Perhaps my last Macworld

Today, I went to the last day of Macworld, the tradeshow for Apple products. I have been to almost every edition of this show in San Francisco. It was first done at the civic center and eventually moved to Moscone Center. At its' height it was a week of a festival of all things Apple. For the last couple of years the focus has been on handhelds - ipods and phones and touches. One year, the highlight of the show was Macporno (which my very young son thought was exciting and which seemed to do very high cash business). Last year showed the 3G and the MacAir - I bought both.

But this year the focus of the show seemed to be carrying cases. For the last couple of years the number of exhibitors has been declining. There are wider aisles and more blocked off spaces in the two halls.

There were a couple of interesting announcements including a major revision of iLife and iWork. I love iPhoto and Keynote and both have been improved. The iWork suite is being made a web application. (While I think the change is positive - it needs a couple of tweaks.) iPhoto got geotagging and recognition of faces (which Picasa has already). I was disappointed in that the company did not release a new version of the Mac Mini - it needs to have a much larger hard drive and possibly to integrate the features of Apple TV. A one terabyte model would be dandy.

Apple made the case that the original purpose of the show - to present new technologies - is made less important because of the web and the Apple store network. That has a lot of truth. But a second point was a gathering of the faithful. That function may also have been reduced as a result of things like Twitter and Facebook - electronic communities.

There is also talk that Apple will make a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show- which is in Las Vegas about the same time. The problem with that is that a lot of the CES is not of interest to me. One of the benefits of Macworld is that I could do it in a day.

Regardless of the reality, I enjoyed this rite of the first week in January. And if it does go away, I will miss it.