For the faithful, the twice yearly Macworld Conference & Expo is a place of wonder: new computers, new software, new directions. And so it was last week in New York where company co-founder Steve Jobs came to inspire his flock. Did he?
Judging by the rapturous applause he received at every pause the answer would seem to be yes. But these are strange times in computing, not least for Apple. Faced with a small (5%) but devoted marketshare, Jobs' mission is twofold: to entice existing users to upgrade, and entice PC users over to Apple in a depressed computer market. But Apple will be pressed to repeat the success that came with the iMac which restored the company to profitability. If anything, Jobs' two hour speech last week showed that Apple is simply positioning itself to take advantage of an upturn in the economy whenever that may come.
"Apple's challenge is now to make sure that when the market takes off again it's ready to make sure buyers know that a Mac is a simpler and more efficient way to go," said Leon Ablon, a Mac consultant at the show.
"People no longer want to just buy a computer. They want to know what they can do with them."
Bounding across the stage, Jobs echoed a version of this sentiment more than once. "We are in a really interesting time," he said. "In the very tough economic conditions out there, most of our industry is retrenching. We've decided to take a different path. Our path is innovation."
That was perhaps a signal - or an excuse. Jobs did not introduce what many in the audience were hoping for: a new-look iMac sporting a flat-panel display. Instead, the new iMacs come in muted blues and white. There were plenty of theories as to why the new machine did not appear - the best being that the price of flat panel displays has yet to fall enough to be fitted as standard.
But the disappointment among Mac aficionados was there, despite the arrival of a new high-end range of G4 Macs. They come in three configurations, 733MHz, 867MHz and a high-end version with dual 800MHz processors, and will be priced well below previous models [US$1,700 and US $3,500].
A new iMac may yet arrive later this year but, despite the disappointment last week, market analysts say the pace of the improvement in the performance of Apple's machines is impressive. Some lines have nearly doubled processing speed and memory, and tripled storage capacity, all within 12 months.
"Apple is now moving faster than the PC crowd," said Richard Doherty, director of research for Envisioneering, a consulting firm. Jobs also promised a new version of the company's iDVD software for September and the first major upgrade of Apple's new operating system, OS X, to X 10.1, will arrive in September. Still, when it came to the presentation of software to make the transfer of images from a digital camera easier, Jobs couldn't switch it on and threw it off the stage towards some Apple employees. "It's technical," he explained.
Apple may be fighting the good fight against the vast Windows empire, but it's one it can never win. Nevertheless, "You have to watch Apple," said Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, a consulting firm in California. "The generic PC has lost its lustre. But Steve Jobs believes that the personal computer is still a platform for innovation, both in product design and in technology."
