Macworld disaster
My first day at Macworld had been a disaster. My plane arrived late, but I swiftly claimed my luggage, took a shuttle to my hotel to check-in, then headed on to Moscone Center.
There lied my first realization. My hotel at Holiday Inn Golden Gateway is far off from Moscone. It cost $10 to get there by taxi. Regardless, I figured I'd find a cheaper transportation on my way back when I have all the time in the world.
When I arrived at the Expo, it was almost 8am, just an hour away from the keynote. I checked in and got my badge, then quickly headed to queue to see Steve Jobs; as stated in an earlier post, the main reason I'm attending the Expo is to see him on stage.
As I went to queue, realization 2 struck. The line in front of me looked a mile long; it must have been a crowd of thousands (my friend later told me she heard from the news there were 40 thousand attendees at Macworld). Will I be able to even get in the keynote?
With nothing to do but wait, I took out my LifeDrive to check if I can get a wireless reception from where I was standing. My Palm didn't turn on. I tried again and again - no luck - the screen remained off. There wasn't even an LED signal. Realization 3: The battery on my LifeDrive had somehow drained completely between last night at Honolulu Airport and this morning. That never happened before. I even made sure I plugged in the power cord at the airport to conserve and charge the LifeDrive so that I'd a have full supply ready today.
Crap! How am I going to blog real time as Jobs announced each new product if I can't even get my LifeDrive to turn on? I wrote in another post that the instability of the LifeDrive was my biggest concern about leaving the PowerBook at home. Sure enough, my worries had come true, much sooner than I had expected.
The line didn't start moving till it was almost quarter-to-nine. By the time I was near the front of the line, I can already hear Steve Jobs speaking inside the auditorium. Rats! I don't understand why the staff didn't move us in sooner, as it was obvious that it was going to take time to move thousands into the auditorium. By the time I walked in the door, however, I realized (number 4) this wasn't the auditorium, but a spillover room, where we can see Steve Jobs only through a large projector screen.
That was the deal-breaker; it ruined just about every last mood I had left in me. I wasn't the only one. There was no clapping in the room as Jobs introduced one thing after another, except from the auditorium and the spirited guy seated right behind me. I sat there tired, hardly able to stay awake from the overnight flight and in the dark room. I kept thinking I couldn't believe I flew all the way from Hong Kong only to miss the live keynote. I could've watched the presentation through the webcast on my PowerBook at home and get more excited than sitting in that spillover room.
The few highlights for me were when Jobs talked about iWeb, which proved the rumors were true. And his famous "one more thing" that no one guessed: The MacBook Pro with an Intel Core Duo processor inside.
But the one highlight even everyone in our spillover room clapped over was the Mac running on Intel commercial, which was shown twice. It's hilarious! Later, I see billboards around San Francisco with this to say:
What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC.
With all the mishaps I had with the keynote, at least it boosted Apple's stock $4.80 in a single day. That's one thing I can't complain about.