It is Thursday night, and San Francisco is being battered by high winds, lashing rain and pounding seas, but inside a Chinese restaurant on the fringes of the city's Chinatown a group of 200 Apple veterans are having a whale of a time.
It's the annual Netters' dinner, which started out 16 years ago as an intimate gathering of the handful of MacWorld attendees who had managed to connect their Macs to the internet.
These days, the Netters take over the whole restaurant. And while Apple's slogan is "Think Different", they appear to be proving that geeks are still geeks, whether they have been weaned on the Mac's graphical interface or the PC's command line. In the queue for the buffet of fiery hot food there is talk of just how cool Apple's wireless networking is, at the bar there's unbridled lust for Apple's new top-end machines, and around the tables there's technically intimate my-Mac's-better-than-yours bragging between mouthfuls of kung po chicken.
The undoubted winner of the king system bragathon, as determined by a rowdy show of hands later on, is a plump Californian who boasts a quarter of a terabyte of hard disk space, 1.5 gigabytes of memory on his desktop machine but, to jeers, "only a gigabyte on my laptop".
"What do you keep on all that?" asks the master of ceremonies. "Porn," jokes one diner, to laughter. "Word 6," shouts another, referring to the notoriously bloated Microsoft product, and the attendees are rolling about, clutching their sides. It is the quip of the night.
Spirits are high - this has been a good Macworld for Apple and its devotees. Two days earlier, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs had appeared before a cheering 5,000 strong crowd, who had stampeded into the hall with a fevered expectation normally reserved for rock stars.
Jobs had started his 90-minute keynote with a concession - that the last few months of the previous year had been "extremely challenging" for Apple, and the rest of the industry. But he said he wanted to start 2001 "with a bang", and went on to deliver machines designed to appeal to this hardcore audience. They include a top-end G4 desktop machine with built-in SuperDrive which allows users to create CDs and DVDs for playback on household machines - a first in the PC industry.
And he used the now famous "and another thing" segment at the end of his presentation, as an apparent afterthought, to introduce the sleek new G4 PowerBook, called Titanium after the metal its casing is made from.
The machine is only an inch thick, sports a 15.1 inch wide screen and faster processors, giving performance which Apple says beats Pentium III laptops. There were whoops from the floor of the vast Moscone convention center as Jobs whipped a sheet off the new machine. One attendee at the Netters dinner claimed he had ordered his machine using his existing laptop and a wireless connection to the AppleStore website within minutes of it being unveiled.
Mac OSX
But, despite the excitement, the hardware was not necessarily the most important announcement Apple had to make. The Mac has long needed a new operating system to match some of the features Windows users take for granted, including better protection against crashes and multitasking, and Jobs finally gave the date when the new Mac OS X will arrive in its final form - March 24.
The new system, said Jobs, would be worth the wait: Apple had expected to sell 10,000 of its beta version of OS X - it sold 100,000, with 75,000 people giving feedback, "some of it quite long", joked Jobs. OS X won praise for its stability and feedback on the classic environment, which will run non-OS X programs, was also good. "I think a lot of you were really surprised to find it actually works," said Jobs.
The greatest criticisms admitted by Apple centred on missing features in the beta which will appear in the final version and, more important to these style-conscious Mac users, the aesthetics of OS X and its new Aqua interface. Jobs unveiled several subtle changes to make the switch to the new OS more palatable for Apple old-timers, including the return of the Apple menu to the top left-hand corner of the screen.
Jobs also unveiled a number of new features in the final version which did not make the beta - including improvements to the dock, a new navigation device at the bottom of the screen which will combine many of the elements of today's control strip, launcher, Apple menu and finder and a new in-built screen saver.
Memory requirements for the finished OS X remain high - Apple recommends that you have at least 128MB of RAM to run it - although it is only the classic environment that pushes the requirement that high: if you were to use only OS X-native applications that requirement would fall, says Apple.
Exactly how many native applications there will be for OS X by this summer remains to be seen. The day after Jobs' keynote, Microsoft - the biggest Mac software developer - handed a major boost to the system by saying that it would release a new version of Mac Office for OS X in the autumn, only a year after its last major revision.
But other major developers have been more reluctant to announce new versions, despite Jobs claiming repeatedly in his keynote that the bulk of new OS X applications would arrive in the summer.
Most significantly, at the show stalls of Adobe and Quark - makers of market-leading programs Photoshop and XPress - representatives would not reveal their companies' plans for updating their applications for OS X.
Lifestyle change
In the keynote, Jobs also revealed his vision of a "digital lifestyle" where increasingly sophisticated gadgets around the home are linked together - with a Mac at the centre. The digital lifestyle, he said, would include the internet and emerging movement towards digital media, including MP3 music, DVD video and programming "broadcast" over the net. But, instead of PCs disappearing inside glorified internet-enabled TV sets, as predicted by some, Jobs said the desktop computer's power, flexibility and superior interface would still be needed.
He said Apple's strategy was "laying the foundation for the next decade, possibly the next decade and a half of Apple products."
Continuing this theme, Jobs unveiled the first two software products of this new era from Apple - iTunes and iDVD. iTunes, free to download from Apple's website, is an all-in-one digital music program sporting Apple's new Aqua interface, bringing together functions such as MP3 playback, cataloguing, internet radio and CD writing, which are normally only run in separate applications. While Apple's aentry into the digital music arena is late, iTunes looked impressive, offering the most important features of its paid-for rivals except the MP3 cross-mixing features included in some.
The only complaint from the conference masses was that no current Macs can produce CDs without additional hardware and, with no new iMacs or iBooks announced at this MacExpo, consumers will still have to splash out for a CD "burner" to make full use of the software.
Inevitably, there is now speculation that new iMacs and iBooks boasting CD-RW drives will appear - either at Macworld Tokyo next month (Japan buys more iMacs than any other country) or at Macworld in New York this June, where new consumer products have aften been announced.
Similarly, iDVD looked a strong product, but out of reach of the users it seemed made for. It looked like a consumer product, with drag-and-drop simplicity, easily applied "themes" for DVD menus and Jobs' suggestion that you could put together some home movies and "post them over to Grandma". But iDVD will only come bundled with the top end G4 PowerMac - a professional machine costing £2,499 plus VAT, and with standalone DVD writing machines costing thousands it is difficult to see Apple creating a huge new market with the software.
On the floor
Away from the keynote and Apple, there were the two huge and bustling Expo halls filled with hardware and software vendors showing off their wares. With OS X around the corner, however, there was not a great deal of new software to get excited about - upgrades were largely incremental, with most vendors likely to announce their major upgrades at Macworld in New York in June.
With big players saying little, smaller exhibitors had a chance to shine. And they did not come much smaller than the International Hypercard Users' Group. IHUG is devoted to the pioneering multimedia program distributed with pre-internet era Macs for years.
"We raised the $5,000 for the stand through contributions from our group on the internet" says R Charles Flickinger, a leading light of the group dressed in an IHUG T-shirt with a floral baseball cap atop his shoulder-length grey hair. "We just want Apple to carbonise Hypercard and bring this great program into a new era."
But, I ask him, hasn't Hypercard - which has its own English-like programming language HyperTalk - been left behind by the arrival of the web and languages like Java? It is clearly a question he has been fielding all day. The full version is still on sale at the AppleStore, he points out, and play-only versions are built into the system still.
And he's only too happy to reel off a list of applications. "NorthWest airlines is using a custom stack [Hypercard program] to manage its airline maintainence. Nabisco is using stacks to help run the world's biggest bakery," he says. "They've got Macs on the factory floor - how many places does that happen?"
"Apple needs to know that Hypercard has a big user base - people who would not be using Apple computers if it wasn't for Hypercard."
He leans conspiratorially towards me and adds: "I've got a great source at Apple who tells me it would take one engineer just six months to carbonise this - yet it's not a priority. Why not?"
Flickinger's comments sum up the air of devotion to Mac at this biannual Apple lovefest - and a distrust for all that is not Mac. In a PC-dominated world, this is a rare opportunity for Macolites to feel part of the majority and, there's a strong antipathy towards Microsoft, despite its position as number one developer for the Mac and its huge conference stall.
That ill-feeling can catch you unawares, sometimes. Back at the Netters dinner, deep into their show of hands voting, compere Adam Engst - author of the bestselling Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh books - polls who uses which email program. Qualcom's Eudora gets a forest of hands, but I do not quite catch the note of sarcasm in Engst's voice when he calls out "Outlook", and I stick my hand up without thinking, owning up to using the Microsoft program.
The jeers, some good-natured, ring out as the five of us who owned up quickly lower our hands, shamefaced. Thinking different, at least for these Mac veterans, goes far beyond your choice of hardware - it is a way of life.
What Apple announced...
Titanium PowerBook G4
A lighter, thinner and more powerful remake of the PowerBook, Apple's laptop for the professional market. Key features include faster processors and a 15.2-inch wide screen TFT active-matrix display. The 400MHz version has 128MB RAM, 10GB hard drive, slot-loading CD/DVD-ROM drive, ATI Range Mobility 128 graphics card, 8MB of video memory, VGA and S-Video ports, 10/100Base-T Ethernet and FireWire and USB ports. It is available to order now from £1,899 plus VAT. The 500MHz version has 256MB RAM and a 20GB hard drive.
Power Mac G4
Apple has "speed-bumped" its desktop G4 range after 18 months stuck at a maxi mum processor speed of 500MHz. G4s can now come with processors at 466MHz, 533MHz, 667MHz and 733MHz, with improved internal architecture twice as fast as before. All the G4s now boast CD-RW drives and the top-end machine comes with a combination CD-RW/DVD-R SuperDrive, which allows users to read and create CDs and DVDs, which can then be played back in consumer DVD players. Memory starts at 128MB, expandable to 1.5GB. There are new graphics cards options, including the Nvidia GeForce2 MX. Hard drives are available to 60GB. Prices start at £1,199 plus VAT, and go to £2,499 plus VAT for the top-end machine.
Max OS X
The much delayed next- generation operating system will finally be released in its final version on March 24. The system is a complete rewrite of the Mac OS, based on a version of Unix, although it will run your old applications in its 'classic' environment.
iTunes
The first of two big surprises in Jobs' keynote: software that brings Apple's customary ease of use to MP3 management. iTunes plays, creates and manages MP3 music files, allowing you to organise your digital music collection, search through it and watch dramatic visual representations of the tracks. It will also help you tune into internet radio. With the top-end G4 Power Mac, iTunes will make 'burning' CD-ROMs a case of drag and drop. iTunes is available as a free download from www.apple.com
iDVD
The second of the big surprises is iDVD - an application which makes creating DVD disks for playback on ordinary DVD machines very easy. Indeed, its drag and drop 'themes' for DVDs and general straightforward interface makes it look like a consumer product.
It's just a shame that the only Mac it comes free on, or is guaranteed to work with, is the most expensive desktop Apple produces - the 766 MHz G4, with the all-important SuperDrive to burn those DVDs.
