Well, we've come to the end of another MacWorld Expo, and the next U.S. event is in July. But IDG Expo Management evidently aren't satisified with just changing the location of the summer MacWorld Expo from Boston to New York. In a desperate grab for higher and broader attendance, they are apparently changing the name of MacWorld Expo/New York. According to Webintosh, the newly-relocated show will be called "MacWorld Expo + Creative World."

"Creative World?" Puh-lease. It's one thing to move the show to New York because of that city's higher concentration of "content creators," but to give it such an insipid name to belabor the point borders on the absurd. We agree that Boston wasn't the best place to hold the yearly shindig-- having to break the event across two venues was incredibly inconvenient (although having to jump back and forth between the World Trade Center and the Bayside Expo Center lent the whole affair a lovely Kafkaesque quality), and the unending downtown construction turmoil gave the city all the charm of London during the Blitz...

...Oh, all right, we'll just come out and admit it: we're bummed because we now have to travel to make it to the Expo. It used to be so nice just to hop on the T to South Station, but now we're going to have to drive four hours to New York, get a hotel room, and eat in restaurants for a week. Sigh. So we're bitter-- but even if we weren't, we'd still think "Creative World" is a stupid name.

Could it be possible? According to Reality, there's a report from PCData which shows Apple's market share up a full percentage point at the end of last year. That study apparently claims Apple's slice of the computing pie to be 5.9%.

An increase in Apple market share? I understand all the words, but when you put them all together it just doesn't compute. We've had to live with decreasing market share for so long, an increase is as foreign as an 8-track tape. (And before you go jumping down our throats about how cool 8-tracks are, rest assured that we have an 8-track player and are well aware of their funky appeal, thank you very much.)

Still, when you think about it, it's not all that hard to imagine. CompUSA is a pretty big computer seller, right? And Mac sales in the last quarter jumped from 3% to 7% of their total sales in the "plain-vanilla" stores, and from 3% to a whopping 14% in the "Apple Salon Store"-outfitted outlets. When you consider those numbers, it makes an overall Apple marketshare increase of 1% seem plausible. Suppose it'll keep growing?

MacOS Rumors is talking about the "Star Trek: The NeXT Generation" project again. "Star Trek," you may recall, was the Apple project to get System 7 running on Intel chips. The project succeeded, but then had its plug pulled due to various political and financial reasons. "ST:TNG" is the rumored reincarnation of that old project, which is said to be trying to get Mac OS 8 running on the x86 architecture.

According to Rumors' latest update, there's been a flurry of activity at Apple to hire a lot of people who've worked on emulation projects in the past. The push is so great, in fact, that Steve Jobs himself has reportedly spent three hours on the phone to persuade a bitter ex-Apple employee to return and work on a project so hush-hush that he's "not allowed to say a single word" about it. Oooooh, cloak and dagger stuff! We dig it. Whether this top secret project is "ST:TNG" or another super-sensitive emulation thingy remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, keep your fingers crossed for the Rumors staff, who are dealing with one helluva winter storm. It missed your friendly neighborhood AtAT elves by about three feet (give or take a few hundred miles), but up there in Maine it's killed power, heat, and people. Our best wishes go out to the Meaders and everyone else dealing with this ice storm ickiness.