Good news, folks: today was the first day of the actual "Expo" side of Macworld Conference & Expo, and despite widespread fears of a seriously dead show, Think Secret reports that the show floor was "crowded, vibrant, and packed with attendees"! Indeed, they've got photographic evidence that there were actual people there, bustling about in largely the same way as we remember attendees doing at the New York shows of summers past, so even with Apple's absence and the echoing void where a Stevenote might have gone, it seems that moving the Expo back to Boston didn't completely crater the event after all.

Of course, then there's the bad news: the Cult of Mac has a snapshot of "the entire Macworld exhibit floor" from Monday before the show opened, and it seems our earlier suggestion that we hold pick-up games of ATV floor hockey in the unused floor space weren't entirely off the mark. The term "yawning chasm" comes to mind. Think Secret has a similar photo taken after the show floor opened, and if anything, it's even more depressing when you see the attendees crammed in way at the back, there. It's obviously a lot easier to make a show look "crowded, vibrant, and packed" when you constrain traffic to "about half the floor space of the smallest" of the convention center's "three giant show floors."

It's too early for attendance numbers (even assuming that IDG World Expo doesn't suppress the bejeezus out of them), but no one expected a high turnout with Apple refusing to come and most vendors then following suit. Indeed, most people would get the impression that IDG only refused to cancel the show (or move it back to New York) out of sheer stubbornness, which is exactly the sort of behavior we might have expected back when Charlie "You Want a Piece of Me?" Greco was running things and threatening to ban Apple from the San Francisco show if it didn't drag its snooty hinder here to Boston. But Greco "left" IDG ages ago, and we were as surprised as anybody when his successor 1) decided to keep the show in Boston as promised, and 2) refused to cancel it even in the face of overwhelming public indifference.

Well, believe it or not, the stubbornness doesn't stop there. Think Secret reports that IDG is "already advertising the dates for next year's Macworld Expo in Boston," and has the photo to prove it. Now, okay, the banner just says "See You Next Year," which could well mean "See You Next Year Back in New York Because Boy Are We Ever Sorry We Dug Our Heels in on This Whole Boston Thing"-- except that an IDG rep told internetnews.com that "the company is already booking the new waterfront Boston Convention & Exhibition Center for Macworld in 2005." So yes, as of now, at least, the show is staying in Boston next year-- and once again, Apple says that it won't be coming. IDG bigwig Warwick Davies's response? He never invited them anyway. Seriously, how can you not love this stuff?

In any case, we're hoping to hit the show floor ourselves tomorrow, so we'll finally get to see what an Appleless Macworld Expo looks like firsthand. If anyone's up for floor hockey, we figure it won't be too hard to find us.

Look on the bright side: even if Apple had come to Boston and Steve had done one of his legendary keynote addresses, the odds are pretty good that he wouldn't have had anything new to unveil. That's not to say that he wouldn't have had plenty of solid material; a less developer-focused tour of Tiger, an onstage bake-off between a new dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 and whatever the fastest Wintel thingy might be today, and a demo of AirTunes and AirPort Express would probably have all figured heavily, but the timing is such that anyone hoping for a glimpse of never-before-seen Macs might well have come away disappointed. There probably wouldn't have been, for instance, an introduction of a next-generation iMac.

You already know, of course, that Apple has admitted it screwed up badly when trying to balance its inventory of existing iMacs against the expected production of new models, and as a result the cupboard is bare: Apple has ceased taking orders for iMacs because it won't have any to ship until new models are announced and available in September. Now, why Apple has seen fit to announce an announcement of a new product and not the new product itself is beyond us, but clearly the company feels that, for whatever reason, it needs to wait another couple of months before it can introduce the world to this mysterious new iMac. So the thing wouldn't have joined Steve onstage in Boston this week even if he had bothered to come.

So what, exactly is the delay? Well, according to AppleInsider, it's that perennial G5 favorite, "heat-related issues." Yes, the same general problem that was once rumored to have delayed the latest Power Macs for months 'n' months is now reportedly at the heart of Apple's iMac debacle, which will leave the company with a big, gaping hole through the middle of its product range right at the height of the consumer back-to-school shopping frenzy. See, the new iMac supposedly boasts an all-new enclosure which looks "similar to Apple's newly-announced Cinema displays," and apparently stuffing even a low-end G5 into an enclosure thin enough to house a motherboard "behind the computer's LCD screen" is causing difficulties of the Mosty-Toasty variety. (In other words, if you're holding your breath for a PowerBook G5, make sure your will's up to date.)

AppleInsider's source says that "at one point Apple believed that it had fixed the cooling problems, but were later disappointed," which doesn't exactly fill us with confidence that the new fix won't be "disappointing" too-- say, after the new iMacs ship and subsequently start melting after a month's worth of use-- but then, we've never been ones to buy the first revision of an all-new design anyway, so our paranoia doesn't really signify. The point is, Apple figures it has the problem licked, and production of the new iMac is rumored to start "in the next few weeks" to start gathering inventory for the launch in September... or, most likely, one day earlier, at Apple Expo in Paris.

See, the Parisians, they get a Stevenote with new Macs. It all comes down to luck and timing. And, um, Apple actually wanting to show up.

Not that we place all that much emphasis on reality around here, of course, but when a plot development looks too good to be true, it often is. Case in point: people have been sending us the link to that "iPod as murder weapon" article for over four months now, because they didn't pick up on the (admittedly way oversubtle) satire, didn't notice that a "HeadlinedNews.com" article was being served by liquidgeneration.com, and never bothered clicking any links on the page, which would have tipped them off pretty quickly to the fact that the whole sordid "I stabbed my boyfriend 80 times with my iPod" story was fake, fake, fake.

Sometimes it's not only the overtly fake stories that are untruthful, however. Faithful viewer Andy Van Buren sent us a Reuters article which was practically tailor-made for an AtAT plot line; it reports that "Britain's Ministry of Defence has become the latest organization to add the iPod to its list of high-tech security risks" and has "banned" the device from "most sections of its headquarters in the UK and abroad." Perfect, right? It builds nicely upon last week's scene about that Gartner report which cautioned businesses of the dangers of wanton employee iPod use behind corporate firewalls, and also plays right into the long-running theme of Apple dissing the UK and the UK dissing right back. And anything Apple-related to do with the military is just begging for a tie-in with Steve Jobs's master plan for world domination.

The thing is, though, the "UK military bans iPods" story is apparently nothing but hooey; faithful viewer Ged Smith pointed out a BBC News article which reports that "the Ministry of Defence has denied reports that it has banned Apple's iPod." While it's true that the MoD has "some areas where portable storage devices would not be allowed" (and we would sure freakin' hope so, seeing as it's the military, for crying out loud), a spokesperson for the Ministry "insisted that iPods are welcomed," and that the Ministry has "a flexible management approach in regards to iPods and similar devices that can move data from official systems. In each area, the risks are assessed and, when appropriate, measures are taken to mitigate that risk. There is not a case that there is an outright ban on these."

So there you have it: British military personnel are indeed allowed to rock out after all. Apparently we're just going to have to wait for another story with a high drama quotient to come along. Well, either that or we suppose we could just do a scene about how the proposed "no 'Pods for MoD" plot point turned out to be false, but we'd have to be pretty jaded and sleep-deprived to pull something like that.