Category Archives: General

Saying goodbye to Macworld Expo

Posted on by

Yesterday, IDG announced that Macworld|iWorld will not take place next year, 2015. While the press release described Macworld as going on “hiatus,” the reality is that the event will almost certainly never return — in any form.

[Coincidentally, I decided to retire from speaking at Macworld last year. I delivered a “farewell” session, looking back at my career and at Macworld over the years. Little did I know that I was foreshadowing the farewell of Macworld itself.]

For those of us in the Apple community, the end of Macworld Expo (I never got used to its newer name; it will always be “the Expo” for me) means saying goodbye to yet another long-standing stalwart. Combined with the recent demise of the print version of Macworld magazine (also produced by IDG), it’s a particularly sad convergence.

At one time, Macworld magazine was the most respected, most authoritative and most popular magazine covering Apple products. Now it is gone, except as a reduced-in-scope website.

At one time, Macworld Expo was the biggest and most significant Apple event of the year (twice a year back in the day) for both the industry and consumers. Before Apple pulled out of the event, it was where Apple and Steve Jobs delivered the company’s most important keynotes, including the unveiling of the iPhone back in 2007.

After Apple pulled out, the Expo rebranded itself as Macworld|iWorld and struggled to survive. Now, the struggle has ended, but not in the way we would have liked.

Beyond Apple’s departure, if you want to blame someone or something for what happened to the Expo, blame the Internet. Expos are expensive to produce and expensive to attend. With blogs and live streaming and a wealth of related content instantly available on the web, it’s become too hard to make money holding a consumer-focused expo and just as hard to justify the cost of attending one. So, Macworld’s closure is not exactly a surprise. It’s following a trend that has already engulfed almost all other technology expos (such as Comdex).

I thought about writing a eulogy of Macworld Expo here. Ultimately, I decided it would be redundant. I’ve already written it — via the dozens of columns I’ve posted covering the Expo over the years. Three of these columns, in particular, focused on a long view perspective that, taken together, form as good a eulogy as anything I could write today:

Macworld Expo remembered. Written in 2008, shortly after Apple announced it would no longer be attending the Expo, this is my definitive look back at all the preceding years. If you want to know what Macworld Expo was like in its heyday and why it mattered so much, this is the one to read.

The Once and Future Macworld Expo. This was my assessment of the status of the Expo at what turned out to be the last year, 2011, that the event was called Macworld Expo.

Macworld|iWorld Reinvents Itself. Written in 2012, this was my op-ed on the transition of Macworld Expo to Macworld|iWorld.

Unfortunately, the final paragraph of the 2012 column did not turn out to be prophetic: “I for one am finished with laments about how Macworld used to be. This year’s Macworld | iWorld was jam-packed with more good stuff to see and hear than any one person could squeeze into their schedule. To me, that spells: success. Let the word go forth: Macworld is back!”

I only wish it were so.

For me, beyond the exhibit floor and the tech talks and the parties, the biggest personal loss of not having Macworld, is not having the annual opportunity to gather with all of my Apple community friends and colleagues, people that I otherwise only get to “see” virtually via Twitter and such. I don’t know if there will ever be something to replace this. I doubt it.

[A final personal note: Thanks to Paul Kent and Kathy Moran, the hard-working organizers of Macworld. What a great job they’ve done these past years. It’s been a privilege to have worked with them.]

NYT on “pay up or wait” freemium games

Posted on by

In my prior post, I detailed how (from my perspective) Rovio has managed to just about ruin what had been one of the best game franchises in history: Angry Birds. The crux of the problem was the introduction of in-app purchases that are now required to get the best scores — combined with incessant nagging during game play to get you to spend money on these purchases. This strategy may be working well for Rovio’s short-term profits, but it comes at a cost that may well have a long-term negative effect.

As gamers no doubt know, this is not just restricted to Angry Birds. As it turns out, the front page of yesterday’s New York Times ran an article about increasing complaints regarding the spread of “freemium” games — where you download the game for free but then have to shell out significant money to actually play it:

…the freemium model is encountering some resistance. Regulators here and overseas are taking a closer look at whether some free games mislead consumers about the true costs of playing them and whether vulnerable players, like children, might be duped into spending money.

I don’t entirely oppose the idea of freemium apps. They can even be a good way to allow a “try before you buy” method for distributing a game. For example, after downloading a free game, you could play the first 5 levels, but then have to pay a reasonable fee to unlock the remaining levels.

What I object to is, as described in the New York Times article, more like the situation for the recently released Dungeon Keeper app:

The free mobile version of the game began its solicitations for in-app purchases early and with gusto. Players faced waits of 24 hours to dig out sections of earth to create their dungeons unless they spent real money to accelerate the process. A demon character taunted them to pay up.

Let’s hope that game developers, such as Rovio and Electronic Arts, begin to see their miscalculations here and that the pendulum begins to swing back in the other direction. I doubt freemium games will vanish from the landscape, but they can be made much less annoying, misleading, demanding and intrusive.

Noah? No

Posted on by

Here’s a footnote to my prior article on Cosmos and God:

If ever there was a Bible story that makes absolutely no sense, it is the story of Noah. It’s so easy to find logical fallacies in the telling that it hardly seems worth the trouble to do so. However, Noah has recently received more than his usual amount of attention, thanks to the Darren Aronofsky movie starring Russell Crowe. An assortment of articles (such as this one) debate the story’s “accuracy.” Several Christian groups are alarmed at the movie’s supposed misrepresentations.

Although there’s not much I can add that has not already been said, I’ll offer a few personal thoughts anyway:

• In Genesis 6-9, God expresses his regret at creating “man” because all men have become evil and wicked. Really? Isn’t God perfect? If so, how could he create something he later regrets?

As an aside: Can you imagine what would happen if someone alive today claimed to be having conversations with God similar to what Noah had? They would almost certainly be declared insane.

• Can it really be true that everyone on earth was evil at the time of Noah, as God asserts in Genesis? What about newborn children? What about most children really? What about the people in distant parts of the world that were unaware of what was going on in the Middle East?

Did everyone really have to die to appease God here? Why couldn’t God have selectively destroyed just the truly evil people, similar to what he did when the Egyptian first-born were slain — as told in Exodus and recalled by Jews every Passover? For some reason, this was apparently not a possibility.

Instead, if the story is true, God executed the biggest act of genocide in history (as others have pointed out).

• Moving on to the specifics of the flood (and again as has been pointed out by others), it would be impossible for the ark to contain a pair of every living creature. There were just too many. It would certainly be impossible for them all to survive for the duration that the ark was afloat. For starters, the varying ecological requirements for each species would prevent this.

Digging a bit deeper, what about the polar bears in the Arctic, the penguins in Antarctica, or all the animals unique to Australia? What about species that live exclusively in caves? Or in the jungles of South America? Did they somehow make it to the ark? If so, how? And if not, how do we explain their existence today?

On a smaller scale, consider insects. There are “more than 925,000 species of insects that scientists have identified. Still, this represents only 20 percent of all species believed to exist” today. Were all of these species on the ark? What about all the microscopic organisms that existed at the time? Were these “paired up” and put on the ark? Not likely.

Yes, one could argue that God intervened, in some miraculous way, to allow all these animals to board the ark, co-exist and survive until the flood waters receded. But resorting to miracles is a slippery slope. If God could use a miracle to accomplish something like this, why require an ark at all? Why couldn’t God have instead used his miraculous powers to keep the necessary animals alive without an ark? Wouldn’t that have been much simpler?

I am sure that the people who take the Noah story literally have invented answers to respond to all of these questions. But that’s the point. They are “invented” answers. They are suppositions. They have no basis in fact.

My view here extends beyond the story of Noah to the Bible as a whole. Rather than viewing the Bible as literal historical truth, it makes more sense to view it as a collection of stories created by humans in an attempt to comprehend the world back when humans had very little knowledge about how the world really worked.

Consider this: From the time the New Testament Bible was written, it would take about 1,500 more years before we came to accept that the earth revolved around the sun and not the reverse. It is only in the last two centuries that we’ve come to understand that stars are actually distant suns light-years away from earth. At the other end of the spectrum, it took us the same 1,500 years to discover that microscopic organisms exist and the critical role they play in our lives. It’s been less than 100 years since we broke the genetic code and began to truly comprehend how reproduction and inheritance work. In that context, it’s not surprising that people might take the story of Noah seriously thousands of years ago. But not anymore.

Presumably, an omniscient God, present at the time of Christ, knew that someday we would “discover” bacteria, DNA, computers, space travel, black holes and all the rest that makes up modern science — including many things we have yet to discover. And yet the Bible makes no mention of any of this. Rather, as you would expect from a document written by humans, it is restricted to the (very limited and often incorrect) knowledge humans had at the time.

That’s why for me, rather than come up with torturous explanations for the contradictions and impossibilities contained in the Noah story, it makes far more sense to accept the obvious: The story amounts to a folk tale, a fable, a legend, a morality lesson. Call it whatever you want. Just don’t call it true.

MacFixIt is gone

Posted on by

MacFixIt is gone.

Sometime last week, apparently without any formal announcement (aside from a tweet), CNET dropped the MacFixIt name from its site. As of now, if you go to www.macfixit.com, it takes you instead to CNET>Computers.

In response, Topher Kessler, who had been the primary contributor to MacFixIt under CNET, has started a new troubleshooting-focused site called MacIssues. I wish him luck.

I began MacFixIt in 1996. After managing the site for four years, and watching it grow to a level I had never imagined possible, I sold MacFixIt to TechTracker in 2000. I remained as editor until 2002. I continued to write a monthly column (mac.column.ted) for MacFixIt until 2009. Beyond that, after resigning as editor, I no longer had anything to do with the site.

TechTracker did a fine job of maintaining MacFixIt in the years after my departure. I felt a bit like the parent who nurtures their child until adulthood and then watches as the child continues successfully out on their own. [To read my look back at MacFixIt’s first decade (1996-2006), as originally posted on the site, click here.]

In 2007, CNET purchased TechTracker, including MacFixIt. This resulted in a dramatic transformation of MacFixIt. In my opinion, it was not a good change. While the MacFixIt name was retained, the site soon lost its distinct character. It was even hard to find the “site,” if you didn’t already know the URL; it was awkwardly located under the “Reviews” section of CNET. After a while, it seemed to me that there was little point in CNET keeping the MacFixIt name alive. I guess CNET finally came to the same conclusion.

[Note: Most of the site’s content remains on CNET, at least for now (for example, click here). However, you’ll likely have to do a Google search to find any of it.]

MacFixIt had a great run. It survived 18 years, almost to the day. That’s a very long time in Internet years. I remain quite proud of the site and all that it accomplished.

I’ve said goodbye to MacFixIt in various ways over the years. The time has now come for me to give it my last goodbye.