Macworld New York City 2002

© 2002 Lawrence I. Charters

Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 24, no. 5, September-October 2002, pp. 27-36.

Rebuilding Year

Sports teams refer to transition years as “building years.” Either they have the proper elements in place (players, coaches, schedules) and just need to refine them, or they are working at collecting the proper elements. Macworld Expo New York, in 2002, was a “building year,” for the Expo, for New York and for Apple.

The Expo organizer, IDG World Expo, had a difficult year. Their flagship exhibitions, LinuxWorld, Macworld, and Comnet, saw attendance level off or even drop. Macworld New York, while successful, had a slight drop in attendance from last year, and some regular exhibitors (most noteworthy, Adobe and Macromedia) didn’t attend. Adding to IDG’s woes, the Jacob Javits Convention Center, site of the New York Expo, hit the company with a large labor rate increase two weeks before the Expo opened. As this article goes to press, IDG is leaking hints that, while the San Francisco Expo will take place as scheduled (Jan. 6-10, 2003), next year’s summer Expo may move back to Boston. The date (July 16-18, 2003) may also change. Or it could be nothing more than a hardball negotiating tactic.

New York City is rebuilding bath physical things damaged or destroyed by terrorists as well as economic and psychological things destroyed by inept, corrupt, or just plain greedy corporate executives. The Yankees have been (somewhat) humbled by Arizona, some CEOs, CFOs and other TLEs (Three Letter Executives) have been humbled by handcuffs, and insufferable snobs on Wall Street have been humbled enough to learn some manners or, in some cases, simply shut up. Regular New Yorkers lacking boardroom keys or sports contracts are quietly going about their jobs, doing the necessary, vital and unglamorous things to make the city shine again.

Apple was definitely in a “rebuilding year.” With their sexy new operating system, Mac OS X, installed on all new machines, with new “iApps” catching the attention of fans and press, and openly subversive products, such as the iPod, sneaking into anti-Apple companies and organizations, it has managed to hold its own in a bad year. Corporate spending on informa­tion technology has plummeted, and in turn battered sales at hardware and software companies around the world. Apple’s sales managed to dance at the border of profitability, with gains in some areas offset by declines in other areas. It managed to do this dance and still keep huge cash reserves in the bank, still release new products, and still collect an amazing amount of mostly positive press attention.

What did “rebuilding” mean in the context of Macworld Expo? It means there were a great many new products, but they weren’t necessarily new to Expo visitors. A tidal wave of new Mac OS X applications and peripherals swamped the Expo but, since many of these were previously available for Mac OS 9, Expo visitors didn’t necessarily appreciate these as “new.” This tended to mask a major milestone in both Apple history and the history of personal computers: Apple is now the largest provider of UNIX-based computers on the planet. Apple is also the first computer com­pany to successfully market UNIX-based computers to the general public, despite more than 30 years of effort by dozens of companies, most of them long dead.

New Fanatics

You could see the breaking wave of the future at the Expo. In addition to the usual Mac stalwarts- home hobbyists, graphic artists, musicians, publishing pro­fessionals, photographers and videographers – there were many new faces. Linux and UNIX gurus were everywhere, enthusiastically promoting the Mac as a UNIX platform to old-time Mac users. This is hilarious to watch: Mac fanatics are famed evangelists, and were bewildered to find themselves evangelized on the mer­its of a Mac by UNIX people who seemed to speak a multitude of strange, almost incomprehensible lan­guages.

Sybase was showing Sybase ASE 12.5, an enter­prise-level database system often found on IBM main­frames, but now available for Mac OS X. The idea of putting such an exotic package on a mass-market ma­chine apparently greatly appeals to Sybase; at the show, if you met certain conditions, they would provide you with a Sybase license for free.

In a similar fashion, ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) was giving away evaluation copies of their Java edition of MapObjects. MapObjects is the premier GIS (Graphical Information System), widely used in government and private enterprise, and mov­ing it to Mac OS Xis a milestone for mapmaking and environmental charting.

But First

For all that was new, there were also old themes and familiar faces. Since his return to Apple, Steve Jobs has been the master of ceremonies at Apple’s opening keynote address, and he continued this tradition in New York. With two noteworthy exceptions, it was a classic Jobs presentation, and it met with the usual cheers and applause. He announced a few new products:

• Apple’s iPod line grew to include a new 20- gigabyte model, which also includes a new remote con­trol. The two existing models (5 and 10 gigabytes) dropped in price. Also new was iPod for Windows, an Apple-labeled package with software designed specifi­cally for Windows users. This last introduction is openly subversive, intended to get Apple technology into previously Windows-only environments. The new 20-gigabyte mode! is also increasingly attractive as a compact, portable network management tool.
• The iMac line added a new 17″ flat-panel iMac with Super Drive, 80-gigabyte hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX graphics card and 800 MHz PowerPC G4 proces­sor. About the only improvement would be to add more memory; while 256 MB is good, adding another 512 MB should tum this into a real monster. All the iMacs in Apple’s booth were equipped with Mac OS X 10.2, which definitely help showcase the new machine’s ca­pabilities. The 17″ display (1440 x 900 pixels) shows quite a bit more infor­mation at once than the 15″ model (1024 x 768 pixels).
• iTunes 3 made its debut, sort of. This new version of the world’s best MP3 player is still free, but it is also Mac OS X-only; if you are still using Mac OS 9, you have to stop at iTunes 2. New in version 3 are Smart Playlists, which can automatically build playlists according to the genre, frequency of play, ratings (you can now rate a track and assign it up to five stars), and other criteria. New tags also allow you to sort music by composer, a boon to classical music fans in particu­lar. Sound Check allows iTunes to scan your library and optimize volume levels. Finally, you can purchase audiobooks from audible.com and play them via iTunes and iPod. Unfortunately, firmware updates to make some of these new features work on iPods were not yet available.
• QuickTime 6 was released the week of Macworld, and in fact, was used to stream the keynote address to over 25,000 live sites. While there wasn’t much talk about it at Macworld, QuickTime 6 is now a solid, in­ternational standards-based technology that extends far beyond Apple. Expo goers were distracted by a con­troversy about MPEG licensing, which is not controlled by Apple but which is one of the key features in QuickTune 6. Those not distracted were treated to a large section of the Macworld exhibit floor devoted to vendors showing an incredible range of QuickTime products.

High Cost of Free

Jobs showed a fair amount of courage in personally announcing the end of Apple’s free iTools Internet service in his keynote. He could have delegated the task to some flunky, but he didn’t: he delivered the news that the service was coming to an end as we know it on Sept. 30, 2002, to be replaced with a subscription service, .Mac (pronounced “dot Mac”). For $99 ($49 the first year if you are an existing iTools user) you get 100 MB of on-line disk space, a mac.com E-mail address that can accumulate up to 15 MB of E-mail at any one time, accessible via a Web interface, POP mail client, or IMAP mail client; the ability to publish some or all of your on-line disk space as Web pages; a limited backup program (called “Backup”) that can back up select portions of your hard drive to CD, DVD or iDisk; and virus protection via McAfee’ s Virex anti-virus software. Taken as a whole, it wasn’t a bad package but, while the faithful applauded almost everything Steve said in the keynote, this met with complete silence: not even one hand was clapping.

Jaguar Pounces

Jobs also formally announced Mac OS X 10.2, better known by its code name of Jaguar, set for release on August 24. Jobs announced it would be $129, and the keynote audience then waited several seconds for him to announce some kind of upgrade discount for existing Mac OS X users. Their hopes unrequited, the announcement was swallowed by silence.

The Mac OS X 10.2 demonstration, on the other hand, was a hit. By the time you read this, the software should be available, along with lots of comments and commentary. There is much to like (and many of us went out and placed orders for copies right after the keynote, not worrying about upgrade price squabbles):

• iChat, a clever instant messaging client compatible with AOL, comes built-in. While many people find in­stant messaging obnoxious, the way iChat works allowing you to build impromptu workgroup chat ses­sions on your local area network, may actually be use­ful.
• Mail has been drastically overhauled with a vari­ety of new features, the most prominent of which is a clever junk mail filter.
• The Address Book now allows you to add LDAP services as directories; while this may not mean much to some people, this is a huge boon to large organizations. Address Book is also now a system-wide resource and can be used with other programs to update Palm PDAs, cell telephones, iPods, and other applications and tools.
• Sherlock 3 has been dramatically revamped into an Internet tool. Click on Movies, type in your zip code, and it shows listings for local theaters, com­plete with times, and the option of buying tickets online. Click on Yellow Pages and you can search for local schools, restaurants, and other businesses, and get a nice map and directions to your destina­tion. Flights presumably helps with booking airline reservations, Dictionary gives access to online dic­tionaries, eBay continues to allow you to fritter away money on legalized gambling, and Stocks and News provide access to online quotes and news articles for other forms of gambling.
• The Finder in Mac OS X 10.2 is multi-threaded, so you can now do something else while the Finder is engaged in time-consuming tasks. There is also a Search box right in the Finder window; you no longer use Sherlock to find things on your computer.
• Rendezvous will be a blessing to network manag­ers, large and small, even though it is a bit hard to de­scribe. In essence, it allows the Mac to go out and dis­cover, automatically, other devices on a network, be they computers, printers, Palm PDAs, servers or things not yet invented.
• Quartz Extreme, although highly touted, will be invisible to most users. In essence, Apple has greatly improved the speed of graphics under Mac OS X 10.2, particularly if you have graphics cards with lots of memory, but most people won’t notice this as a sepa­rate benefit; instead, they’ll just think that Jaguar is “faster.”
• Inkwell, the automatic handwriting recognition built into Mac OS X 10.2, will be appreciated by graphic artists; most mortal users will find it useless. But sooner or later someone will invent a game or some clever little utility that uses handwriting recognition — and the millions of mouse users will suddenly think it is cool. The Newton lives on.
• Mac OS X 10.2 offers improved Windows interoperability. As it is doubtful Microsoft will work on improving Windows compatibility with Mac OS, Apple has taken the lead in making it easier to exchange information with Windows computers through a variety of tweaks large and small. As Jaguar already has excellent UNIX compatibility – it is running on UNIX — a lowly Mac iBook or a high-end dual-processor G4 tower will be able to talk to almost anything except maybe a rock.
• Prompted no doubt by federal Section 508 guide­lines, Mac OS X 10.2 offers a greatly improved “user experience” for those with vision or hearing limitations through its Universal Access features. A new, global “Zoom” feature allows the user to enlarge any portion of the display to improve visual clarity; since it is done at the operating system level, it is compatible with all programs. Speech recognition has also been improved to allow you to simply talk to your Mac to launch pro­grams and do various tasks. Jaguar also has improved text to speech capabilities.
• Spring-loaded folders are back. Apple thought these weren’t necessary since you can do the same sort of thing, in a different way, using Mac OS X’s “column” view in the Finder. But Mac fanatics told Apple they were wrong.
• Several new screensavefs come with Mac OS X 10.2. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that even the current version of Mac OS X is the world-leader in cutting edge, high-tech, stunningly beautiful screen savers which, as always, have no real purpose other than to be cutting edge, high-tech, and stunningly beautiful.
• Jaguar will allow you to mount FTP servers directly in the Finder (whee!). Given that you can directly mount Windows volumes, AppleShare volumes and WebDAV volumes, mounting FTP volumes seems per­fectly natural.
• You will be able to animate your desktop by auto­matically changing your Desktop pictures. Third-party utilities exist to do this under Mac OS X, but Apple has quietly integrated this into the Desktop preferences pane.
• Nerds will appreciate BlueTooth support, CUPS printing, IPv6 and IPSec support, Kerbros authentica­tion, and support for file systems larger than one terabyte.

Aside from failing to make any mention of an up­grade price, Steve’s demo of Mac OS X 10.2 was a huge and popular success. People liked what they saw.

Beyond the Keynote

Outside the keynote, in the “real world” of the Expo exhibit hall, pen drives were hot. lt seemed almost ev­eryone was selling some sort of USB “pen” drive, de­vices the size of a lipstick tube (or smaller) that con­nect to a USB port and allow you to transfer data with­out first installing drivers. Most of these require no extra power, and have capacities rang­ing from 8 MB to 128 MB. At least one vendor had an even niftier “keychain” storage that uses FireWire.

There were lots of gizmos for iPods: car adapters, cases, ear­phones and earbuds, cables, and utilities. The two oddest were by Photo Control Corp., which makes the “BookEndz” docking stations for PowerBooks. They have devel­oped iPodDock, a desktop dock­ing station for the iPod, and an iPod desktop stand. Try as I might, I saw no purpose for either of these. One of the great strengths of the iPod is that you can “dock” it to a Mac by just plugging in a FireWire cable. Why do you need to add the bulk of a docking sta­tion, or a stand?

CMS Peripherals, after disappearing from view for several years, was back with specialized storage devices, ranging from PCMCIA hard drives to automatic backup systems, essentially hard drives that automatically grab everything that needs to be backed up on your laptop or desktop machine. These devices can also be used as ordinary external drives.

FireWire drives were everywhere. If you looked hard, you could find SCSI and USB drives, but you had to look very hard. As Macworld was ending, a com­puter consulting firm released a white paper claiming FireWire hadn’t “caught on” outside of the world of digital video cameras, and the authors of the paper clearly have never been at Macworld.

On the other hand, video card manufacturers were scarce. Since 1987, when the “slot Mac” Mac II was in­troduced, Macworld has always played host to lots of video and sound card manufacturers. The built-in video and sound capabilities of the current Macs have greatly reduced their ranks. One shining exception was Radion, showing their outstanding Radion 8500 card.

Video displays are also going through a transition. There were relatively few vendors of traditional “tele­vision-like” CRT monitors, but flat panel displays were everywhere. NEC/Mitsubishi had an enlightening booklet listing their various monitors. What was interesting: the number of CRT-based monitors compared with LCD monitors. While CRTs still outnumber fiat panels, there were still 24 different models of flat-panel displays listed in the booklet.

Just before Macworld opened, there was a blizzard of hype about EyeTV. EyeTV is a combination of hard­ware and software that allows a Mac with Mac OS X 10.1.5 and a USB port to record live TV directly to disk. The hardware is a little larger than a paperback book, and has a coaxial cable input for connection to a cable or TV antennae, plus RCA jacks for connection to a VCR or camcorder. The software allows you to watch live TV on your Mac, pause live TV, skip through comrner­cials, program EyeTV to record shows at set times, etc. The rather small booth was always packed, and sales were brisk. Since the booth demos were all canned ( old game shows, movies, and news casts), it was impos­sible to see how well it would work in the “real world.” Exactly how many people want to use their Mac to record TV is also unclear.

Harman Multimedia, which produced the iSub and SoundSticks for Apple, had a new, radically different sound system on display: Creature. This combination of subwoofer plus two satellite speakers certainly pro­duced incredible sound. Harman also engaged in their usual marketing ploy of loaning units to various soft­ware and hardware vendors scattered throughout the show, allowing visitors to see and hear Creature in com­bination with games, music and video software.

Hewlett-Packard was promoting “hp Mac-con­nect,” which aside from strange capitalization is a ma­jor campaign to keep HP as the number one peripheral manufacturer for Macs. They were showing a bunch of forgettable digital cameras (that do work with Mac OS X, but otherwise are unexceptional), plus their ex­tensive line of inkjet printers, laser printers, and large­format plotters. Catching quite a bit of attention was the HP Scanjet 3570cxi, an attractive flat-bed scanner with a transparency scanner built-in to the cover, for $149. In what could be a trend, many HP devices had drivers for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, but not for any­lng older.

IOGEAR, best known for their geeky networking KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch boxes, was showing their famed switch boxes and quite a bit more, ranging from FireWire hubs to USB 2.0-based hard drives. Many other network-centric, enterprise-centric companies, not normally seen at Macworld, were dis­playing similar devices.

Mark/Space, a telecom­munications company that used to have a strong pres­ence back in the days when people used modems, had a new product: Missing Synch 3.0. This driver allows a Sony CLIÉ to connect with a Mac, and even drag and drop MP3 and photos from the Mac to the CLIÉ. They say they will soon have versions of Miss­ing Synch for “ail Palm OS devices with USB.”

Microsoft didn’t offer any big new products, but their new “Microsoft Office Key­board” looks interesting. It is a USB keyboard, with the standard Microsoft Windows key instead of an Apple logo key, but it features a large, built-in wrist and palm rest, a built-in scroll wheel to the left, dedicated buttons for la unching Word, Excel, and other Microsoft Office pro­grams, shortcut keys for Cut, Copy, Paste, and a num­ber of other touches, and cornes complete with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X drivers for $44.95. Drivers were also available for two sirnilar keyboards, and for vari­ous versions of Microsoft’s “Intellimouse” optical rnice.

Canon has released an explosion of digital still cam­eras and digital video cameras, effectively filling almost every niche from the inexpensive ”I’m just going to try it out” to the ”I’m a pro and I want pro equipment.” The cameras and scanners attracted lots of attention; their printers, in comparison, were pretty much ignored.

Probably the most impressive camera at the show was the new Nikon D100 digital SLR camera, with a 6.1 megapixel resolution and the ability to use the won­derful Nikon AF Nikkor lenses. lt starts at $1995 for the body alone, and a full compliment of batteries, lenses, storage media, flash accessories, remote con­trols, voice memo options, and a Hama to carry every­thing will probably cost somewhat less than a Porsche. The only camera with a comparable drool factor was the Olympus E-20N, also an SLR camera but with a 5 megapixel resolution.

In startling contrast, Kodak had a small, even tiny booth, promoting their digital cameras. The people staff­ing the booth were remarkable: they didn’ t seem to know much about the cameras, they were completely unaware of what their competitors had to offer, and they knew almost nothing about Macs. The cameras, and the booth, were forgettable, a genuinely sad state of affairs for the company that almost single-handed created modern mass-market photography.

One of the more interesting barometers of the com­puter industry is the sale of computer books. Recently, Mac books have been doing very well. O’Reilly, the famed UNIX and networking book publisher, had a large booth that was constantly packed, and people were buying their books by the ton. PeachPit Press, publishers of the famed “Little Mac Books” and QuickStart Guides, had a com­parably-sized booth, and it was similarly packed, and also doing a booming business. In contrast, Wiley, cur­rently the publisher of the infamous “Dummies” books, usually had more staff than visitors in their booth. This is an encouraging sign.

Outslde Macworld

Outside the exhibit hall, New York City was swel­tering, victim of high temperatures and high humid­ity. Apple decided to engage in a bit of weather modi­fication by opening their coolest retail store on July 18, in New York’s SoHo district. Quite a few Macworld visitors took the subway down to the store, but far more stayed away: the store was jammed with people for the entire week. It is the largest Apple store so far, and among other things features a stairway with steps made of glass planks. The store’s calendar for the first month was filled with luminaries doing presentations on everything from video to photography to art to Internet services to music.

Maybe things will calm down by next year. As­suming, of course, that Macworld is still held in New York instead of Boston.