Macworld San Francisco 2008 Concludes

[MacRumors]

Macworld San Francisco 2008 has come to a close. The 5 day conference and expo started on Monday, January 14th and ran until Friday January 18th. MacRumors.com was there for our traditional keynote coverage as well as extended floor coverage.

Our latest expo stories

NeatReceipts - a personal receipt scanner solution originally on Windows only.
Intuit - complete Quicken rewrite, and demo of Turbo Tax
H&R Block - demos 2008 TaxCut
Poll: Did you buy a MacBook Air?

Live Keynote Coverage

Keynote coverage on Tuesday, January 15th went remarkably well, though there were some issues behind the scenes. In particular, live keynote SMS updates were not sent due to technical problems at Twitter and Spoiler free emails were inadvertently delayed a number of hours. Despite these problems, we successfully updated our MacRumorsLive site which garnered universally positive reviews: JoshBancroft.com, ForWheelers.net, Sauria.com, ImRoot.com, MathewIngram.com, MacNoob, and Scobelizer.com:

For watching a live keynote, my son and I agree, Mac Rumors Live was -- by far -- the best place to watch the keynote. You didn’t need to refresh the page. Everything just came to you live.

Due to the overwhelming traffic, we are still processing log files to generate proper stats. We did, however, serve a record 535,000 unique visitors during the 90 minute keynote.

An archive of the keynote transcript is now available. Macworld 2009 takes place from January 5th-9th, 2009.

Article Link

[Jon'sLightBulbs]

Macworld 2009 takes place from January 5th-9th, 2009.

And you can expect us all to be present for the webcast. Sincere kudos for this year's great coverage.

[Xeem]

I absolutely love the spoiler-free quicktime links; they have made all Apple events much more fun and interesting to me. I guess I just really like being surprised.

[lofight]

I can't wait 'till next year. IMO it was a little less this year, paying for apps on touch?? i know this is business, but this should be free. Macbook air looks very nice, but not a thing for me.. itunes rentals isn't at this moment in European countries, and will al big companies go like they did in America, renting their films via itunes in Europa?? Apple tv seems very nice! maybe this will be bought in our house.

[HiRez]

I loved the Ajax page updating, it's a great improvement for users and probably easier on the servers as well. Inline images might not be a bad idea, sometimes they were out of sync with the text updates. Good job!

[aswitcher]

Very happy with your excellent coverage. Looking forward to coverage of other events from Apple this year like WWDC.

[PeckhamBog]

Very much appreciated your excellent coverage from here in London.

[kaisdaddy]

The excellent coverage is really appreciated. I can't think of any other time when watching text updates on a screen is that exciting!

Mac news and music/production info is my porn and for the Mac related stuff, there's no better pimp than macrumors.com! (No really, it's a compliment!)

[dan3L]

Thank you very much for the excellent job done at Macworld. I started following the keynote with three sites open and ended up with in short order with only MacRumors.

[Darkroom]

i totally forgot about the keynote that morning, and when i went to macrumors i saw images of some guy at a piano with big crazy hair... but if i had remembered i would have been reading the live feed from macrumors, so i guess you can count my unique visit as well

[lofight]

One question.. Are you guys going to also cover WWDC?? it would be very nice, but from what i heard the tickets are much more expensive..

[WildCowboy]

Originally Posted by lofight

One question.. Are you guys going to also cover WWDC?? it would be very nice, but from what i heard the tickets are much more expensive..

We've routinely covered WWDC in the past, and we certainly expect to do so again this year.

[carrotsandsmart]

Absolutely super coverage of the keynote - I wasn't sure how you would do it, and I was logged on to this site along with a couple of others, I soon X'd the other screens to watch MacRumors exclusively. You provided the facts. Just the facts maam - (there's a song...).
Thank you.

[notjustjay]

I had two browser windows open -- one left on MacRumorsLive, the other on Engadget. I liked that your coverage was pushed to me automatically, but Engadget's went into a bit more detail, so I only refreshed it when I saw something really interesting.

[SeaFox]

Originally Posted by MacRumors

Macworld 2009 takes place from January 5th-9th, 2009.

When I first saw that, I thought, "Man, we're thinking about next year already?"

Then I opened my Yahoo calendar and added it in for next year.

You know you're a Mac fan when you do that because you're worried you wont remember to do it later. I actually missed the keynote coverage this year (I was up late the previous night).

[Brianstorm91]

Maybe you could put a little caption under photos?
People thought that those images of the Sony were the new MBA..
Boy was that thing ugly.

[blashphemy]

Absolutely, definitely the best coverage of the keynote on the net. I had MRL, Engadget, and Gizmodo all open at once - MRL never crashed or effed up, but Engadget was down half the time and took like 5 minutes to reload the page when it was working. Gizmodo was OK but the page was poorly formatted and sometimes had crap like pictures of the iPhone and iPhone news in the middle of when he was talking about the iTunes movie rentals, and it took an additional refresh or two to get the most recent text and photos.

For next time, captions for photos would be good - but what mainly kept me reloading Engadget and Gizmodo was the dumb, stupid stuff (read: opinions) like the unanimous WTF's on the $20 upgrade for the iPod Touches. (well I guess I can hop on IRC next time or something...)

[thecritix]

Originally Posted by notjustjay

I had two browser windows open -- one left on MacRumorsLive, the other on Engadget. I liked that your coverage was pushed to me automatically, but Engadget's went into a bit more detail, so I only refreshed it when I saw something really interesting.

i did the same, but in the end got bored with engadget, too slow to post etc.

I'd suggest perhaps a bit more detail for MRL, not too much just a little bit more.. when your sitting between posts, its nice to have some detail to anaylise.

Nick

[davak]

Anybody have requests/ideas for next year's coverage?

I would love daily video reports from arn and the crew... maybe in podcast format? Even if it's just arn holding up a beer and telling everybody how good it is to be king!

Wifi enabled high resolution cameras with nice zoom glass taking pictures of the screen would be nice too. The cameras could update the laptop... and somebody could be editing/posting the best. Are cameras officially allowed?

An optional feed with some macrumors regulars giving commentary during the keynote would be nice too. Maybe have the commentary being posted in different colors than the main post. I was running a personal IM commentary with some of my crew as I was watching the keynote. I would have loved to seen the at-the-moment opinions of some of the mods here without trying to scan forums.

Anybody else have ideas?

[CyberGreg]

I had several, or rather tried to keep several pages / sites running for keynote upadtes and ONLY MacRumorsLive worked. Many promised a lot and delivered nothing. Almost all the other sites I was checking crashed, not MacRumorsLive!

Thanks for the great coverage.

[MacTO]

Originally Posted by MacRumors

Macworld 2009 takes place from January 5th-9th, 2009.

Maybe I should really think of attending next year instead of catching up with it through MacRumorsLive like I always have (due to living in the other side of the continent). Although it has been great, I am sure that actually being there at Macworld San Francisco would be a much better experience (missing all the excitement...)

Cheers.

[geenosr]

I was able to follow the keynote on my iPhone (even on Edge) and the updating feature was outstanding. I didn't even consider following on other websites, and after reading all of the problems they had with clogged blogging, I was glad I made the right choice to start with! When all of the other blog sites come out and say they had major problems but Macrumors was flawless, that really tells you something about what a great job you did!

We knew you were the best---and it's nice to see that everyone else knows it too! Keep it up--you have a very loyal fan base.

geenosr

[iDAG]

The letdown for me was the text updates. That was my only source to find out what was happing while I was at school so had had to wait until I got home which I didn't want to do really.

[kjr39]

Originally Posted by Jon'sLightBulbs

And you can expect us all to be present for the webcast. Sincere kudos for this year's great coverage.

Absolutely, you guys rocked it out this year!

[Cubert]

Proud to be among those 535,000!

MacRumors has always been one of the better sites for keynote coverage.