Yes, Apple is pulling out of MacWorld. No, this is not as big a deal as it sounds. Remember MacWorld Boston? MacWorld New York? Apple pulled out of those, too – and basically killed them. What you may not know is that Apple didn’t exhibit at this year’s NAB convention, either – and that used to be near the top of the show schedule, at a level below only MWSF and WWDC in the hierarchy.
I went to MacWorld twice – 2006 and 2007 – and not once did it strike me as that big a deal once the keynote and product announcements were done. If you walked the show floor, the only things that might be of interest would be obscure things appealing to technical niches – the rest was a flood of accessories. In fact, after my first trip, I openly speculated on whether they would be renaming it “iPod Case World” for next year.
The much bigger deal is having Phil “Steve’s Pal” Schiller delivering the keynote. Partly this is to further de-emphasize the importance of MacWorld, partly (I suspect) it may be a concession that there’s nothing that big on the way. The only bit of Apple’s product line that’s really ripe for a refresh is the Mac mini and maybe the XServe, neither of which strikes me as the sort of thing you could wrap a keynote around.
The point is, trade shows aren’t integral to the operation. Apple announces its stuff however they like. In fact, the “September iPod announce event” has become almost standard since 2005. And trade shows themselves aren’t exactly healthy – COMDEX shuffled off this mortal coil some years ago, and CES is 10% smaller than last year according to some reports. And given that Adobe and Google, among others, were massively scaling back their MWSF presence – well, Apple’s not going to be the last rat off the ship.
What this really is about is what happens with no Steve. Life without the big Barnum and Bailey events every six months, life with Tim Cook and Phil Schiller at the controls and occasional appearances from big wheels in the iPod and Mac OS groups. The stock is already down 5% in after-hours trading and I fully expect a bloodbath tomorrow, because the market is seriously starting to contemplate Apple’s prospects for life after Jobs.