Okay, one more scene on Macworld Expo Boston and then we'll shut up about it, we promise. It's just that after months and months of hearing how small and lame the Apple-free version of the show would be, we finally got to check it out first-hand today, so we thought we'd share our perspective on the situation. In a nutshell, yeah, the show was tiny-- but not quite as tiny as we'd been led to believe. Certain photos of the show floor make the active area look about as big as a largish throw rug, or possibly Rhode Island. There was a little more to it, however.

The first thing we should mention, though, is that Boston's new convention facility is freakin' huge. From the outside it looks like the new headquarters of the Legion of Doom, and once you're inside you find yourself looking through a glass wall, down upon a swimming expanse of empty space. Game geeks may get the picture when we mention that we were flashing back to the "Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap!" level from Marathon. Indeed, just getting from the front door to the Expo itself was a three-mile hike through monstrous passageways that required hiring two donkeys and a sherpa. No wonder the Expo felt small in these surroundings.

Once we finally found the show floor and walked in, we were struck by another mental comparison. Are there any veterans here of the pre-1998 shows that used to have to be split between Boston's World Trade Center and the Bayside Expo Center? (That's pretty much why Boston built the new center in the first place.) Well, far from being absolutely tiny, this week's show floor looked about as large as the portion of those old shows that sat in the WTC-- not minuscule by any stretch, but a lot smaller than any Macworld Expo has a right to be. We got to the show at 3 PM, and by 3:20 or so we had covered the whole floor; since the exhibitors seemed mostly like those smaller, more off-topic and obscure vendors that used to get thrown way in the back of Bayside, it was pretty easy to take a quick sweep and, well, not get captivated or drawn in by too much of anything.

Still, we made the rounds a few times and tried to get into the spirit of the thing, but without a big ol' Apple pavilion as an anchor, we just really didn't feel attached to the place. At one point a woman stopped us and asked if there was another floor or something or if "this is it." It was heartbreaking telling her that what she saw was what she got. On the plus side, though, 1 1/8th-ounce bags of Baked Lays only cost $1.50 (convention center food is usually way more of a ripoff than that), and Anya had a lovely time bouncing on the springy carpet, collecting all the fallen leaves from the potted plants and putting them back in the pots, and occasionally deciding to lie down sprawled out on her tummy in high-traffic areas. But we're not at all sure that even that was worth what we paid to get in.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but we overheard a lot of grumbling in the two hours we were there. Maybe it's just time for big trade shows to go the way of the dinosaur; the Internet has really made the whole format seem superfluous and dated. It seems to us that before long, Macworld will be all about the conferences, not the show floor, and while that strikes us as sad, hey, things change.