The vanishing trade show

Saturday I attended what's left of Macworld Expo, now known as “Macworld/iWorld” in San Francisco’s Moscone West.

I last attended the show in 2009, which was also the last year of Apple’s participation. Their huge exhibit space cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in booth rental, setup charges and salaries — so with other avenues to reach customers, they decided to drop out. The show never has been the same ever since, although despite some predictions (including my own) Macworld Expo is not dead yet.

Founded in 1985, the Macworld Expo once helped justify the construction of the Moscone convention center complex. At one point it required more than 400,000 square feet of exhibit space in Moscone (South) and Moscone North. (Earlier in the week, the Photonics West optical trade show filled both halls).

This year, despite the longer name the show needed less than 100,000 square feet in Moscone West.

The only one of the traditional major Macworld Expo exhibits was HP, through seniority occupying a 20x30' booth right at the show entrance. In a new take on the traditional “booth bimbo,” HP hired two of the “Gold Rush” squad (aka 49ers cheerleaders).

Another longtime exhibitor was Xerox, taking over the Tektronix Phaser color printers that date back to 1988 (the one color printer company that didn’t need the help of Palomar Software). As for Mac software, I was unable to solve my Exchange calendar synchronization problems. However, saw two new (to me) drawing programs — Art Board and Concept Draw — which might replace my old copy of Smart Sketch for the times that PowerPoint is not nearly enough.

My favorite hardware item was microcone, a (pricey) five-sided microphone for recording 5 6 separate voice tracks from a meeting to a Mac, for transcription or for use as a Skype microphone. On the music side of audio, there were other microphone vendors on the show floor (from Blue and MicW) but the show seemed much less (Mac) music oriented than any other time in the 21st century.

The main trend was that the new name reflected the longstanding shift away from Mac to cases, headphones etc. for iPods and iPhones. I lost track of the number of booths selling cases and headphones, including major audio companies like Polk (with athletes jumping on their trampoline) and Sennheiser (showing their $200+ headphones).

If you wanted to play an electric guitar, you could try it out with the iRig plugged into an iPhone or iPad. However, iPod speakers were much less common than in 2008.

There were a few things that I would have bought for my iPhone or iPad — if I owned an iPhone or iPad. Tops were the keyboards, which included the RightShift and ZaggFolio for the iPad and the Slide to Type 2.0 for the iPhone.

But in the end, we left with two free cases from the moshi drawing and a pair of $10 earphones that claim to be waterproof. In the end, we split our $30 direct cost equally between the earphones, our two Groupon tickets and the offstreet parking.

It was a nice chance to show my daughter an example of that vanishing 20th century phenomenon, the trade show. I can’t imagine going to a smaller show in the future, but perhaps we can find another more vibrant example of the genre to visit before the phenomenon dies off permanently.

Update 2:00 p.m.: Correct error on Microcone pointed out by sharp-eyed reader. Serves me right for not putting on my glasses when in the booth.

Have we got a Macworld deal for you!

In my e-mail inbox Friday was the following email. As noted earlier, IDG is either in denial or thinks it can actually do something to forestall the expected death of Macworld Expo.

Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:04:22 -0800
From: "Macworld Conference & Expo" <info@macworldexpo@idg.com>
Reply-To: info@macworldexpo@idg.com
To: xxx@xxx.edu
Subject: Free Registration for Macworld 2010

Thank you for attending Macworld 2009! Macworld 2009 was a huge success, due to you, the amazing members of the Mac community!

Macworld Conference & Expo has thrived for 25 years due to the strong support of tens of thousands of members of the Mac community worldwide, like yourself, who use Macworld as a way to find great products, partake in professional development training and cultivate their personal and professional networks.

IDG World Expo is committed to continuing to serve your interests at Macworld 2010 and for many years to follow. Macworld 2010 will take place in San Francisco, January 4-8, 2010, where it will continue to provide quality education and dynamic product viewing, while adding additional focus on the amazing ways in which people are putting Apple products to work across all endeavors, from desktops to iPhones to games to music.

While there is no question that Macworld is going to evolve and change in 2010 and beyond, we will continue to build great shows that are worth everyone's time and money. As part of this commitment to the Mac community, we held a standing-room only Town Hall Meeting at the show earlier this week where hundreds of members of the Mac community had the opportunity to ask questions about the 2010 event and make suggestions about how they want Macworld to evolve.

Now we are asking you. We want to know your thoughts and ideas for future Macworld events.

Please take our Macworld 2010 Survey at www.macworldexpo.com/2010survey and submit any ideas and suggestions at suggestionbox@macworld2010.com.

REGISTER TODAY FOR MACWORLD 2010.
As a thank-you for your continued support of Macworld, we are offering FREE exhibits hall registration for Macworld 2010. Registration is open today. Go to
www.macworldexpo.com/2010registration to lock in your registration for Macworld 2010.

We look forward to seeing you next January 4-8, 2010, at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

-The Macworld Conference & Expo Team

Of the questions on the survey, the most amusing quesitons were #1 (“For Macworld 2010, who would you like to see deliver the Keynotes?”) and the questions about when and where to hold the 2011 conference. Since the sampling frame is those who attended a San Francisco conference, I presume SF is still going to win out over LA, NYC and Vegas.

I don’t know if last week’s Macworld Expo was my last. I assumed it was, but as Sean Connery said, never say never!

Macworld Expo: What I did and didn't see

Last of my posts on Macworld Expo 2009

As I remarked on last year’s Macworld Expo, the show seems to have migrated into being a show for schlocky iPod speakers from Taiwan. (When I ran into Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post researching his own story on Macworld, he said that such products will occupy an entire wing of CES later this week.)

This year, there seemed fewer speakers (literally) but many many iPod, iPhone and MacBook cases. To me, this suggests that for plastic or nylon cases, the gross margins are so high — and the entry barriers so low— as to invite excess entry.

Ironically, the only thing I bought at Macworld was an iPod speaker. I was looking for small, portable, self-powered (or battery-powered) speakers that either I could use in a hotel room, or for my daughter’s iPod Shuffle. I found three products from two Taiwanese manufacturers

• What I really liked was the Pocket Hi-Fi in Bass speakers (about $100) from Digifocus — a built-in iPod connector, tiny with amazing room-filling sound. (Get the two-AA battery model CLSS-M, not the one-AA model which has less bass). I didn’t buy them because I only had a want, not a need. However, if I’d realized that they’re not available from the company website (and Amazon only has the lower-end model) I would have just bit the bullet and bought them.
• Until I heard the Pocket Hi-Fi, I really liked the Tweakers from Grandmax (about $40), a pair of golf-ball sized omindirectional speakers that can be separated to improve stereo separation. The sound isn’t quite as good (although it’s amazingly good), but they are very convenient to carry and use: the speakers have a minijack for input, and run off a rechargeable battery charged via a USB port.
• Grandmax also sells a single-speaker version, the Tweakers Teeny, at half the price. This is what I bought for my daughter, and she loves it. Supposedly one or both of the Tweakers models will be available at Office Depot next month

I also had an immediate buying interest in two other audio product categories. One was in headphones. Sennheiser had a booth, and I’m very loyal because I bought a pair of headphones 30 years ago (the HD424, then the best-sounding open air headphones made) and they still sound great.

I am very picky about iPod headphones. Most headphone makers have been emphasizing earbud headphones, but I hate the feel. I have some large noise-cancelling headphones but rarely carry them except for international flights. Instead, I always use clip-on type headphones, which I first discovered in Japan a decade ago before they were available here. The Sennheiser OMX 80 clip-on headphones seemed to provide better sound quality than my existing pair, so I’d like to do a side-by-side comparison before spending the $60.

On the other end of the sound chain, I liked two microphone products, mainly for VoIP or videoconferencing. The one I really wanted was from Marshall Electronics, the music amplification company that now makes a family of USB microphones. The product that I tried was the MXL AC-404 — a USB microphone designed for Skype users that looks (and sounds) like the auxiliary mike for a mid-range Polycom speakerphone. I would have bought it on the spot, but right now I do most of my Skype calls at home and I don’t have a place to put it on my desk.

The mike that I wanted to try — but the booth was too busy — was the Snowflake USB microphone from Blue Microphones. It’s also selling to the Skype audience, but this is a portable product designed to take with your laptop (or even hang on top of the lid).

Another mike that I really liked was the external mike for the iPod Touch 2G sold by Truphone (which doesn’t appear to be mentioned on their website). Although I didn’t see it on the show floor, there is a comparable product (SmartTalk) available from Griffin Technology, which provides an iPhone (or iPod Touch) microphone that you use with your existing audio headsets.

Another cool thing I saw was videoconferencing for the iPhone (which might also run on an iPod Touch). The most press attention came to WebEx, the 800 pound gorilla now owned by Cisco. However, I also saw two other iPhone solutions: Fuze from CallWave and TouchMeeting from Persony. The latter seemed to be living what they preach — i.e. virtual distributed collaboration — as their CEO is in Los Gatos, their President in Santa Barbara and their sales director in Vermont (near the ski slopes).

At least as interesting is what I didn’t see. Like many other users, I was disappointed that the rumored announcements were so wrong. The new Mac Mini is long over due. It’s also odd that Apple hasn’t released more LED-powered LCD screens since the Apple LED Cinema Display 24-Inch released last year; since making a new LCD screen isn’t that hard to do, perhaps they are waiting to fix problems with this one, or timing the introduction to match the (also overdue) update to the Mac Pro.

Also what is disappointing is the lack of a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPod Touch or iPhone. Nokia has had something (the SU-8W) for its smartphones for four years, and there are third party solutions for the Blackberry.

The iPhone has a Bluetooth radio but Apple does not allow it to be used with keyboards. For now, it’s possible to get it to work using an external Bluetooth adaptor. My guess is that Apple has disabled this feature until it sells its own external keyboard, or (less likely) because it plans to release a phone with a built-in keyboard.

The Best is Yet to Come?

I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco, but Tony Bennett famously did. And he sang about it once again on Tuesday at the end of Phil Schiller’s keynote. I didn’t get a chance to hear the keynote, but it is now posted to Apple’s website in QuickTime format. Schiller’s introduction to Bennet starts around 1:27, and the entire part (including intro) lasts about seven minutes (including the cutaway to Apple director Al Gore).

Before singing his signature song, Bennett started with the song “The Best is Yet to Come,” a song made famous by Frank Sinatra — in fact, so associated with ol’ Blue Eyes that the phrase is printed on his tombstone.

However, the song was recorded earlier by Bennett in his 1962 album “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” that was later reissued.

“The Best is Yet to Come” is the implausible theme that IDG has been using this week (in various banners around the show) to promote its planned 2010 Macworld Expo. Implausible because Apple says it won’t be back next year, so that it can save $20+ million per show and instead leverage the “100 Macworlds each and every week going on at our Apple stores around the world."

On Wednesday night, IDG held an open “town hall” event for all attendees to talk about next year’s show. I’m sorry I couldn’t attend, but I had a previously schedule class to begin preparing my students for a business competition that begins in a few weeks. Jim Dalrymple of Macworld (the magazine) has the only report I’ve seen thus far on this Macworld (the trade show) brainstorming session.

Some elements in the report made sense. The IDG rep notes that the vast majority of the items on the show floor are not available at the Apple Store, which is certainly my experience. (How many of these are important? Likely to succeed? Those are different questions).

However, IDG’s core challenge is that it must quickly head off a collapse of confidence in its two-sided market. It needs exhibitors to attract attendees and attendees to attract exhibitors — and perceptions are self-fulfilling — so if either side gives up on the Expo, then it’s dead.

Along these lines, IDG is giving away free show floor (but not conference) admission to consumers to build up the promised numbers to sell to exhibitors. According Dalrymple, it also claims “60 companies” are committed to exhibit in 2010, but I count 473 exhibitors for 2009.

Of those 60 are only two major exhibitors — Microsoft (a 40'x40' this year) and HP (the 30'x40' at the best spot in the hall). It doesn’t have Adobe (one of several that abandoned the 2008 show) or Apple (120'x160'), and so far we have no indications as to how many it has kept of the bread-and-butter 20'x20' booths (Brother, Quark, Peachpit Press) that bring in $21.5k each.

On Tuesday, I talked with Robert Cowling, head of Microspot Ltd., a 20+ year Macworld Expo exhibitor who was my archenemy back in the days of the MacPlot vs. PLOTTERgeist war. He was not optimistic. As I scribbled on my notes:

I don’t think it will last. It’s a shame, because it’s a good place for people to get together.

Cowling recalls when the hall was dominated by software, filled with “people looking for a tool for their computer.” Now of course it’s about iPods and iPhones and the occasional Macintosh.

Cowling’s advice to IDG: if you want exhibitors to sign up today [i.e., when the picture is not clear], give them an escape clause if things don’t work out. So far, the evidence suggests IDG remains confident if not smug about its chances for 2010: the current contract asks for 2/3 of the money by May 4 (without refund). In normal years, IDG wants to assume no risks and wants exhibitors to assume all risks, but this is clearly not a normal year — for the economy or for Macworld Expo.

Best deal at Macworld Expo

My favorite stop at Tuesday’s Macworld Expo was at the Berklee College of Music booth. I saw them last year at the Expo, but this year they have an even bigger booth (4302) in Moscone North.

I never heard of Berklee until I went to MIT, but then they were around the corner from where I lived (briefly) in Back Bay. The founder was an MIT alumnus, and his son expanded the mission to include both on both the business of music and electronic music.

At Macworld Expo, some of the Berklee faculty were giving free demos on making music using a computer. It was very practical, grounded in how actual musicians work, and (unlike most booth demos) was not pushing a particular product or set of features.

The full schedule is published online. I saw “Mac for the Guitarist” (Tue 4pm, Wed 1pm) but “Making Music with the Mac” (Tue Wed noon) was highly recommended.

I stopped to ask: “why is Berklee doing this?” (If I were asking a SV firm rather than an arts college, I would have said “what’s the revenue model?”). This is the answer I got:

1. Berklee has one of the largest college installations of Macs around — some 2000 new machines for students every year — perhaps the most(?) for a music conservatory.
2. They want to raise their visibility on the West Coast, to get away from being primarily a regional school with a student body fro the Northeast.
3. Finally, the show management (IDG) gave them space for free — a lot more space than last year (there was clearly plenty of free space).

This is not out of character for Berklee: one of the slides mentioned BerkleeShares.com, a website for free self-paced music instruction available around the world. Effectively, Berklee is doing for music education what MIT (just across the Charles River) is doing for science and engineering with its OpenCourseWare initiative.

I think it’s great that Berklee’s doing this, and I hope that it continues in some format after Macworld Expo disappears.

Even iTunes has competition

As predicted, the Apple announcements in the Phil Schiller keynote this morning at Macworld Expo were mostly minor, although it sounds like Schiller did a demo to the same standards as his boss would have.

The biggest news was that the iTunes Store is going DRM-free, with 256K files available from all four major labels (not just EMI) by the “end of the quarter.” Is this because of pressure from Amazon? Somehow I doubt it. Instead, I believe this is because Apple has concluded the long and difficult negotiations with the remaining labels to release music DRM free, as it claims to have wanted to do for years (or at least since it got into antitrust problems in Europe).

However, I do think Amazon played a role in the price drop to 69¢ for some (most?) back catalog songs. It could be that Apple won the same pricing terms that Amazon was already using to offer such prices, or perhaps it matched some improvement in operational efficiencies (or scale) that Amazon also has been enjoying.

More interestingly, the price cut and the DRM free songs seem intended by both Apple and the labels to boost lagging iTunes sales. Schiller announced that Apple had sold 6 billion songs, lower than what I’d expected. This could be because all the honest people have bought the missing back-catalog songs that they want, or it could be due to competition from Amazon (or others), or because during a slow economy, digital downloads are a luxury.

Still, the iTunes news was the highlight of an otherwise uneventful keynote. The other announcements were hardly exciting:

• Incremental improvements to its (now web-enabled) application suites, iWork and iHome.
• A bundle of the apps with 10.5 to get people to switch over
• An updated 17" laptop, the most expensive (and thus least popular) model in the line.

Of these, the most intriguing updates were for iPhoto which promises to do automatic face detection to sort pictures of the same person together, as well as better integration of geotagging.

What I most regret about not seeing the keynote was missing the live Tony Bennet performance, singing (of course) “I left my heart in San Francisco.” If it shows up on YouTube or a TV station, I’ll post a link.

The end of an era or two

Back in 1985, at Brooks Hall, I flew up to San Francisco to attend the first ever Macworld Expo. While the franchise (temporarily) expanded to Toronto, DC and (for almost 20 years) Boston, the San Francisco show was always the main show, and attended every show for the next 15 years. (I was also a speaker from 1988-1998 until the show management ousted conference manager Peggy Kilburn so they could pocket that revenue themselves).

Yesterday, Apple announced that it’s pulling out of Macworld Expo after next month’s show, and everyone expects that will kill the show that has been produced by Patrick McGovern’s IDG since the very beginning. While Apple no longer needs the show — given its direct consumer marketing power — as Rob Griffiths writes, I wonder if it will damage the sense of community held by the Mac owners.

In particular, I wonder if it will hurt the ecosystem. Third party software and hardware vendors always used Macworld Expo as a way to get visibility for their new product launches, although these third parties too having been dropping out. Tom Krazit speculates they will create their own show (like Oracle’s), but since Apple used to have a show in Paris (AppleWorld) and dumped it, I think that’s even less likely. Apple says its growth demographic — iPod and iPhone carrying teenagers — don’t do trade shows, and I think they’re right.

Of course, the big financial news is Steve Jobs’ decision to skip Apple’s final appearance. The most benign explanation is that Apple wants to put its management bench in the spotlight, and this is the time to do it. The next most likely explanation is that Apple’s products are late and Steve has nothing to announce in January.

However, the stock opened down 7% today on speculation that Jobs is in declining health — reviving the rumors that appeared over the summer. That Apple won’t deny health problems has caused analysts to (rightfully) downgrade the stock until Apple puts out the truth.

If the Jobs II era (1997-2009?) were really ending, then it seems like 7% is not enough of a valuation loss. This would be an end (however temporary) of Apple’s latest run as a growth stock. The current executives could keep the lights on, but without Jobs around to provide the uncompromising vision and the tyrannical leadership, Apple would be yet another middle-aged bureaucratic Silicon Valley company (think HP, Sun, Oracle, Intel).

Losing Jobs is bigger than losing Jack Welch, and we all know how that turned out. It’s bigger than losing Alfred P. Sloan — or Hewlett and Packard — because the impacts will be felt immediately, rather than gradually over time.

The best option is for Apple to acquire an innovative startup with a monomaniacal CEO who can step into Jobs’ shoes. Although it hasn’t worked out so well for Sun, it is what saved Apple back in 1997 from certain oblivion.

The other option would be to steal back Jon Rubinstein, Jobs’ right-hand man from the NeXT days who knows Apple and its culture. If Palm somehow cheats death with its product and technology announcements next month, his stock will be on the rise.

This week I am praying for Steve Jobs and his family. While his children will not lack for any material thing, if they lose their father, it will (as my own father discovered) influence them the rest of their lives.

23 years of Macworld Expo

This week I had a chance to go to the iPod/iPhone Expo (née Macworld Expo) in San Francisco. Steve Jobs made headlines Tuesday for introducing a new portable Macintosh, but the term "Macworld Expo" seems to no longer really describe the show. With the declining role of the Mac to Apple’s bottom line has come a rise in non-Mac products; in Paris, it was always “Apple Expo”, a more generic term.

So as with last year, there was a proliferation of iPod (and now iPhone) accessories. How many different types of cases or iPod speakers do we need? The ultimate in cr***y iPod accessories was the iCanta, a $80 toilet paper holder/iPod holder to use in your bathroom.

I've been going to Macworld Expo since the first one at Brooks Hall in 1985. I worked the Silicon Beach booth a couple of years (IIRC 1985-1987) to get an exhibitor badge, and at Palomar Software exhibited at most shows (both SF and Boston) from 1987-1993. I also was a panelist for Peggy Kilburn during the conference she created until she was forced out in 1999.

At Macworld Expo SF 1998 I sat outside the expo and did preliminary interviews for my PhD thesis. That thesis during the darkest days of the Mac, and so my study tried to predict which Mac users would stay and which would switch to Windows. I nicknamed the survey “should I stay or should I go”? So a decade ago, I would not have believed that one of the books being shown at Macworld Expo today would be “Switching to Mac for Dummies”.

Software

The show’s origins as a Mac software show was hard to find on the floor. There were a few innovative packages, like TheSkyX and Seeker, an educational astronomy packages from Software Bisque. At $150 for the combo, it’s too expensive to buy for home use, but we might buy it to donate to my daughter’s school.

Instead of new software, there were probably even more 9.0 and 10.0 releases. SPSS (the standard stats software for social scientists) was showing SPSS 16 for the Mac. At one level a rev 16 is mundane as you can get, but on the other hand, it was an incontrovertible sign that the Mac is back. In June 1996, it was the decision of SPSS to abandon the Mac that caused me to start the MacStats website to educate the Mac faithful as to other alternatives.

Although SPSS now does their own Mac development, they came back to the Mac in July 2000 after outsourcing the port to Software MacKiev. Today, the Ukraine-based firm is the world’s largest independent developer of Mac software, with 400 employees. It does both contract work and also has a line of retail products, typically ports of Broderbund PC titles like PrintShop. According to Steve in the booth, its commercial products started when WorldBook decided not to do an OS X port of its encyclopedia and MacKiev stepped up. They still do contract development (taking over much of the HP printer driver work we once did) but are a major presence on the consumer side as well.

Although I ignored the the Microsoft, Adobe, etc. booths showing the N+1 release of their decades-old software, but that was just calculation that I wouldn’t learn anything new. Of course I’ll need to get Office 2008 (under university site license) to deal with the dreaded DOCX disease. Also when it comes out, I’ll buy (if it’s reasonably priced) Photoshop Elements 6.0 since my 5-year-old copy of 2.0 doesn’t run under OS X 10.5.

Hardware

Macworld (or at least my personal purchases) has always been about esoteric hardware accessories. I finally bought a Radio Shark 2 to listen to the radio at work, as well as another USB 2.0 hub to use with my forthcoming MacBook Air.

For those interested in the MB Air, I visited the Apple both and found the CD-free strategy convincing — you can boot from a remote CD(DVD) drive over a WiFi network, although Ernie Prabhakar suggested that for emergency booting I just spend $20 and install OS X on a dedicated USB pen drive. The annoying thing is that Apple will not recommend any power supply to share between the MacBook/MacBook Pro/MacBook Air. As someone who’s accumulated about 7 bricks (and a car adaptor) for the previous model (shared between 3 laptops), I find that inflexibility to be frustrating.

Another cute piece of hardware was the iRecord ($200), a dedicated appliance that will automatically convert analog video input into a format (H.264) that plays on your iPod. It even knows the resolution of your iPod screen and thus the resolution to use for transcoding.

The hardware I’m most likely to buy is the NetGear ReadyNAS Duo, a network attached storage with multiple drive bays (due in March). It sounds ideal for Time Machine backups. The little brother of the ReadyNas NV, it sounds like it will be available for under $500. And unlike the last NAS I bought (which I returned),it presents an HFS file system and thus can backup Mac file names without modification.

I’m also interested in the Western Digital MyBook Studio hard disks, not because they do a better job of commodity hardware, but because (unlike so many other firms) they bundle some decent software. The software does an automatic continuous backup which is interesting but not unique. Instead, what was attractive is how unusually versatile in how it backs up, since it will back up some data to different places or other data (like photos) to multiple places. I’m sure my wife will use the feature that automatically uploads photos to Shutterfly.

Air ball

Today Steve Jobs only a few of the things predicted for Macworld Expo: a new laptop, iTunes movie rentals and a better AppleTV. They also came up with Time Capsule, a wireless backup server that should prove popular with price-insensitive buyers who don’t want to build their own out of commodity products. But the iPhone update was pretty minor, and there was no news on DRM-free iTunes music.

I’ve been waiting for the new laptop for more than a year, and aspects of the MacBook Air are compelling. 13" x 9" x 3/4" is a nice size, and 3 lbs is the lightest Apple laptop ever. The screen (1280x800) and keyboard are full-sized, it comes with a built-in camera and claims a 5 hour battery life. As expected, it uses an external CD drive to keep weight down, but apparently there is provision (“Remote Disk”) to remotely access the CD drive on some other Mac or PC.

The rumored diskless Mac was just a rumor — at $3100, nobody’s going to buy the 64gb flash RAM model, but instead the Air will be sold in an $1800 configuration with a 80gb iPod disk drive (even though 160gb drives are shipping now).

The MacBook Air shows the power of positive network effects from joining the Intel ecosystem. In PowerPC laptops, Apple was the only company interested in ultrasmall CPUs, but Intel has developed a smaller (“off the roadmap”) CPU that presumably will be offered to other vendors.

But beyond this, the tradeoffs are pretty disappointing:

• no built in Ethernet — only available via external dongle
• no FireWire at any price
• only one USB port (shared by the mouse, disk drive, CD drive and Ethernet)
• no expansion slot (ExpressCard) for cellular modems
  
• no user-changeable battery (forget swapping batteries over the Pacific)
• video cables (micro-DVI instead of mini-DVI) incompatible with any existing Mac out there

To me, the most serious omission is this is the first Apple laptop since the very beginning (1991) that does not have “target disk mode”. Originally in SCSI and later in FireWire, TDM has been a unique and invaluable tool for fixing hard disk problems on Apple laptops, and it’s hard to see how certain problems can be fixed without it.

Some are calling it another “Cube”: too defeatured in the name of style. (Since I bought a Cube, too, that would be appropriate.) If so, that would be another example of the problems not having checks and balances on Steve’s tastes

It’s a very portable laptop, and I may buy one. However, it’s not nearly as useful or innovative as (for its day) the 4 pound Duo 280. Mine's still in a desk drawer somewhere, but I’d still be using it if you could get software that ran on a 24 Mb 68040 OS 9 machine.

Rabbits I'd like to see in Steve's hat

Steve Jobs is doing is annual “rabbit from a hat” act at Macworld Expo on Tuesday. I don’t know what he’s going to say, but here’s what I’d like to hear:

• long-rumored diskless (flash RAM) compact laptop that I have been waiting to buy for 18 months.
• an announcement of 3rd party applications for the iPhone, addresing the two most glaring omissions: Flash, and some sort of IM client (such as the deliberately omitted adaptation of iChat)
  
• more details on the iPhone SDK due in February
• a decision finally by Universal and Warner to provide DRM-free music not only to Amazon, but also (like EMI) for the iTunes Store,
  
• more transparency on the iPhone revenue numbers for Q1 of FY2008 (Oct-Dec), as well as for iTunes music and video downloads.

Some things that are possible but I don’t really care about:

• iTunes movie rentals
• a 3G iPhone (I won’t switch to AT&T), although a better iPod Touch would be nice
• the laptop docking station — not because I wouldn’t use one (I once owned all three types of Duo docks) but because I’m too cheap to throw out my existing monitor.

Jobs always saves the most anticipated or most surprising announcements for last: if he doesn’t mention the iTunes Store in the first half, this suggests that he has yet to win over some of his critics in Hollywood.

Dissin’ Apple may be good for egos (and improving negotiating positions) but in the long run ignoring the world’s most popular legal music download site is bad for business. Even Edgar Bronfman (Jr.), the former Universal Music owner and now CEO of Warner Music, admitted two months ago that Jobs had been right all along on music download pricing.

Tomorrow I have to work (everybody has to sometime), but Wednesday I’ll go up to the Expo to see what’s going on.