1. Fuck you IDG. You and your crappy policy this year sent MacTeens and Macsimum News to MWSF '06 with full media passes, and all I got was a "OMG WE HAVE NO SPACE come back after the keynote to get your 'limited access' badge which is basically just an exhibits hall pass". (In case you don't know, MacTeens updates like twice a week while we at AppleXnet update at least 5 times per week, and we have more original content and less news regurgitation. As for Macsimum News, they employ Neo, who writes total bullshit articles and anonymously comments on and touts his own articles.) And yes, in case you were wondering, I got to see the keynote live, just from an overflow room with a video feed.

2. Fuck you Microsoft. I really don't give a crap that you've "signed a formal agreement" committing to make Microsoft Office for the Mac for five more years. Where the hell did THAT come from anyway -- what is this, Bizarro World in 1997? Furthermore, don't give me this bullshit about "ongoing product updates, and today is no exception" when you announce updates THAT WILL BE RELEASED IN MARCH. Oh, no one cares about Messenger. And one last thing? You're such a loser that even after five years of Mac OS X being released, you can't make a decent player, so you have to wait for someone else to do it.

3. Fuck you Apple. I buy an iMac G5. Then you release an unexpected update two weeks later. I take the time to back up everything that I had already meticulously installed, erase the hard drive and reinstall a stock system, package it back up, and return it for a new model. And then just a scant three months later, you go and screw me over again. The hell?! Jason Kottke, I've got you beat.

4. Fuck you Apple (redux). OK, seriously. You go and release what's perhaps the most important update in the history of your professional laptop lineup, and you go and give it the name of "MacBook Pro"? Are you JOKING me?! Seriously, you could not have come up with a name that would make me hurl even more than I already am. Note to Apple: you termed the name "PowerBook" almost FOUR YEARS before you EVER put a PowerPC into the PowerBook. I don't give a damn that the "MacBook Pro" doesn't have a PowerPC processor; it sure as hell doesn't deserve such a shitty name like "MacBook Pro" if it truly runs 4-5x faster than the previous generation PowerBook. I call premature moratorium on the name "MacBook Pro". You are hereby christened, "Intel PowerBook".

5. Fuck you Jack Campbell. Your little pet companies DVForge and MacMice -- created to buy products from other companies and jack up the prices, to outright steal products from other companies and call them your own, and to dupe customers into buying your lame products -- aren't present at MWSF '06. Have you learned your lesson? GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE MAC COMMUNITY. We don't want you here.

In all seriousness (and with less swearing), I enjoyed the keynote, with the exception of the Aperture infomercial, iLife '06 demo, and the diatribe from Microsoft's MacBU manager (Roz Ho). It was actually quite entertaining, and I'm glad to see that Apple and Steve Jobs still have a sense of humor:

-- "Hi, this is Steve and this is my weekly podcast, super-secret Apple rumors."
-- "Photoshop always takes a little while to start up."
-- "The Intel chip. For years, it's been trapped inside PCs, inside dull little boxes, dutifully performing dull little tasks."
-- "Who's out there that we can call. Oh, look, there's Phil!"
-- disclaimer: quotes not guaranteed to be verbatim

I'm also quite glad that Apple started off 2006 with a bang, a full six months ahead of schedule, no less. Despite the fact that there are some surprising misgivings about the new MacBook Pro Intel PowerBook, and the fact that superficial SPEC benchmarks have little to no relevance in real-world applications, I think the new Intel Macs are pretty nice. I'm glad that Front Row and built-in iSights are migrating across the product lines. It's just kind of weird that this "new generation of Macs" has been ushered in with virtually no change in outside appearance. C'mon Apple, throw us a bone here, give us a black iMac!