The Night Without One More Thing
Waffles and Beck’s Green Lemon—that was the equipment I’d assembled by five in the afternoon. A beer that tasted like carbonated dishwater and a sugar situation I hadn’t fully thought through. Didn’t matter. Steve Jobs was about to talk.
By six o’clock, a full hour before the keynote even started, the Apple online stores went dark in the traditional way—a ritual that still felt charged, like a curtain going up. The Mac fan chats were absolute chaos. Everyone wanted everything at once: new Macs, a new Mac OS, iPhone rumors, new iPods. People were behaving like children on Christmas Eve, which is maybe the most honest way to describe any Apple event crowd. A few Windows users had wandered into the feeds—braver or more curious than their usual habits suggested.
The live tickers kept pace minute by minute, and half the sites covering the event collapsed under the traffic before Jobs had even taken the stage.
What he showed: the Mac Pro—the fastest Mac Apple had ever shipped, built around Intel Xeon processors. The name made the target market obvious. If you had to ask the price, you weren’t buying one. Genuinely impressive hardware in the way hardware you can’t afford always is.
Then came the Leopard preview—Mac OS X 10.5—but Jobs kept his cards close. The reasoning was transparent and slightly amusing: Microsoft was still finishing Vista, and there was real concern about Apple showing features that Redmond could still lift before shipping. So we got glimpses rather than the full picture. Time Machine looked compelling—a backup system that required no active effort from the user and could reconstruct your entire drive from any point in the past. Spaces showed virtual desktops, a feature Linux users had lived with for years, but one that Apple was going to make feel inevitable.
No new iPod. No iPhone. No "one more thing"—that theatrical closer Jobs had refined into something genuinely exciting, the phrase that always meant something was about to shock you. Its absence was louder than anything that had been announced.
It was a developer conference, and it felt like one: useful, but not electric. The kind of evening where you eat your waffles, finish your terrible beer, and sit with the particular low-grade dissatisfaction of a preview that promises more than it delivers. The full Leopard release was still months away. Vista was still months away. Everything was still months away.