We'll say one thing for Macworld Expo's summer show: it sure was a lot cheaper for us when it was in Boston. And apparently that's not just because we live in Boston (though, of course, that was certainly a huge advantage)-- it's because New York sucks money out of one's wallet like a snack cake addict hoovers the cream filling out of a Twinkie. And if you think it's expensive to go to the New York Expo as a simple attendee, your eyes might pop in their sockets if you saw how much it costs to be an actual exhibitor at the thing. So is it any wonder that some companies who fully planned to have booths at the show are now dropping out in the eleventh hour?

Yes, according to MacAddict, even at this late date several exhibitors have decided to cancel their plans to hawk their wares to the teeming throngs of East Coast Macophiles. You probably heard that Corel pulled out of the show earlier this week, citing financial difficulty as the impetus, but perhaps you didn't think too much of it, since everybody knows that Corel's been in dire straits money-wise for quite some time now. (Personally, we're amazed that it doesn't have its sales force selling Amway on the side for supplemental corporate revenue.) But now FWB Software, the Hard Disk Toolkit company, has just cancelled its Expo plans, claiming that it's "trying to manage [its] funds a little better." Since the San Francisco show each January is the really big one, we're going to see more and more companies bailing on the New York Expo and instead investing the savings into building a killer presence at the January show. Which bites for us, since we can generally only make it to the New York one. Hopefully this isn't the beginning of a serious East Coast Expo deterioration; we can just imagine that in three years, only six companies will be exhibiting and tumbleweeds will roll down the aisles...

Incidentally, MacAddict also reminds us that NVIDIA isn't going to exhibit next week and had never planned to, despite rumors to the contrary following whispers of the company possibly replacing ATI as Apple's graphics OEM of choice. And Bungie isn't going to have a booth either-- but we figure that wasn't a financially-motivated decision, what with all that sweet Redmond sell-out money at its disposal. It was probably a survival move instead, as we imagine the Bungie crew may well have been expecting some strident, and possibly even violent, reactions from the Mac fans they're allegedly leaving behind. (Did anyone else notice that the "Coming Soon For Windows and Mac OS" tag at the Halo site has been replaced by the phrase "Coming Soon To A Platform Near You"?)