That's all she wrote, folks; Macworld CreativePro is officially over, and by pretty much every account we've seen, it was... well, kind of a dud. Phrases like "ghost town," "crickets chirping," and "Burgess Meredith as the last man on earth who finally has time to read but winds up breaking his glasses like a doofus" figured heavily. We haven't been able to spot any official attendance numbers yet, but the Boston Globe reports that "only 40,000 Macintosh diehards were expected to show up"-- a "big drop from previous years," according to NYC's official tourist and convention bureau. (The Boston Herald reported that last year's show drew 58,000 visitors.)

Not much of a farewell blowout for New York, was it? Because starting next year, the show returns to its native Boston-- at least, in theory. The question now is whether there'll even be a show to move back in the first place. We're talking about an estimated 30% drop in attendance for the NYC show just because Steve didn't bother to attend; remember, Apple still had the biggest booth on the exhibit floor, and the first public display of the Power Mac G5 had to have some kind of drawing power to put butts in the seats (so to speak). The only missing factor was a Stevenote, but apparently that's the heart and soul of the Expo these days, and without it, CreativePro kinda flopped.

So the question, of course, is what kind of attendance numbers Boston can possibly expect, given Apple's stated intention not to come to next year's shindig at all. As in "no Stevenote, no booth, no nothin'." Now, this sort of thing has happened before, so let's consider the history: when Apple has pulled out of other shows, like Macworld Expo Tokyo and Apple Expo 2000, other vendors anticipated much lower attendance numbers and bailed themselves to avoid spending a ton of money to hawk their stuff to a much smaller-than-anticipated audience; that, in turn, prompted many prospective attendees to skip the show, since there'd be hardly anything to see. And then the shows' organizers pulled their respective plugs, because without vendors and attendees, it'd be less of a Mac trade show than a really effective way to lose millions of dollars. (Setting fire to wads of cash would only be marginally faster.)

Which means that either next summer's Boston show will be tiny, or it'll be cancelled altogether. The irony, of course, is that Boston got the gig back from New York in part by building a convention hall finally large enough to house a Macworld Expo in a single location-- and now it looks like the show will fit comfortably into the Dunkin' Donuts two blocks over. Unless, of course, Apple finally gets over whatever it has against Boston and deigns to drag its anthropomorphized behind out here to Beantown. We are not, however, holding our breath.