David Flynn15 January 2008, 9:17 AM
There's late-night movement at San Francisco's iconic Apple Store, and dozens of Mac enthusiasts lined up to spend a chilly mid-winter night outside the Moscone West building, all in readiness for tomorrow's Big Event. Plus: Macworld Keynote Buzzword Bingo!
Welcome to 'ground zero' for Macworld. As midnight approaches the mercury has long since dropped into single digits, with an overnight low of six degrees predicted before the sun rises on a new day and, legions Mac fans around the world are hoping, a new era.
But none of those fans could hold a candle to those lined up and rugged up on the corner of Howard and Fourth Streets in downtown San Francisco (and if they could that candle would be probably snuffed out by a mild yet typically San Francisco slice-through-your-bones breeze).
 Mac geeks are cool: no, seriously -- literally cold. |
We counted sixty happy souls at 11pm, and no doubt it's grown a bit since then. This annual Gathering (it deserves the capital letter) is a ritual for die-hard Apple afficionados in the countdown to Steve Jobs' keynote which kicks off the two-day Macworld Expo at the Moscone convention centres (the keynote and follow-up briefings is held in the Moscone West building, while the expo itself takes place in the original Moscone Centre that's one block distant).
There's no sarcasm when we describe the queue-dwellers as 'happy souls'. The mood is buzzy; it's an instant little community sprung up on common interests, a shared experience and the damned fun of it all. It gives you serious bragging rights at the next gathering of the Mac faithful.
Near the head of the line is a clutch of some twenty 'Googlers' for whom this is a ritual. They headed north from the Googleplex around noon, and when we arrived they were tucking into six fresh-delivered pizzas. Two large tureens of piping hot coffee stand in the corner, part of the overnight vigil. Although we're certain that some people came by themselves, no-one in this line appears to be alone. Even if they're plugged into their iPods, messaging on their iPhones or surfing on their assorted model of Mac notebooks, they're doing it together.
Hanging from the street lamps above the Moscone West are pairs of banners. One promotes the Macworld Expo itself. The other blandly welcomes you to San Francisco and has no doubt supplied by the city council as a mere placeholder for tomorrow, when these will likely be hauled down and replaced with banners trumpeting Apple's 'hero product' of the show - widely tipped to be the ultra-thin MacBook Air laptop.
The same operation is likely to be repeated with military precision all across the city by the bay. Street posters and even billboards sport new advertisements for the iPod, although there's really nothing 'new' apart from the creative - they play on the same 'black silhouette, white iPod' theme.
Apart from a small Macworld promotional tag at the foot of the poster, it's so generic an image that we expect these were supplied by Apple merely to ensure the prime poster space was booked and certain to be theirs during this crucial time. Perhaps, as with those streetlight banners, the iPod posters will be replaced by MacBook Air artwork during the Macworld keynote.
It's an operation we've seen at previous Macworld shows, and the whole of it is an extraordinary logistical exercise. It's made perhaps more astounding by the almost total lack of accidental 'leaks' from the dozens of companies and agencies involved in creating, printing, transporting and installing the promotions. Can any company keep its secrets as well as Apple?
But when Steve Jobs takes the stage, unveils new kit and proudly says "it's available now", the Apple Stores dotted across the US have to deliver on that promise. in fact, in previous years when Jobs has announced ground-breaking products such as the 12 inch PowerBook and the first iPod Shuffle, we've witnessed an exodus from the keynote (yes, they left the room while His Jobsness was still speaking) as eager fans sprinted the two long blocks from Moscone West to the Apple Store so as to be first to score such coveted prizes.
So tonight we paid a visit to the San Francisco Apple Store, and despite the very late hour a handful of staff were steadily bustling around behind its closed doors. The store opens at 10am, which is roughly the same time as the keynote will end, so any fresh-baked Apples will already need to be set up.
We didn't spy any 'MacBook Air' boxes, but noticed some staff unloading boxes of aluminium iMacs from a trolley into a storeroom. Perhaps these were refreshed models sporting Intel's hot-to-trot 45nm Penryn dual-core processor?
We'll know in eight hours from the time this article has been written (yes, it's already in the wee hours of Tuesday here in San Francisco), although Apple hasn't exactly gone out of its way to encourage live coverage of the keynote. At the company's insistence, public wi-fi access in the main hall of Moscone West will be switched off for tomorrow morning.
There'll be bloggers posting live minute-by-minute reports, of course, but those will be done with the aid of 3G modems hanging off their laptops. Gizmodo, The Unofficial Apple Weblog and MacRumors among those.
For added fun, download and print out the PDF 'buzzword bingo' card on which you can cross off typical Jobsian keynote phrases such as "Boom!" and of course "One more thing..." as well as announcements related to the iPhone, iPod and other products and online services.
Apple no longer offers a live video stream, although the keynote will be recorded and posted onto Apple.com for viewing sometime on Tuesday afternoon (which means sometime late Wednesday morning, Sydney time).
And with that, we sign off from San Francisco - to sleep, perchance to dream of incredibly thin notebooks, 3G iPhones and who knows what else...
David Flynn is attending Macworld 2008 as a guest of AppleRelated Macworld coverage