Last Day at Macworld
Because of a tournament on Saturday, I had to leave on Friday, making Thursday my last day at Macworld. Thursday began even earlier than Wednesday. Macworld Live with David Pogue was scheduled to start at 9:00 in the same room as the other presentations. With my Platinum Pass, I managed to get a front row seat for this event.
The first guest on this late-night styled show was Craig Eisler, General Manager of the MacBU at Microsoft. He talked about Microsoft Office 2008 and presented David with a special launch edition of Office.
Next, he had someone from MacSpeech demonstrate the new engine for speech recognition on the Mac. The demonstration was very successful, and it is a very promising product. Even more surprisingly, he let David Pogue demonstrate the software using his own voice and somebody else’s voice profile. It still worked with stunning accuracy.
The next segment consisted of specially chosen members of the audience to explain why they are Mac zealots. They made me feel…normal.
David Pogue had some people from a computer museum show some of their artifacts from Apple history, such as the first circuit board, the first iPod prototype, and the first Apple portable.
After overcoming technical difficulties, David sang three songs. The first was called “Killing Me Softly with His Slides,” a song about Steve Jobs’ presentation magic. The second was “Imagine,” and it had a similar theme to the original song by Lennon, but instead about what the world would be like without technology or Apple. The last song was the final ever performance of “The Bill Gates Song.”
This concluded the presentation, but I went down to see him and got my picture with him. It unfortunately came out blurry, but you get the idea.
I had also noticed that his assistant, Lisa King, was the wife of Shawn King, the host of Your Mac Life Show who gave me my Platinum Pass in the first place. I wanted to meet Shawn and thank him in person, so I explained the situation to David Pogue, who took me backstage to look for Lisa King. When he couldn’t find her, he called her on his cell phone (alert: he doesn’t actually use his iPhone, don’t tell anyone).
He told me I could go down to the Speaker’s Lounge to meet her, and she could redirect me to Shawn. When I met up with Lisa, she told me she didn’t know where he was at the moment, but she knew he would be at the podcast booth from 2:00 to 3:00. At 2:00, I finally got to meet Shawn King, who actually recognized me for some reason, and I thanked him in person. He told me about how much IDG loved the video.
After playing around at the expo, I went to the presentation room again for another presentation, this one called “The Process of Elimination.” It was a sort of geek game show hosted by Andy Ihnatko.
Contestants were chosen using the strangest selections, such as the person with the last name at the end of the list alphabetically, the person with a certain blood type, or the person still using a Newton. There would be a list of 32 Apple products on the screen, ranging from the MacBook Air to the windsurfing board with an Apple logo on it. You had to guess the product, which was narrowed down by answering silly questions of a certain category. For instance, one question about the MacBook Air was something like, “According to U.S. Army regulations, from what height would you have to drop a MacBook Air on somebody’s head to give them a concussion,” and “On which terrestrial body would the MacBook Air weigh the least? Earth, the Moon, or Mars?” There was also a section called “Jobs, Woz, or God,” during which you had to determine which person said a given quotation. It was very entertaining.
This presentation pretty much finished my week at Macworld. Since I would be gone on Friday, I gave away my Friday lunch coupon and walked back to the hotel.
Next: Up Close With the MacBook Air
About Me
Hi, I'm Neil! I'm passionate about building delightful products at scale, creating music, and performing in theatre and comedy shows.
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