Macworld leads tech out of the desert
Apple has the third week of January all to itself this year, and although it probably won't top last year's Macworld, the company will likely make everyone forget about the Consumer Electronics Show.
Trade shows are a necessary evil in the tech industry. Everyone claims to hate them, but the opportunity to have all the major players in the same town at the same time is too much of a draw. And usually, the parties are decent, leading more than 140,000 business types to CES in Las Vegas this week for a chance to make deals and network inside crowded booths and over the craps tables.
Contrast that with Macworld, scheduled for next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. About 40,000 people are expected to attend the 23rd such gathering, according to conference presenter IDG World Expo. And, like last year, Tuesday's Macworld announcements will probably overshadow anything announced in the Nevada desert.
Hundreds of ordinary people will start lining up for Macworld on Monday night for a chance to sit 300 feet away from their hero. They'll be swapping stories and talking tech all throughout the chilly night with their fellow line-standers. They're anticipating the Stevenote, the two hours of the year when the tech world stands still, waiting for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to introduce the company's latest products.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone at last year's Macworld.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com)The buzz this year doesn't seem to be approaching the heights reached last year, when Jobs unveiled the iPhone. The best bets this time around appear to be new slim notebooks and a movie rental service with several of the world's largest studios joining forces with Apple.
Apple's stock, which usually follows a "buy on the rumor, sell on the news" pattern prior to Macworld, is actually down quite a bit from last week. Granted, it was a bad week for just about everyone, but it's still a little surprising that Apple's performance was below the market's in the week leading up to Macworld. With a recession looming in the minds of many economists, perhaps some investors are wondering whether people forced to choose between a growing mortgage payment, filling up the tank, or buying a new Mac might opt to keep the roof over their head and the car moving.
However, it's also pretty hard to introduce products every year that will generate buzz on the order of the iPhone. New notebooks seem like a given, coming off the introduction of new mobile processors from Intel and the two-year gap between next week and the last significant overhaul of the MacBook design template.
Much of the speculation has centered on an ultraportable notebook, a 3-pound or so laptop currently missing from Apple's slate of Macs. But it's also likely that the company will take the occasion to update the regular notebooks in its arsenal.
The more significant news, should it come to pass, would be the announcement of a movie rental service through iTunes. Reports have been flying out of Hollywood that Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, Lions Gate, and, of course, Disney will have rental agreements to announce with Apple.
Apple's attempts to replicate the success of the music portion of the iTunes store in the video market haven't exactly taken off, especially when it comes to movies. While people may indeed want to own their music, they seem less interested in having to buy movies just to check them out. Details of exactly how Apple's rental service would work are still sketchy, but for a few dollars, you'd likely download a file that would last a predetermined amount of time (24 hours is the popular bet) and then disappear from your hard drive.
Given how many people are using iTunes, this could be one of the first Internet-download services to break through to average consumers. The concept has been around for a while through companies like Wal-Mart and Movielink, but no one has managed to turn the idea into a hit. Apple has a fighting chance to pull that off, and if it does, it'll also dramatically expand the usefulness of Apple TV.
There's also likely to be the fabled "one more thing." A lack of preshow buzz might mean Apple has been ratcheting down expectations for this year, but it might also mean it's done a better job keeping its secrets secret. After all, there's no way Jobs can talk about notebooks and movies for the scheduled 90 minutes, and some feel that this week's introduction of the Mac Pro and Xserve was done to free up some time in his keynote for something else.
Contrast that with the "news" coming out of Las Vegas. Despite hours of keynote speeches from some of the titans of the American technology industry, there didn't seem to be anything radically new or different this year that changed the way the industry looks at a certain segment or captured the attention of the average person. The iPhone managed to do both of those things last year at Macworld.
For the most part, people leave Las Vegas drained from the experience of the daily trek across the equivalent of a small town, listening to the same stump speeches from the same industry visionaries who want you to imagine that all of the things they said would happen last year (and the year before that, and the year before that) actually did happen.
Jobs has managed to avoid falling into that malaise so far. Last year, he introduced the iPhone. That seems to have worked out fairly well. The year before that, he introduced the first Intel-based Macs. People have clearly responded to those as well.
Every time he does this, however, the expectations grow. Apple has done a masterful job with Macworld the last several years, but it will become more and more difficult to outdo itself every year.
But until the Intels, Microsofts, Yahoos, and Comcasts of the tech industry start doing the same thing at CES--introducing products that captivate ordinary people--that show will always be more about schmoozing and gambling. And Apple will continue to own January.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
Music Store . . . and less likely but more important, of some form
of DICTATION SOFTWARE for the iPhone, such as voice dialing, or
perhaps true text dictation of outgoing Emails, that could later be
retrieved on a home computer, thence to be filed or printed . . .
I would bet that every Sunday morning, Tommy Boy rushes to the closest Mac store for his weekly service. He sits, with every iPhone in his hand that can reach him and prays to his savior. "Mr. Steve, please please let me be more like you. I too can wear a turtleneck and jeans, and come up with useless products that look pretty. Show me the way."
Such a fanboy, and it makes me sick. Please tell me cnet doesn't actually pay you for your writings...
fanboys nowadays. It must be hard watching your precious
marketshare evaporate, having to look at all those Apple logos
and earbuds everywhere.
How long until MS can produce a decent OS? I mean, what is
the 'roadmap' for post Vista failure? How long until MS can
make a compelling tablet or handheld device? We are waiting
for the FIRST such device.
The writing is on the wall. Have you seen what Leopard server
does? That should make any 6-week MS training course
graduate pretty nervous.
those?) - IOW, it's slowly fading away.
MacWorld has more of a Cult Classic feel to it (in a good way,
a'la Rocky Horror Picture Show), which means it has a bit more
staying power. :)
/P
Jeremy lesser macs in the world
Jeremy lesser HD means more blu ray
I mean, unless I missed something apple still has less than 10% of the market share in the computer business. Less than 1% of the market in smart phones. Less than .1% of the market in servers, etc.
Now I know Apple will always appeal to people that want to think they are different from everybody else, and Macworld is that cliques raison d?être, but really, try to keep some perspective on just how little market share apple really has before you spend yet another year talking about how apple is going to take over the __________ (fill in the blank) market.
computer business...
Wow - so at what point might Apple be important to the
computer industry? 100%?
....Less than 1% of the market in smart phones....
Again WHEN might they be important? I realize that they only
have one phone and that they have only been selling them for a
few months AND they already have about 1% of the smart phone
market. They also seem to be make money at it... So?
The server bit I will concede.
Another difference is intention. The mac platform is intended to help people and to let them excel. This is evident if you use the supporting applications (iLive, included when you buy a Mac) of Mac OS, and this is a real difference.
The importance of the struggle between the operating systems, can be compared to a struggle between (human)languages. So it isn't a trivial thing. (And it isn't about reading mail at all.)
Maybe it is helpful if you understand that when you don't understand the difference it doesn't mean that there is no difference.
I have had a number of macs over the years and have administered networks of them professionally while in the publishing industry. I'm not saying they don't have a viable market or that the products are bad, I'm just saying that as someone whos time is very expensive (valuable) I can't justify something like macworld as a business function. The ROI on my time there is negative as opposed to CES or CeBIT (which is itself starting to be less profitable for me due to the influx of nontrade attendees).
I have nothing against apple as a company (though as a tech consultant/integrator their licensing issues have always been troublesome) but I don't see apple ever actually living up to the hype thats generated around it. The company is now less about actual performance than it is about media anticipation. While everbody learns in marketing 101 that its important to have brand exposure and market anticipation, I just think its now gone to extremes. Of course this isn't an exclusively apple problem anymore, most traded companies now get floated or floundered based more on media speculation than on any actual business data.
Now just so were clear about my personal use of this stuff, this is what I'm running at home currently (actually on the network and not just sitting in a closet somewhere):
Vista: 3
XP Pro: 4
XP Media Center: 2
Server 2003: 2
Ubuntu Server: 2
Ubuntu Desktop: 2
Mandrake (Mandriva now): 1
Apple OS9 (for an old file maker database): 1
Apple OSX: 2
Apple OSX Server (won't get to keep this, I'm evaluating it for a client): 1
AS400: 1 (I just keep this in the garage for fun, my last client that was using AS/400 finally got away from it last year)
AIX: 1
Solaris: 1
SGI Onyx: 1
IBM Blades: 3
You would be hard pressed to say I'm just a "PC" guy. However I am a geeks geek. But despite my geeky disposition to love all electronics equally (except the Altair 8800, it will always have a special place in my heart) when it comes to making money, I go where the market majority is. And when it comes to making business decisions I go with rational performance data (i.e. trade volume) rather than "Cult Classic feel" or other subjective performance values.
To be honest my only real complaint about the MacOS's over the years have been the difficulty in digging down through the OS to get direct hardware access, I'm much happier with OSX in this regard in that its much easier to rip into its guts than it was previously. However I will continue to bemoan the lack of software options for the Mac and this is where MS pcs continue to excel, the near limitless variety and options that are available.
Now as to my "self imposed misery", its anything but. I love the fact that PCs are complicated and 90% of the population can't figure out how to make heads or tales of dll troubles, network configuration errors, etc. This is my bread and butter baby! If people got smart and figured this stuff out on their own (at the corporate level) I'd be out of business. But fortunately I don't see that happening anytime soon, if anything the population is being dumbed down as technology becomes even more complex. I love that professors think that Java is killing low level programming education. I love that people return 10% of HDTVs because they don't realize they need an HD signal (and HD cables) to get an HD picture. I love that jackass is more popular than cspan.
Of course it sucks if your one of the people that needs to pay me because you still haven't figured out to RTFM or google it. But I'm not one of those people.
Oh and the reason I spend alot of time talking about this is in the hope that it will get one more kid interested enough to get into science/engineering AND business for themselves. The industry has been good to me, I enjoy passing on what I've learned from it (especially when I can do so from my blackberry or tablet while sitting in some boring @$$ meeting or waiting for a plane, lol).
- No, I agree with your numbers, just not the way your using them
- by baka-man January 14, 2008 5:36 PM PST
- I agree with the figures you cited (we used the same report from Canalys), I just disagree with the way you focused exclusively on the NA market. Like I said, we're behind the curve here now and only falling further behind. But despite those millions of units Apple still only has about 1% (2% if your inclined to round generously) of the smart phone market.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(51 Comments)Personally, my opinion is that Apple isn't really going to take (much) market share from any of the existing players, what they are going to do is grow the market so that there is more share to go around. I taught a class 2 nights a week last semester and I had 4 out of 24 students that had iphones. These mostly aren't kids that previously had blackberrys or windows mobile devices (I asked, one was upgrading from a symbian device) these were people who had been caught up in the wave of popularity for the product and got their first smartphones. Of course, one of these kids couldn't afford a graphing calculator but he bought an iphone, go figure.