Musings

The fun has been taken out of Macworld. Steve Jobs isn’t going to make an appearance at this event, something he has done for as long as I can remember. 

This is a bummer because I’m headed for Frisco come January to attend Macworld. So it has come as a shock to me that he wasn’t going to show up. 

The BIG question is: is he dying? He certainly looked thin when he launched iPhone 3G in June this year. So thin that his bones were sticking out of his trademark black turtleneck. 

It won’t be the same again Macworld without Jobs. He would take centrestage for at least 90 minutes giving Apple fans an update on what has happened and of course, in his trademark nonchalance way, announce new products from the iPod to the Nano to the Air Book. Of course, his digs at Microsoft were really good too. 

Jobs has been my hero because he was always the underdog. He believed what he’s doing was right and he set out to do it and proved everyone wrong in the meantime. He wasn’t the first to come out with multi-coloured computers. Actually I had seen multi-coloured Nokia PCs at the Cebit exhibition years ago. But it was Jobs who popularised the concept that computers can be colourful, not only in beige. He was so good at marketing computers to consumers that he owned this arena. 

So I’ll miss him as I’m sure I’ll miss Macworld too. It was the only big fair that did justice to the Mac products. 

Stay tuned, there’ll be more on Jobs and Apple in the next couple of days.

• An era has ended
• My last Macworld
• Macworld 09
• Good friend and PR person
• Typos on iPhone