Waiting for One More Thing

Waffles and a Beck’s Green Lemon on the desk while Apple’s servers exploded. Five PM keynote time, the usual ritual—Steve Jobs walking out and everyone in every chat room acting like kids on Christmas morning. This was going to be it. New iPod. New iPhone. Something that would justify all the breathless waiting.

The live ticker fed updates by the minute. Apple Stores offline an hour before he even started speaking. Sites buckled almost immediately under the surge of people refreshing for any scrap of information. For an hour I watched the minutiae accumulate: specs, announcements, features that felt less exciting with each passing update.

The Mac Pro was the big hardware reveal. Fastest Mac ever made. Also six thousand dollars, which meant it existed for about five people. OS X Leopard got the spotlight instead—Time Machine for backups, Spaces for virtual desktops, the kind of solid features you appreciated rather than loved. Microsoft would have these in Vista by next month anyway.

No new iPod. No iPhone. No surprise one more thing waiting at the end. That moment that usually salvaged these events, that made you forget the hour of professional hardware talk and forget Jobs’ reality distortion field had worn thin. It just… ended.

I watched the full thing later when the stream stabilized. Leopard looked competent. The Mac Pro was impressive if you had money to burn. But the letdown had already set in. You knew what you were hoping for, and somewhere around minute thirty you knew it wasn’t coming.