MACWORLD Expo - Expo Diary For Thursday

by , 3:00 PM EDT, July 20th, 2000

What can I tell you?

What I find neat is that you can meet anybody at any time. You go near a booth and suddenly, you are talking to a colleague (of the Mac press) that you respect very much, and who seems to like you too! You can see faces from all kinds of companies, publications, and organizations. You e-mailed them before and got along well, but shaking hands in real life is even better.

Another interesting aspect of Expo life is sleep. Why? Because if you want to sleep 8 hours per night, good luck! You have people to meet, companies wanting to stuff your brain with their material, and there are parties to attend around the Expo and City. And, of course, your buddies wanna go out for a drink and pizza. Oh yeah, if you are in the media, your editor will say, "You gotta turn those articles in, man."

Usually, the people I see have a hard time finding 4 or 5 hours of sleep per night. For industry people, the Expo week is like the most demanding time of the year but also the most entertaining. For regular users who come to visit the exhibitors and watch the keynote, it must be even more dazzling.

When you come here, you realize that all those comments about the Macintosh being more than a computer are absolutely truthful. The Mac IS a community. You can find that funny when you read Web pages on the Net, but when you are around the show floor, the press room, and all the other parts of the convention center, it is obvious. You can see it; you can feel it; you can really sense it. You don't see that everywhere.

The show floor is huge. Some exhibitors (Apple, Adobe, Epson and the other big names) usually have booths with screens for demos and someone explaining stuff at a microphone. Such booths get most of the traffic.

Of course, THE company that gets the most visitors is Apple. It probably has the biggest booth on the show floor, not without reasons. They have dozens of Macs on display with Apple staff showing you the units. Of course, they have the latest hardware like the Cube, a few multi-processing G4's, the iMacs, etc. What got my attention was an open G4. You saw the pictures on Apple's pages, but you have to see it in person. This thing is cleverly designed from the interior and adding RAM could not be easier.

I saw one of those MP G4's open and you know - maybe it was my eye only - but I did not see many differences between a "normal" G4 and the new MP machines. The heat sink was probably bigger, but generally, it was pretty much the same.

From what I saw, it was calmer today than yesterday. It was a little easier to get around, and I even got to play with some hardware while I was snooping around. I guess that the keynote effect is huge. Even the press room is quieter.

An interesting aspect of the Expo is the worldwide coverage. There are people from literally all around the planet. I heard languages that I could never figure out, and saw Mac media from everywhere. It is nice to see that they go through all this travel to cover the event.

That is pretty much it for today. I have lots of people to meet and I will tell you more about what it feels to go through the Expo.

MACWORLD Expo