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Joe tells of his adventure showing off the G5 iMac at a conference of PeeCee business users...
This past weekend I was the A/V person for a private business conference of about 500 people. The conference was a teaching session for internet-based small business owners. Most of which were PC users. I decided to take along my new 20" iMac beast to wow the business crowd.
After getting ribbed by a friend about "pretty pictures and cutsy sounds is all Macs can do" for the last several years, I was particularly excited about seeing HIS reaction to others as they came over and looked at the iMac. By the end of the weekend I had most of the crowd gushing over the iMac and how their boring PC couldn't do things like that.
Just having it sit on a table at the AV post in the front of the room was all it took to start the gawking. The iMac logo facing the crowd was great.
Where is the rest of the machine?Questions like "where is the rest of the machine", "that's just the monitor... isn't it?", "where are the cables", "how do you put a CD in it" and "where can I get one?" were fun to answer. One attendee wanted to know if he could take it to his room overnight.
I had used the iLife suite to create slide shows and lifestyle videos of the speakers. Since I was also in charge of personalized music bumps between speakers, I used iTunes which handled it with ease. My powerbook G4 12" was along for music and sat beside the iMac like a silver offspring.
During the course of the weekend, there were many opportunities for the iMac to shine. Several times during the function specific music track bumps were requested to introduce a speaker. The iTunes Music Store took care of that.
The main speaker had emailed me a product profile system in Excel. He commented that he had forgotten to print copies for the crowd for use during his teaching segment. Popping it up on the screen drew kudos and a drop-dead-look from my PC "business machine" critic.
A speakers notes were photographed with a digital camera and presented on the wide screen projection system. Print copies were churned out by the good 'ole 1994 16/600PS Apple Laserwriter on the table. A copy of the file was emailed to numerous attendees that walked up and asked to be sent a copy.
A mundane powerpoint presentation on a nursing home came to life after I doctored it up by inserting pictures of the residents from another CD. And, yet more drop-dead-looks came from my PC critic.
Several speakers had Web pages and lamented about "wishing the crowd could see their page". No problem for the wireless iMac and Safari. Several comments came from PC Explorer users on how fast Safari loaded the web page.
Finally, the magical moment of the weekend was prior to the Saturday night session. What normally would be some background music became a full scale party with dance tunes. The projection system was centered with a large screen in back of the stage. The visualizer in iTunes created a huge iPod commercial-esque picture with several people shadow dancing in front of the projector. The image on the screen complete with the Apple logo was incredible. Memories of Discos and TV shows brought the crowd to a fever pitch. Turn on the disco ball (conveniently mounted on the ceiling of the grand ballroom) and presto... instant dance club! A steady stream of business owners took turns being realtime ipod TV commercial actors.
Numerous attendees came over wanting to know what application I was using. So, I took great relish in telling them that, yes, even a PC owner could download iTunes for free from the apple web page.
The business owner that had hammered me over the last several years called truce and, with a handshake, said "nice business computer". Organizers of the event were blown away by the excitement music and visuals created and with the ready to go Microsoft Office capabilities.
All in all, the iMac was a huge hero of the function and may have created some new "switchers".
The Macintosh is for people who love to use computers. The new all-in-one flat panel iMac is the coolest desktop computer this mac evangelist has ever purchased. It was a joy to showcase it to an otherwise business PC crowd.
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