Macworld NYC 2002--Show Floor Day 1

After filing our report on yesterday's keynote, we hit the show floor and headed to the Apple area. On the way, we noticed that the crowd was sizeable but not overwhelming as in the past. There are many fewer exhibitors than there were at prior MWNYCs.

Apple had two double-sided banks of the new 17" iMacs available for hands-on trials, about 80, and the displays were jammed 5 or more people deep. Here's where most of the crowd was. The new 17" iMac's screen is really fabulous. At 1440x900 pixels, a wide screen aspect, it looks much larger than a 17" CRT. Mac OS X 10.2 beta ran very spiffy on the 800 MHz G4 CPU and GeForce4 MX graphics card. People looking for a performance Mac who do not need the flexibility or complexity of extra PCI slots will love this model. The crowds at the Apple area were huge so we weren't able to put in a lot of time on 10.2 but we tried out each of the new applications and were highly impressed. Sherlock 3, the almost web browser, was the most impressive with its information searches from addresses and airline schedules to ebay. iCal is excellent and will be our calendaring program when it comes out.

Here are a few of the gems that we found while walking the south half of the show floor:

Move2Mac by Detto Technologies was mentioned during Steve Jobs keynote as a significant part of Apple's Switch campaign. Move2Mac is an application that allows a Wintel user to easily migrate to the Mac, or at least it will when it is released in September. Detto makes successful Wintel to Wintel migration software called IntelliMover that moves data files for some 50 plus Wintel applications. The person manning the booth said that Apple only recently talked to Detto about making Wintel to Mac software but the beta looked and worked extremely well. No price has been set yet but the Wintel to Wintel migration software runs $50-60.

XPlay by Mediafour was the first Wintel application to permit use of an iPod on the PC. For some reason, Apple chose MusicMatch as the software to sell with the iPod for Windows, perhaps because of its popularity in the Windows world. Anyway, XPlay is iTunes-like and will contribute to Apple's bottom line as by allowing Windows users to buy and use current as well as future iPods on their PC. XPlay costs $30. Mediafour also makes MacDrive 5, an application that allows PCs to read Mac-formatted files and volumes. MacDrive 5 is very useful to carry if one is going to meetings, workshops or conferences that are dominated by Wintel users and you need them to read your Mac stuff on their lame PC notebooks.

iRise by XtremeMac is a FireWire and USB pedestal hub that fits under the new iMac like, well a pedestal. It is about an inch thick and the same diameter as the base of the iMac and it contains four FireWire and four USB ports right up front where they are easily accessible. Sliding doors cover the ports when not in use. The iRise has the added advantage of raising the iMac so the Superdrive tray easily clears the top of the iMac's keyboard. Finally, it has blue LEDs on the bottom for a cool blue glow. The iRise costs $159.