Macworld, Macboring

If no news is good news, Apple just hit one out of the ballpark. At the annual Macworld trade show in San Francisco today, Apple put on an excruciating 90-minute keynote that may go down in history as the worst Apple event of all time. In brief: for the first time in recent memory, Apple has nothing interesting to sell. And the company's remarkable decadelong run as the hottest company in consumer electronics may be drawing to a close.

For the past decade Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been the star of Macworld, thrilling the Apple faithful with artfully staged keynotes and amazing new products. But a few weeks ago Apple announced that Jobs would not be in attendance this year and would send Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller in his place.

That fueled yet more speculation about Jobs's health—he's been looking sick for a year now. But the real reason for Jobs's pull-out may be much simpler than that. It may be that he simply didn't want to get up without anything interesting to say.

So that fun job fell to Schiller, who's a nice enough guy but a bit of a schlub. The poor guy limped through the first hour of showing new features in iLife and iWork, Apple's desktop software programs for making movies, managing photos and creating spreadsheets.

How bad was it? Let me put this as politely as possible. It was awful. Almost unbearable. Hacks in the press pool were sighing, groaning, checking e-mail on their BlackBerries and iPhones, not even paying attention. One of my fellow journalists sent me a message from across the room: "Shoot me now."

The only event I've ever seen that was more boring was Microsoft's rollout of Windows Vista in New York a few years ago. I was left today with the same feeling I had at the Vista event: these guys have run out of ideas, so now they're just piling more and more features onto existing products, loading them up with complexity and calling it innovation. The demo of the new version of iMovie made me want to scream. Loads of confusing new features, a zillion new pulldown menus and functions that nobody in their right mind will ever sit down and learn.
This from the company that prides itself on its Zen-like simplicity?