So, I'm home now, after being delayed in San Francisco long enough to miss my connection in Kansas City (although it was the storms in KC that caused the delay). Sadly this meant spending a night with John in KC. :) Can you see me pouting?
There is something fundamentally wrong with a place where ice falls from the sky and your car turns into a ve-sicle. Just saying.
10 degrees (F) in KC when I left at around 9 a.m. A balmy 86 degrees (F) in Orlando when I landed just after noon. There was green grass, and sun glittering on the water, and glistening in the palm trees. People wore shorts and everyone was carrying their jackets. It was paradise.
I love Orlando.
But now I'm home, and I've picked up my car and my cat and I'm sitting and decompressing after the last week and a half of Macmadness, and I find there's a few things I want to say, in summary.
On Tuesday, when John had just come down with his bout of stomach flu, and was curled into a ball of misery in the hotel instead of watching the Keynote, I caught myself doing a Bad Thing:
I was sitting there, at the desk, reading Peter Cohen's live updates of the Keynote, following along as Steve Jobs announces that this year Apple is going to make history, and I was thinking how awful it was that John was missing that moment. This has the potential to be huge, I thought. This could change everything. He might regret missing this for the rest of his...
...then I realized. I was doing the Bad Thing. So I stopped. I backed away from the computer. I looked out the window at the cars going by, and the homeless people begging for change on the corner. At the Bloomingdale's across the road. At the taxis and the construction and all the noisy, crazy, crush of San Francisco.
And I thought: this is nothing really. It's a moment. A gadget. A new toy for the techno kids. In the end, it's not going to change my life significantly. It's not going to change that taxi driver's life. It's *really* not going to change that bum's life, and I wonder if he ever got the $.98 he needed to ransom his wife from her kidnappers.
The way everyone gears up for it, you'd think that Macworld was a meteor that every year impacts the earth and changes it in drastic ways. But really, the effects are pretty minimal. The iPod creeps in, the Mac computer slowly draws some of the market, Apple TV will slowly corner it's share, and the iPhone will, for better or worse, have it's time in the spotlight, and then become just another phone. New things will come out to replace these in a year or 18 months or so, and next year we'll all get together again, the hush will fall, and everyone will brace for a meteor when really, it's more like a pebble being dropped into a pond. The ripples spread, seemingly huge waves at first, but eventually fading out until they're barely there. Then someone tosses in another pebble.
Don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed Macworld. But it wasn't for the gadgetry, or the geekery, or the toys (and really, guys, that's what all of it is: toys. iPod is the new Barbie doll, complete with clothing, accessories, car, house, stereo, computer, and socks). It was meeting so many fascinating, brilliant, incredible people who are all in their own ways uniquely talented. For one week out of the year they descend on San Francisco to play with their toys together, and get roaring drunk, and then they go back home to brag about their toys for another year and argue over who beat who and who had the coolest what.
I loved that aspect. I loved meeting John's friends.
But to the man who sat there the other night and told me how he woke up one Saturday morning after having his Hi Def TV installed and turned on a crappy football game between two crappier college teams and found it to be a "Life Changing Experience" and an "Epiphany;" and to all of his ilk, who think that their pebbles really are meteors, to them I have just one thing to say:
Get over yourselves.