I was at PC Expo and MAC Expo today. It was pretty full, at least while I was there from 1-4pm. The Rhapsody demo was kind of weak b/c the demo person didn't know too much. It was an alpha release and looked a lot like NeXTstep but with an Apple Menu in the corner. The developers there seemed excited about the idea writing code only once. I liked that their eyes lit up, being a shareholder and all. One important thing to mention was that the alpha of Rhapsody that they featured was running on a 133MHz Pentium computer, not a MAC. People seemed amazed at this.
The Rhapsody presentation was done much better than the little demo. Each presentation had twenty to thirty people standing, which also made me happy. It was quite informative, and explained how the Yellow Box and Blue Box things worked, in laymen's terms. They said that the company was working very very hard on getting Rhapsody further along.
OS 8 was not a demo station. It was included, very little if any, in the presentations. The Apple people said that was b/c it will be released in a month. Also, they said apple will have a whole lot of advertising -- including TV! Another person asked about this quarter's numbers but the Apple person said they had no idea. Too bad.
Overall it seemed like there is still interest in the MAC. The Claris area was in the PC section, and was packed. Newton looked pretty good too. But the US Robotics section was really jammed all day, their PalmPilot is quite a piece of work.
OS 8 seemed to generate a lot of discussion. Most people were asking questions about whether MAC OS will end when Rhapsody comes out. Apple said they will have a dual OS strategy, Mac will continue being developed until it is really obsolete (ie most people have switched to Rhapsody). I thought Apple looked pretty good.
geoff |
