop, easier, easily-accessible, easy-to-access, easy-to-learn, easy-to-use, elegant, enhanced, enterprise-class, even better, excellent, expressive, extensive, familiar, fantastic, faster, fluid, formidable, fresh, good-to-go, gorgeous, graphics-rich, great, handy, high-bandwidth, high-definition, high-performance, high-quality, highly-optimized, ideal, impressive, incredible, industrial-strength, industry-leading, industry-standard, innovative, instant, intense, intuitive, jaw-dropping, juicy, legendary, lickable, massive, next generation, nifty, perfect, phenomenal, photo-quality, powerful, preemptive, prodigiously powerful, professional-caliber, protected, purpose-built, quick, rack-optimized, reliable, remarkable, responsive, revolutionary, rich, rock-solid, scalable, seamless, secure, sensual, simple-to-learn, simple-to-navigate, simple-to-use, stable, stunning, super-modern, superior, sweet, symmetric, terrific, tightly-integrated, time-saving, top-of-the-line, tremendous, ultimate, ultra-modern, unbeatable, unix-based, unprecedented, user-friendly, vast, vibrant, wonderful, world-class...repeat....

My patented AppleAdjectives....

LOL!!

Brother mighty, see what I mean about that friggin' DESPERATE quality? All those adjectives hanging on something that, if we're all being honest with ourselves, is NONE of those things. Not really.

I guess I come from an era when you COULD say that shit with a straight face. When Apple walked their talk.

But holy crap, my expectations are so lowered, that when they do ANYTHING good, I want to like cuddle them, tell them it's OK, attaboys, keep it up. They're so close. Take the same minimal industrial design sensibilities, and ease-of-use of say the iPod interface, and run with it. But that stuff just HAS to find its way into the OS. It has to.

Lookit how clear it is that supersized bloat ruins the Mac experience. I mean it couldn't be any clearer. It's hammer-in-the-face clear. The last thing the Mac wants to be is Windows. it certainly doesn't want to be WORSE than Windows, and yet that's exactly what it is. And all the stupid adjectives aren't going to change that.

There are photos coming in from MacWorld Boston.

I scoured over them but did not see a single person carrying a fishing rod.

Must say as photographs go these people better not quit their day jobs. The one set has corrupted files intermingled.

The one set has alot of SpyMac photos but nothing interesting just the logo.

SpyMac is offering web space hosting. $7 a month or $84 for the year does not seem so bad. knowmoorehomeless.org just might be around the corner.

Here's a shot that gives you a feeling for how little of the hall the expo took up. I stood at that same vantage point and shook my head. I even asked a security guard "is that all there is?" Because I couldn't believe it. I thought I might be missing a whole exhibit hall.

Crap, I would have loved to see Bill Atkinson. Missed that. Missed the keynote. You can see a picture of the Spymac booth on the Spymac homepage. But you really need to track down the Quicktime of the creepy video, it's friggin' priceless.

Look at the picture of the geeks and gadgets stage, and you'll see what I mean by the defeated Mac Faithful look. Everyone there seemed to be on thorazine. Duped, hypnotized, rubes.

It seems that even Macintouch is beginning to succumb.

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[Brian Shaw] Unmentioned on any Mac/Apple web site that I can find is the fact that neither of the new iPods includes the remote control or case. They are both options with both units (see iPod specs). Furthermore, only the 40GB includes a dock.
Since all three of these options have a $39 price tag, it is not correct to state that the new units reflect a $100 price reduction from current models. For example, a 20GB 3rd-generation unit, which included a dock, case and remote, listed for $399. The 20GB 4th-generation lists at $299, but add the optional remote, case and dock, and it costs $416, a $17 price increase!

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The editorial comment?

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[The new models had the very positive effect of driving down prices on 3rd-generation models - now $50-$100 lower at Amazon - making 4th-generation models even less of a bargain. -MacInTouch]

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Wait, wait, wait, wait....

Is that SERIOUSLY the entirety of Macworld Boston? No wonder everyone looked despondent!

Oh my stars and garters...Man my freaking Spidey sense just SCREAMED not to go and thank God I didn't go to that depressing little rat maze sans cheese. (Or thalo will say the maze was made from cheese?)



Macworld best of show

More pictures of Macworld attendees:

iPod user and his wife

SpyMac's Illene Hoffman

Thalo and friends (I'll take 4 of the girl on the right).

Planning for Macworld Boston 2005 underway. (Outsourced to China).

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Is that SERIOUSLY the entirety of Macworld Boston? No wonder everyone looked despondent!

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You know it, brother mighty. Your spidey sense was friggin' dead on. It was embarrasing. And yeah, everyone was despondent. Even though it was X-Man central, and even though those red, white, and black flags hanging everywhere kinda hid the truth from everyone, colorwise they reminded me of what it must have been like at Nazi ground zero in Center Berlin during the huge propaganda campaigns... uh, but without the energy. I mean nobody was shouting "Make Mine Mac" or anything like in days past. The only Mac T-shirts I saw were faded, and from the 80's, on old guys like me. And their legs looked too tired to goosestep. Mine were. I parked on Congress St. and walked up to the conference center, and must have put in two miles just looking for the front door. It's really not easy trying to get in from the bottom floor.

Say what you will about Ilene. I still think she's a hottie.

Thalo and friends (I'll take 4 of the girl on the right).

What in Sam Hill are those people selling? And John, once again I approve of your Asian fetish.

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What in Sam Hill are those people selling?

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I wish I knew. Look like characters from anime or games. But I'll tell you this, if I had seen all the freaks and Jedi like that, I would have enjoyed myself much more than I did. As it was, the only thing that kept me going was the Mac chick ringers posted at various booths. Or the crewcut/nosering/tattooed graphic design chicks milling around. But I only saw a scant handful of those. I really can't get over how friggin' awful the Expo was.

Here is one for MightyQ.

Is that really Illene Hoffman? She used to have an avatar of herserlf doing the dish's. She did not seem to be such a dish herself.

I think Mighty is messing with you guys. Those photos look like his visit to the Comic Book convention.

The only Mac T-shirts I saw were faded, and from the 80's, on old guys like me.

Hey, it's easy enough to make fun of a thinning Macworld. I mean, they didn't have the main attraction, Steve Jobs, and that magazine has been shrinking for years. Soon it may be little more than a pamphlet. But it suddenly makes a Thaloworld seem within reach. Of course, something like that is going to be an out-of-pocket expense because you're unlikely to find any paid sponsors. As much as we'd like to believe (and it may even be true) that a number of people are fed up, it's not in anyone's immediate commercial interest to express such feelings, especially to a Mac audience. But the way you described the show, thalo, it's a very poignant situation. Mac people seem to thrive on that feeling of belonging, and to walk into a supposedly major show and see what you saw would be distressing.

And as much as I admire and respect Ilene, to see her, or any Mac user, reduced to having to wear goofy costumes in order to promote a Mac product is not a moment for gloating. It's a moment for sympathy and sadness. I hope she enjoyed what she was doing and is laughing all the way to the bank. But I wonder.

Oops sorry! I hadn't realized that my pics were so believable as X-Men/Macworld patrons... Right, they are totally randomly Google'd images (somehow popping up during my search for a rat maze).

Yes, my post was entirely fabricated. I'm interning at the New York Times at the moment. (That too is a lie). (That was the truth). (That was also the truth). (As was that).

Yes Rico, that's my style. Short enough to bite my nipples without bending down but tall enough (with high heels) to not have to be on tippy toes. Too much info? (Don't worry, a petite Thai girl with a 5'11" farang enjoys various benefits too...we're a nice match all around. )

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Is that really Illene Hoffman?

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That is YOUNG Ilene Hoffman. But I think she's kept up pretty well. Maybe, like OS X, she's high maintenance

LOL, I knew brother mighty's photos were too good to be true. I didn't see a single freak. And the photos brother Rico linked to, were among the few where it even shows people friggin' SMILING. I will always remember the event as a real downer. Like I said, if there's a 2005 MW Boston, I'll be exceedingly surprised. If there is, we should try to have a booth. I can see it now. Black and Blue... very minimal. One beat up old soapbox with a spotlight on it. We'll sell Steve voodoo dolls, and fake dog-do with Tiger Stripes. Yoda GoGurt, and Blue sodapop... looping "I'm a Barbie Girl"... we'd have a blast.