…and here I thought I’d get to blog on-site about my Macworld Expo experiences fairly regularly this year. Silly me for thinking there’d be the time. The minute another iProng Team member hit the ground, we were collectively running — finalizing our gameplan for covering the Expo, attending to last-minute communications from iPod-related exhibitors, running into friends and colleagues across the industry while picking up our credentials and eating dinner. No matter how early you start preparing for an event like this, there are always going to be aspects that can’t be dealt with until the time arrives.
I’m not saying it was all work and no play. Arriving on Sunday allowed us to decompress on Monday, spending the morning sightseeing while trying not to fill the entire conversation with Expo gameplanning. For the record, I was the only member of this year’s iProng team with the guts to hang off the side of a cable car for the full length of the ride. Going down Nob Hill while literally hanging on to a pole for your life is sort of like riding a roller coaster, but colder and with bigger stakes.
Monday evening we gathered with friends and fellow journalists at Jillian’s (the site of Thursday’s party) to watch Florida blow out Ohio State for the college football national championship, an event that had a lot of meaning to me at the time but quickly faded so far into the recesses of my mind that I literally didn’t think about the game even once after it ended until this very moment. Ones brain just isn’t big enough to deal with a Macworld week while also processing any outside concepts, and this was perhaps best expressed by the fact that when we realized the television in our hotel room didn’t work, we didn’t even bother to ask for a room change because we knew there wouldn’t be a single opportunity to watch TV all week. Nor any desire, for that matter. Thank goodness for my DVR, I suppose. It’ll take me a month to catch up on the week’s worth of shows I missed.
Speaking of the hotel, it turned out to be just what we needed. Less than half the price of the Marriott and just a tad further away, still easily within walking distance of Moscone. The rooms and beds were small, but we spent so little time in our hotel rooms during the course of the week that it didn’t matter. When you’re that tired, you can sleep on any bed, and when you’re nose-deep in your laptop every waking minute that you do spend in the room, the size of the room doesn’t much matter either. The view of the cable car turnaround right outside our window was nice, but the noise coming from the resulting hubbub usually lasted until about midnight. Didn’t matter to us, since there wasn’t a night where we got to bed before midnight anyway. As with nearly every hotel I’ve ever stayed at during a tech conference, the wireless internet was unacceptably slow, but not nearly as bad as the place we stayed at last year. The phrase “no way are we staying here next year if they don’t increase this crappy bandwidth pipeline” only came out of my mouth once or twice during the course of the entire week, which is far less frequent than usual.
Apple VP and design honcho Jonathan Ive walked into Moscone West for the Keynote directly behind us, but we chose not to say hello because we knew he would probably be part of the presentation and we didn’t think it was fair to risk shaking his concentration. None of us could figure out why he was entering through the audience door until he ended up being one of the audience recipients of a Steve Jobs iPhone call during the Keynote. But Jon Ive was far from the only celebrity we encountered during the course of the week. And no, I’m not talking about John Mayer’s moving-platform performance at the end of the Keynote.
The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir was on hand at the Expo in support of the John Lennon Bus, a project which seeks to teach music to kids in schools where the arts budgets have been slaughtered. Bob was nice enough to sit down in the back of the bus with us for an interview (which will be released on iProng Radio on Wednesday), and while I’ve interviewed plenty of famous musicians before, they’ve usually been remote interviews done over the phone or Skype. Sitting next to Bob Weir on a couch while interviewing him was a whole new experience. Turns out he doesn’t just do publicity for the project, he actually goes around and teaches music to the kids himself, making him some kind of saint in my book. With the life-long residuals he presumably has coming in from Grateful Dead album sales, he could easily be laying out on a beach sipping martinis. If I ever find myself in his position, I hope I can be as altruistic.
But while I knew we’d meet Bob ahead of time, what was totally unexpected was bumping into Robin Williams on the show floor. Not the Robin Williams who writes books about the Macintosh, but the one who stars in movies. Yeah, that Robin Williams. The one that even your Windows-using friends have heard of. Ran into him on the Exhibit Hall floor, and he was gracious enough to pose for pictures with us. But in typical Robin Williams fashion, he grabbed ahold of the top of Matt Saye’s scalp during the picture and proceeded to try his very best to rip it off Matt’s head. It’s something that we’ve taken to calling the Robin Williams Maneuver, and I’m afraid that we’ll probably be doing to each other during pictures for many Expos to come.
The Incubus concert on Wednesday evening turned out to be just the fix we needed to temporarily pull out minds out of Expo mode and refresh ourselves for the second half of the week. Unexpectedly, a number of people (attendees and exhibitors alike) asked us if we had any extra tickets. I sometimes forget that some people actually read what I like to scribble here, and I was having a hard time figuring out how anyone knew we were going. Maybe next year we’ll announce our intentions a little earlier (say, before the venue is sold out) so that folks can grab their own tickets and join us if they want. The screw-up? Buying floor tickets got us as close to the stage as possible, but it also meant standing up for the entire length of the show — not something you want to do during Expo week when your feet are killing you. My bad. Shoulda gone for the balcony seats. Next time we will, if we get lucky enough to have some band we all like performing a block from our hotel during the Expo next year.
And then there was director Kevin Smith, perhaps best known for portraying Silent Bob in his own movies. I only got to ask him one question, but it was the one I wanted to ask him, and I got the answer I was looking for (and a whole lot more). He uses iTunes to download other people’s movies, he’s no more happy about the fact that his movies are missing from the iTunes Store than anyone else, and he’s hoping to figure out how to get them in there. His hilarious and insanely profane tangent about how the iPhone will lead to the downfall of the human race was almost enough to get me to buy the conference DVDs just to be able to transcribe it directly (no personal recorders were allowed in the session).
Visiting with seventy-five iPod-centric exhibitors in a four day span was about what you might think it would be. Even though exhibitors tried their best to let us know whether they’d be introducing new products at the show this year, a number of companies simply didn’t know whether their latest products would arrive from the factories until the week of the Expo. That left us visiting everyone in the name of seeing every last new product, an exhausting process in which you have to take notes and pictures while thinking of the right questions to ask about a brand new product you haven’t necessarily been briefed on in advance. Thank goodness for multi-person teams. Although there was plenty late-night internal debate and discussion in the name of whittling twenty-four finalists down to twelve winners, I think we got it right when it came to our Best of Show awards. In the end, every member of the team was able to get behind every one of the twelve winners. While it’s not a substitute for sifting through our full listing of seventy-five companies’ worth of iPod-related products from the Expo, the Best of Show list is a good guide for figuring out where to start first.
The Podcasters Panel at the Apple Store on Thursday evening was extremely engaging, and although I was a member of the panel, my relative newcomer status as a podcaster left me doing a lot more listening than speaking. What am I supposed to contribute to the mix when I’m on a podcasting panel with Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, Ken Ray, Adam Christianson, Tim Street, and too many other famous podcasters to list? It was one of those “just happy to be a part of it” moments and I felt privileged to be up there. My speaking engagement in the User Group Lounge had something of the same feel to it, with me looking at the roster of famous Apple personalities who were also speaking and wondering why the heck my name was on it. But it was a great opportunity to share ideas about how to present iPod and iTunes topics to a Mac User Group, and in fact a nice discussion about which iPod and iTunes topics should be a part of a Mac User Group.
From a personal perspective, the week ended up pivoting on the Mac Mingle party which also served as iProng’s Third Birthday celebration. The team took turns cutting and serving the two iProng birthday cakes, I somehow managed to get myself sufficiently intoxicated to grab a mic and lead the audience in a rendition of Happy Birthday, and Mike Strum managed to pull a Robin Williams on me during a cake-cutting picture that Matt was taking.
The party ended with something that, well, maybe it’ll come out during the week and maybe it won’t, but for now, suffice it to say that you had to be there at the party to see what had me smiling through all the tiredness on Friday.
You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to go down an escalator with four bags including two large wheeled suitcases, but I managed to get myself in precisely that situation when I was taking BART back to the airport alone and managed to miss my opportunity to opt for the elevator. Every year I swear I’m not going to let any exhibitors load me up with on-site review samples that I have to figure out how to get home, but then I consider the opportunity to get the products tested, reviewed, published, and in the hands of the public sooner if I don’t wait for the companies to ship the stuff to me the next week. But wow, the largest suitcase I brought was completely empty on the way out and bursting on the way home, and I also ended up going home with one more piece of luggage than I went out there with. If you asked me to recount how I survived the escalator ride I couldn’t tell you, but I do know that by the time I reached the bottom of it, none of the bags was in the same position as when I got on the thing. It wouldn’t have been an issue if I were driving to and from the Expo instead of flying. Someday I’ll figure out why I’m still living in Florida when the industry I cover is located primarily in California. Until then, I guess I’ll just keep flying out there eight times a year.
So that’s a wrap on this year’s Macworld Expo, at least officially. Now that I’m back home, the real work begins. New products waiting to be reviewed, new commentary about new directions in the iPod universe waiting to be written. Words. Lots and lots of words. There are probably half a dozen other Expo stories I wanted to share with you and forgot, but now it’s time to move on to the real word at hand. Oh, and seeing how Apple rolled out features on the iPhone that will clearly make their way into the Sixth Generation iPod but didn’t actually roll out the Sixth Generation iPod, I’m taking bets on how many months or weeks it’ll be until I’m on another plane to San Francisco for the next round of new products. Never dull, never boring, never the same week twice, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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