It’s been a solid week on the road for Chuck and me. We’ve been traveling since last Sunday, and got home late yesterday. We spent five days in Yuba City where Chuck was doing some training, then headed down to visit friends in Vacaville, then yesterday we went to San Francisco to check out MacWorld 2010. We drove home today by way of my aunt’s in Watsonville and I am now ready to not get in a car again for a month. Actually, we had a good time seeing everybody, and Chuck enjoyed the training gig. But let me vent about MacWorld 2010…

I have really enjoyed MacWorld over the years. I was there when they introduced the first iPod back in 2001, the Mac Mini and iPod shuffle in 2005, the first iPhone in 2007, and assorted other shiny objects. When Apple announced that they were pulling out and would have no presence at any more MacWorlds, we figured it didn’t bode well. Still we got free exhibit passes and San Francisco wasn’t too out of our way so we figured what the heck. We decided that Saturday Feb 13 would be the best day since they were having an iPad event – awesome!! A first look at an iPad for real!! Hahahahaha!! Surprise! There were no iPads. Instead they had foamboard cutouts with iPad faces glued on them. I am not kidding. And we didn’t even see those in person – by the time we left the overflow room, the foam core iPads (and the speakers who had them) were gone. Sheesh!

The exhibit hall itself was okay – mostly full of vendors with various iPhone add-ons. But a lot of our favorites: Canon, Nikon, Adobe were all no-shows as well. We spent about an hour roaming around, bought some new car chargers, and called it a day as there just wasn’t anything exciting in the hall at all. I have to say, based on this experience, this most likely was our last MacWorld. I guess you’d call it the end of an era. This photo is the closest I got to the iPad at MacWorld. Ooh ahh…not so much.