Macworld moves to February

It's long been one of tech's little frustrations, as the Consumer Electronics Show and the Macworld Expo have often collided from a scheduling standpoint. Most journalists had to pick one or the other to cover, with some die-hard reporters I know flying to CES in Las Vegas, then zipping to San Francisco for a day for the Apple keynote, then flying back again to CES on the red-eye in order to keep up with all the news.

Things came to a head in January 2007, when the dates of the two shows actually overlapped, and Apple announced the original iPhone while hundreds of thousands of tech industry people were hundreds of miles away in Vegas. No one remembers much of anything actually announced at CES that year, as all anyone talked about at CES was the iPhone... which they had to see on TV instead of on the show floor.

After years of acrimony between the two shows and their die-hard audiences, Macworld is blinking, finally moving the show to February, well out of CES's enormous shadow. In 2010, Macworld will take place from the 9th to the 13th of February.

That's good news for everyone, but mostly for Macworld itself: Before this year's show, Apple announced that it would no longer be presenting at Macworld anyway, leading many to wonder if the show would simply be canceled in the future due to lack of interest. I mean, seriously, how many people need to spend multiple days ogling iPod cases and white earbuds if Apple's not on hand to demo its latest must-have gizmo in the same room?

One trick to survival: Macworld 2010 now includes a Saturday during which the show will be open, critical for getting consumers who'd otherwise be working into the exhibit hall. As Harry McCracken notes in the above link, Macworld openly encourages product sales at its booths, so perhaps exhibitors won't flee en masse if they figure they can earn back the money spent on running the booth by selling merchandise to show visitors -- which should be easier to do on a Saturday in February than, say, a Wednesday morning two weeks after Christmas.

In related news, Macworld is indeed now just "Macworld," dropping the cumbersome trailer to its old name: "Macworld Conference and Expo." Not a big deal, really, but hey, it worked for Apple when it dropped the "Computer" off its name.