Jobs Not Giving This Year's Macworld Keynote

Many readers including thermopile wrote in about Apple withdrawing from Macworld Expo after this year. The other bad news for Apple fans is that Steve Jobs won't be delivering the keynote in 3 weeks — we may have seen his last "one more thing." Apple VP Phil Schiller will be doing the honors. He's "an Apple executive notably lacking in Jobs's showmanship and star power," according to the Fortune blogger. Apple's press release states that "trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers." While this may be true, the keynote addresses have been a critical venue for major new product announcements. Apple's stock is taking a 6% hit in after-hours trading, possibly on concerns about Jobs's health. Reader Harry has gathered together YouTube clips from most of the Macworld keynotes Jobs given since 1997.

Re:Time Article

[ComputerSlicer23]

Yes, Berkshire Hathaway [wikipedia.org] and Warren Buffet [wikipedia.org]. My hunch is the fact that so many people have held onto the stocks for so long, and they are such stable investors would be one of the very few counter balances to the stock freefalling. They are making public plans the contingency plans for when Buffet retires or dies.

I live in Omaha, and trust me, Berkshire Hathaway's meetings every year noticed by folks far and wide who have nothing to do with Warren Buffet. He's at least as strongly connected personally to his company as Jobs is to Apple. The problem is Warren has a strong "Reatily Clarity Field", and thus is far less of a rockstar then Jobs.

Kirby

Re:iPod, iPhone, then what?

[Guy Harris]

... as long as it's not Windows.

Wrong. [apple.com]

Re:iPod, iPhone, then what?

[timmarhy]

if your toaster came with the kind of EULA an iphone comes with, yes.

Re:iPod, iPhone, then what?

[dgatwood]

That may be the worst pun I've read on Slashdot in years....

Re:iPod, iPhone, then what?

[dangitman]

Are you completely ignorant of the history of computing? Apple shaped the entire way we interact with computers - Windows, Linux are both heavily influenced by the original Mac OS. And yes, now you'll bitch about XEROX PARC and all that... again, missing the point. Apple did not invent the GUI, but put a lot of hard work and great ideas into refining it into a mainstream product. Even the mouse was shaped by Apple - no, they didn't invent the mouse, but again, refined it from being a technical curiosity into a workable, durable item. They put a lot of research into making it something that was smooth and didn't break easily. Go look it up some time.

Inventions are one thing, but turning inventions into real-world products is just as difficult and challenging.

Re:iPod, iPhone, then what?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was then, this is now. I personally have been asked to work through Christmas for products that were going to merely have a demo at MWSF, not even to begin shipping then. They still ostensibly have the holiday shutdown but the number of times they say "except for this project" has been rising steadily every year.

Re:She's Right

[thetoadwarrior]

The only thing the iPod is really lacking is the ability to play more file types (ie ogg) and the ability to something other than iTunes without having to worry about something breaking.

Other than that it does everything people generally need. I can't think of anything else I've truly wanted it to do other than play my flac and ogg files.

Nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that finds it hillarious about how seriously these expos are taken by fanboys? It is just a computer, phone or whatever. This is just plain goofy. nerds.

Re:Look, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

And lo, on the third day, he rebooted!

Re:First touch screen?

[Tetsujin]

I'm also glad that people still make real smartphones like Treos, because I am a PDA user and I refuse to give up meaningful features for marketing fluff and looks. My four-year-old Treo model has many, many features that the iPhone lacks, including multimedia features like stereo bluetooth support and over a decade's worth of third-party software available directly from the people who developed it.

I'm with you there - except that Palm dropped the ball on PalmOS in a major way. For instance, the version of PalmOS installed on the Treo 650 has a fun little bug - where if the device crashes while a database is open, the database ceases to exist. This is a known bug, they even fixed it - but they couldn't be bothered to issue a patch for the people stuck with this problem... PalmOS in general is in a sorry state these days. And most everything still runs on the PACE M68K emulation layer, which is really just sad...

I guess in terms of credit where credit's due for the iPhone:
Moving away from stylus operation of the touchscreen was in many ways a good idea... You don't get the fine control that you would with a stylus, but on the flip side, that means that interfaces are designed such that you generally don't need one... In a sense this is an improvement upon the Palm devices' design philosophy of making the most of the limitations of a device given how people have to interact with it. Bringing multi-touch, accelerometers, and gesture-based UI was perhaps long overdue...