MacWorld Keynote: Final Thoughts

The Future

This year is not going to be an easy year for any company, what ever their industry. With the economic downturn (take a drink) affecting everyone and everything, Apple has had to adjust itself accordingly.

What we saw today was Apple’s response to what is happening with the rest of the market. Things are slowing down and now is not the time to be bringing out anything revolutionary and financially risky. What we saw today were improvements on existing products and upgrades that had already been planned and organized long before the global meltdown (take another drink). What we saw was Apple’s last keynote at MacWorld, a move to save money as well as to control their media cycle.

For example, Apple would not be planning to make a niche device like the Apple TV any time in the near future. The products we see now are the same products we will see for a while to come. This is not saying that they will not be upgraded, that’s a given, it just means that no brand new products will come along for a while unless they had already been planned and matured before the economy took a tumble (drink).

It’s not a major claim, but I think we will see Apple work on it’s core products and that’s about it. We’ll have to wait to see if I’m wrong.

The Coverage

I was slightly disappointed by the coverage of the keynote this year. Things seamed to just grind to a halt half way through the presentation.

It started with the MacRumors live blog being shut down after hackers broke in and started planting porn all over it. That was early on in the coverage and was very disappointing because MacRumors had the best implementation of all the major blog sites. They had auto updating feeds (not just a page that refreshed every 30 seconds) which would have been fantastic throughout the keynote.

Gdgt and Gizmodo has auto refreshing pages which would have been fine in the place of MacRumors. But it was not to be the case. Gizmodo started tripping over itself and crashing, no good. Then everyone rushed to Gdgt, causing that to crash. As time went on Gdgt’s auto refresh inteval got longer, changing from 30 seconds to 60 seconds until it eventually decided that it wasn’t going to auto refresh. Oh well.

My frantic search for information brought me to two Ustream feeds, which were closed down half way through the presentation. All of this happened less than half way through the keynote. My only saving grace turned out to be Twitter. @jalada made this incredibly useful website devoted to the #macworld and #mwsf09 Twitter hash tags. The page was auto updating in front of my eyes with comments from people left, right and center. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked.

So, where do you turn to when all the traditional forms of online media (that’s an oxymoron) crash? Twitter!