This Macworld was probably my last

One pleasure of living in the Bay Area is that I get to go to Macworld every year for only the cost of a Caltrain (commuter rail) ticket, around eight bucks. I’ve been going every year, just to the Expo (trade show), with my son, who is now 18. (We always manage either to get a free Expo pass or pay at most ten dollars.) I would take him out of school for most of the day, usually a couple of days after the Steve Jobs keynote so we knew what the news was. We brought our lists of problems to try to solve and gear we wanted to find and buy. We often watched the main Apple presentations on their new products and tried them out on the huge Apple stand. I frequented the HP stand (usually gigantic) with questions on scanning and printing, always ragged on Adobe for no longer having a native Mac version of Framemaker, and flitted between the virtualization companies whose products allowed you to run Windows on the Mac. Oh yes, I talked to Microsoft a lot. My son wanted to see everything having to do with playing and composing music and using the iPod. And we wanted to be part of the celebration of Macolytes. We brought our own lunch and spent four or five hours there.

For this year, the first Macworld since Apple announced a year ago it would no longer participate, we signed up online a year ago, not only to secure free admission but also to provide the organizers with some incentive not to cancel the show. It fell during the Presidents Day long weekend so my son did not in fact have to miss school, so up we went on the Friday. We were in and out in ninety minutes.

The Expo was confined to Moscone North; there was nothing at all in Moscone South, and all the sessions for the paid attendees were in the meeting rooms in between. These are not huge.

We went up and down every aisle; we missed nothing. There were two larger presentation areas, one for general topics (like best of show awards) and the other exclusively for music; we saw them mainly as places to get off our feet for a few minutes. There was one aisle for iPhone apps, which I wanted to see. My son, on the other hand, said there are 140,000 apps on the App Store; why waste your time on these few dozen? I didn’t see anything I wanted.

Microsoft had the most ridiculous stand. They had people bouncing around wearing costumes representing the icons for the Microsoft Office applications. We stayed away. No, we ran away.

HP had a stand, much smaller than in previous years, all about printing and imaging. The one cool thing was a large-format printer (maybe 40 inches, not 80 inches). I got some advice on scanning problems. Hardly any other major companies, and no really big stands.

There were a couple of places showing small accessories, a Dr. Botts stand for example and some stands with iPhone cases, even one with iPad cases. But no place to buy batteries, external hard drives, or other real hardware.

Nope, no wow this year. No oomph. No information. My son will be in college next year so if I go it will be alone. At this point I don’t see much reason to do so.