by , 11:00 AM EDT, July 27th, 2001
While there is some debate on whether last week's MACWORLD Expo was a success regarding the number of vendors in attendance and the new products that were announced, there is no debate on the size of the crowds. The official numbers are in, and the Expo drew over 64,000 people, making it the largest MACWORLD Expo in history. According to show organizer, IDG:
IDG World Expo and Apple today announced that more than 64,000 attendees packed the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City last week for the Macworld Conference & Expo. This year's record attendance is the highest ever for the New York event.
The final attendance numbers contrast sharply with lowered attendance figures at other technology shows this year - most notably, PC Expo held at the same convention center just three weeks prior. Macworld has now surpassed both PC Expo and Internet World as the largest annual technology event in New York City.
"The loyalty of the Mac community is astounding," said Charlie Greco, president and CEO of IDG World Expo. "While other tradeshows struggle with low attendance numbers, Macworld Conference & Expo continues to set new records. As the number one technology tradeshow in New York City and San Francisco, Macworld is proof positive that the Macintosh platform is hotter than ever."
"The growing enthusiasm for the Mac platform is contagious. Our customers and developers demonstrated phenomenal support for Apple's latest innovations at Macworld this year," said Philip Schiller, Apple's vice president of product marketing. "It's really great to see this strong show of support and excitement by so many customers for Mac OS X and all of Apple's digital lifestyle products demonstrated at this year's show." In addition to the show's record attendance, more than 44,000 people around the world tuned in simultaneously for a live stream of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote via their QuickTime Player. QuickTime 5, Apple's industry-leading software for creating, playing and streaming high-quality audio and video over the Internet, is available for free download to Macintosh and Windows users at www.apple.com/quicktime.
You can read all about the big show at The Mac Observer's MACWORLD NY 2001 Special Report, and find more about all of the big product announcements at the Apple Web site.
It is our best guess that before the end of the year rolls around we will see and updated PowerBook G4 Titanium, and totally redesigned iMac, and of course a major update to OS X. We would not be surprised if Apple dropped a fairly large bomb on us over the next few months as well, but we will have to see how things go.
However you look at it, whether MWNY was a success or not, by the time 2001 is over it will likely have been a very good year for Apple Computer.