This fortnight, we flew 11,000 miles to go to a computer show. Macworld Expo San Francisco may be a long way away and named after a rival magazine (in the US, the two are intertwined by a complicated history of cross-licensing and staff swaps), but it’s our favourite place to meet the industry and some of our readers face to face. Like a lot of international exhibitions, however, it’s not quite as big as it used to be. And that got us thinking: why do we still do this?
Strictly speaking, few of us really have to go anywhere any more. I’m writing this in Newcastle, where I’ll upload it to the printer’s server in Oxfordshire. The press operators will have to turn up to print it and somebody will have to deliver it to you. But I’ll never meet most of those people, or the people around the world who sent us details of their products for this issue’s show reports. Even my communication with the many other writers, editors and designers who contribute to MacUser is nowadays more likely to be on the internet than in real life. Which is kind of a shame, isn’t it?
Apple doesn’t go to shows any more. There was no official Mac or iPhone or iPad stand at Expo; or at CES in Las Vegas; or at London’s BETT. Plenty of other people were there evangelising Apple products, which is probably one reason why Apple doesn’t think it has to. But its absence was keenly felt. The way those adverts go on about it, you’d think FaceTime was the first video chat system. There’ve been plenty, yet it’s never really caught on. At one end of the scale, that’s because you don’t want the woman from Barclays nosing around your living room. At the other, when you really want to see someone, you don’t just want to see them. You want to be there.
I couldn’t make it to New York for the launch of Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily, an event to which News Corp and Apple issued joint invitations, because I’d just spent a week in San Francisco, and we do MacUser every fortnight, and ‘This page intentionally left blank’ never looks quite as proper in a magazine as on an exam paper. Fortunately, News Corp provided a live webcast. But if we hadn’t also had a correspondent there in person, I’d never have spotted Apple’s Phil Schiller supervising proceedings from offstage. And I wouldn’t have known the glowing logo behind Eddy Cue was practically the only Apple branding around the venue. Along with the brevity of Eddy’s appearance and Murdoch’s terse response to questions about Apple’s involvement that told its own story. These aren’t facts you can get from a press release or even a video stream.
So I’m glad to be able to say MacUser isn’t just in favour of live events, we’re doing something about it. Along with our sister magazines at Dennis Publishing, we’re starting our own show, LITS. You can find out more about it at litshow.co.uk. It’ll be great to have a Mac show in the UK again, and even better to have it alongside a PC show, a gadget show and a camera show. I look forward to seeing you there. Of course, you can email me any time. But it won’t be quite the same.
Adam Banks
