Wow, so how 'bout that keynote, huh? Yesterday it was all we could do to broadcast our raw notes on the event before collapsing into a fetal position and whimpering the word "mommy" for two hours straight while twitching. Seeing as the keynote is always the end-all and be-all of Expo drama fodder, and we've spent most of our time since then hobnobbing with the faithful viewers who stopped by to say hi and buy a t-shirt (well, that's not entirely true-- we also spent some time hearing more than we'd ever care to know about various Hollywood personalities' porn preferences), we felt a wrap-up was in order.

First of all, we'd like to mention that this was the AtAT staff's first time attending the keynote as "media" instead of as regular showgoers. As it turns out, what this elevated status got us was the chance to wait in a shorter line, the ability to move inside and wait in an enclosed "holding area" prior to the show, and access to free bad coffee. As far as better seats are concerned, well, consider another one of our naïve illusions shattered into sharp little pieces of bitter defeat. As it turns out, press people in general are apparently inconsiderate scum; who knew? After waiting patiently in line for a couple of hours, once the Expo staff started to lead us in, the line quickly degenerated into a massive mob; we'd have been better off showing up right at 8:30, because the way everyone behaved, the last ones to arrive were the first ones into the conference hall. We wound up sitting in seats that would have been labeled "OBSTRUCTED VIEW" if we had been there to see, say, Def Leppard.

Anyway, after that disappointing experience, we got to move on to the next disappointing experience-- which was, of course, the keynote itself. Perhaps it was the fact that we could only catch an occasional glimpse of Steve when he happened to wander all the way stage right, but whatever the reason, we just weren't feeling the Reality Distortion Field yesterday. While it was nice to discover that our scrying abilities with goat guts and randomly-drawn Scrabble tiles were pretty close to dead-on accurate, there just wasn't much substance there about which to get overwhelmed. Or even just plain whelmed. Yes, we'd even go so far as to say that we were underwhelmed. Sad, isn't it?

So, that was the keynote; slightly faster iMacs, the return of Snow, faster Power Macs with a new front panel (yes, those "spy photos" were real, just with translucent drive bay covers instead of the final opaque ones), and for the "big surprise," we got... iDVD 2. Sort of. It's not actually done yet-- just like Mac OS X 10.1, and those LCD iMacs everyone is talking about. But iDVD 2 is due in September. So is 10.1. We've also heard the mythical LCD iMacs are likely to surface right around then as well-- and gee, doesn't the current PowerBook promo end in September as well? Think of it this way: Apple isn't two months behind cranking out all this cool new gear; the Expo just arrived two months early. And now we've all got September to look forward to...

Given our wacky Expo-shaken broadcast schedule, allow us to backtrack for a moment, okay? It looks to us like Apple may indeed be back in the groove when it comes to the time-honored practice of smacking down the analyst consensus like some kind of piñata filled with little dollar signs and happy faces. Well, okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, as far as Tuesday's conference call is concerned, but hey, Steve and the gang pulled off a good thing in some tough circumstances, and we're pleased with that fact. Is that so wrong? By now all of you have surely heard the good news: Apple announced that, in its third fiscal quarter, the company managed to squeeze out a profit of $61 million-- about seven big ones more than Wall Street was expecting. Go team!

There's just one teensy little catch; despite that larger-than-expected profit, ol' Fred also lowered revenue expectations for future quarters; as The Mac Observer deftly pointed out, Apple's stock dove into a tailspin in after-hours trading, prompted by the company's own negative outlook for future sales and Alan Greenspan's minor coughing fit caused by some grape juice going down the wrong pipe. (Or something to do with Greenspan, at any rate-- the Dow plunges whenever the man forgets to floss, for crying out Pete's sake.) Add a healthy dose of the usual media pessimism (despite a better-than-expected profit, the Associated Press headline was "Apple Profits Drop 70 Percent"), toss in a thoroughly less-than-exciting keynote address the following morning, and blammo! Instant stock death plunge!

Which is, sadly, pretty much exactly what we expected to happen. It's darn clear to us that Steve and the gang had a very specific plan for this Expo: unleash a stable of important and immediately available Mac OS X-native third-party applications, ship version 10.1 of that currently-not-quite-ready-for-prime-time operating system to make it fast and furious, and introduce a stunning new LCD-based iMac to mark the Mac's long-awaited shift to Mac OS X as its default OS, thus officially ushering our beloved platform into its Glorious Second Age. Instead we got the return of Snow and a preview of the sequel to a product almost none of us can use in the first place-- and iDVD 2, cool though it undoubtedly is, won't even be ready until September. If Mac OS Rumors can be believed, it's hardly a wonder that Steve said of his own performance, "we should have been ready; we flopped hard out there."

So things don't always happen according to plan. On the plus side, though, at least we can look forward to a slew of really cool stuff to appear in about two months or so-- and when that happens, it's go time, baby. (Assuming Plan B works out, of course...)

Continuing with the keynote theme (or "harping," as some of you may put it), we thought we'd field a request from the studio audience. Faithful viewer Juan Antonio wrote in asking that we describe the "intricacies of the digital camera fiasco at the keynote presentation," complete with all the "nitty gritty details." And a valid request that is; those of you who watched the event via webcast or even via direct satellite downlink probably missed a lot of the dramatic tension charging the air in those few dangerous moments. For a breathless minute or two, the smell of madness and blood hung in the air like a knife on a spiderweb, and that sort of thing just doesn't come across when the drama of a live event is filtered through pixels and scanlines before reaching your brain.

For those of you wondering "what fiasco?", clearly it's time to refill the Ritalin prescription. During Steve's demo of Mac OS X 10.1, he attempted to show how the new version of the operating system makes working with digital cameras so much easier; the idea is that when you plug a camera into a USB port, Mac OS X automatically launches a special application that sucks all your photos off the device and files them handily in your Pictures folder. That's what was supposed to happen; what did happen was a whole 'nother story, and it's not one you'd tell your kids before they go to sleep unless you're the sort of sadistic bastard that likes to hear children waking up screaming in the middle of the night.

Here's the crux: Steve couldn't turn the camera on. That's it; the evil seed from which so much melodrama sprouted. If this were a classic Greek tragedy, that would have been Steve's tragic flaw: not his ego, not his temper, but his inability to power up a consumer electronic gadget. For you see, Mac OS X couldn't do its thing unless the camera were actually on, and so an otherwise flawless demo was suddenly derailed by something as basic as a set of depleted batteries. Oh, the humanity!

What we're guessing didn't show up over the video feed was the look of burning hatred mixed with utter despair etched horrifyingly in Steve's normally easygoing visage. Similarly, you may not have picked up on the beads of terror-soaked sweat forming on his forehead as the man futilely jabbed at the camera in frustration much the way we imagine a member of the bomb squad fiddles with wiring as the timer hits the two-second mark. And we bet it just looked like Steve tossed the camera to a helpful person in the audience for assistance, right? Well, if you were there live, you would have borne witness to a desperate and murderous man hurling the nearest object with any heft at an innocent bystander who suddenly found himself the target of the blind rage of a CEO at the end of his tether.

At least, we think so. We're pretty much just assuming all this, because to be honest, we had such lousy seats for the keynote, we couldn't possibly have made any of that out. Still, it's what we choose to believe as the most likely scenario, just as we assume that the camera itself was sabotaged by minions of Bill Gates in a daring attempt to send Steve hurtling off the edge of sanity. After all, if none of this actually happened, then it really was a dull keynote, wasn't it?