Notes from MacWorld

Once inside, I saw right away the big banner for the iPod Shuffle. The iPod Shuffle hits the bull's eye. The price is low enough to get people to adopt them, and small enough to carry around without it seeming obtrusive. The small size is really, really cool. It's basically the size of a pack of gum.

The

The Mac mini. It's like 3 CD cases tall. I'm expecting that people will purchase these to use as second computers. I think the small size makes it a portable computer that could probably be used as a mobile workstation (imagine using this at home or at work) or for those techheads that would try integrating it with their car.

Apple is so adept at their advertising that the lanyard becomes a sales point for the iPod shuffle.

Car audio was a big part of this year's MacWorld. On display was a Clarion-sponsored Acura RSX, a Griffin-powered Mazdaspeed Miata, a Denison Mini, and a pair of Mercedes, all sporting various types of adapters and interfaces for iPod functionality in the car. Both the Clarion and Mercedes' interface is very clean, and they display more information than the BMW interface (which was noticably absent). The Mini had to solve the problem of not having a cassette deck, so the addon accessory was of course an FM adapter.

These cases appeal to the inner geek in me, but I would never buy them. Speaking of cases, there were a lot of laptop/ipod case vendors there, but none of them had any cases that really appealed to my sense of style, nor my functional sense.

These are the successors to my old Powershot S200. Really tiny, but at least one of these cameras feature 5.0 megapixels and 6.5X Zoom. There's some serious firepower to these little Canons.

I also got to play with the EOS-1D Mark I and Mark II at the Canon booth. Really sweet cameras, but a bit on the heavy side. I was afraid that I'd be hit with buyer's remorse when I picked up these cameras, but I still love my 20D. The 1D has an interesting feature which is grips on two sides of the cameras, so that even if you rotate the camera to take a portrait shot your hand is still in the same position as when you are taking a landscape shot.

A view of Moscone from the pedestrian walkway to the Metreon.

While I was attending MacWorld, an army of Apple employees must have put up all these iPod Shuffle ads, because all the iPod/MacWorld ads were gone when I came out.

At the Apple Store, my sister compared a iPod Shuffle to her Sony digital camera. I was really surprised that they hadn't tethered the iPod Shuffle to the plastic block. (Of course there was quite a bit of security). Apparently the SF Apple store had 400 of them, and they were gone within 10 minutes. Expect these to sell quite well. I assume a good portion of the 400 probably ended up on eBay, because people were buying a couple at a time.