This week I am in SF. My Bangkok Post Database article actually came out a few hours after the Keynote speech by Phil Schiller, but I had to write it some 10 days before. I hate making predictions, so look more at likelihoods according to what we did know, what we didn't know and what may reasonably have been expected. First the possibilities, then the facts.

What we Should Expect From Apple

This is now Thursday and I am just getting up -- it's all a bit late here. I had, of course, intended to get the podcast out after the Keynote, but a combination of jet lag and some bad food got the better of me. It seems somehow ironic that I have to go all the way from Thailand to California to suffer from food poisoning. I bought the big microphone with me and it would be a shame to let that go to waste.

I had thought about cancelling the podcast, but instead I am going to do an abbrevaiated version, just to get it out of the door. Not that I have been idle. I wrote up some ideas on the Keynote speech after I had written next week's Post article, and while some ideas are the same, I also put some other information in that was not in the Post item. As usual, I also have some photographs.

I had a better seat this time with the help of my Apple minder and was almost at the front, albeit way to the left. Afterwards, while we were packing up, I suddenly saw Phil Schiller, only about 5 metres from me chatting to Al Gore, so I grabbed my camera and got closer, just in time to see Gore heading out the door. I did get a couple of Phil Schiller, but must have tripped the flash and needed to edit with the redeye feature in Aperture.

Phil Schiller had an unenviable task at the keynote as he has some shoes to fill. With Apple moving on from MacWorld after this, one blogger tried to drum up support for a no applause response. That did not get very far as Schiller had a lot of support and some fair product announcements, proving that as much as we love the Steve Jobs showmanship, there is more to Apple than him, particularly now that the groundwork has been laid. In the 90s when he returned via the NeXt backdoor, the company was in a mess. That is not the case now and this is a good time for Steve to reduce the hands-on management.

Excuse me repeating some of the ideas that were in the main item this week, but some people have not been listening and prefer their news from the panic merchants and from analysts who do not analyse.

On that, Steve Jobs issued a press release that I got on Monday and that is in the initial report I wrote when I arrived here. In that, he says the cause of his thinness is down to a hormone imbalance. A point that he made here, and other Apple personnel I have come across over the last few days confirm, is that next year, for the first time ever, they will be able to have a normal Christmas and New Year.

All I have to do is get ready and pack, but this also affects me as I have to organise documents and teaching schedules need to be refigured, so I start shifting classes about some time in November. All I have to do is turn up and take notes then write some stuff, but Apple personnel at all levels have to produce a working product that has to shine: year after year. Moving the date to when any product is finished -- Apple's own timetable -- means they gain a considerable amount of control.

As for the exhibition? My first look round did not occur until the day after the Keynote and, again, I produced a version that is online and included some 40 photographs extra.

I took over 200 while in the show and when I get back to the hotel, I use the card reader rather than attaching the camera to download to Aperture. A quick look removes some of the lousy shots, then a slower look allows me to think about some of those that might be usable and I go through these with the occasional edit, still deleting some that I find with defects I missed the first time. I still endd up with 127 and from these selected about 50: some of which I used on the text page, similar to what I have with this page, and the rest on the additional images pages. Once I have an idea what I can use, I switch to iPhoto (and I am really looking forward to the new one) and use the export function to create the web page, then I upload the lot. From downloading the card to the upload took me about an hour.

What did we get; what didn't we get? We had a good presentation from Schiller signifying that whoever does the job, will still do it well. I was told that he is as much a perfectionist as Steve and that aspect is in good hands, even if there is other talent that might be tapped. We had a couple of updates and, despite all the hype and all the expectations, Apple resisted the pressure and did not roll out anything amazingly new.

We did not get anything on Snow Leopard, which to me was a given. That would have been easy: a few words to say it is progressing and that would have been it, but I was told by Apple personnel last night that the real advances in Snow Leopard are not the eye-candy that people love to gawp over, but the way it works underneath.

We had no major hardware releases, so all that rumour frenzy was wasted energy; but this also puts Apple in form control: whatever, whenever a new product is released, it will be when Apple wants it to be out there and not to some artificial schedule.

While getting ready on Sunday for the trip, I had email from someone who had just returned from the north and went into Myanmar via Mae Sai where he picked up two iPhone nanos. Not much good he said as, although the phone worked, not much else did.

The Register had some words for him, suggesting that the fake iPhone makers had been wrong-footed by Apple on this one, as if somehow it was Apple's fault.

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