Schillermania!

San Francisco was shaken to its knees this week by a massive Schiller-quake that was off the charts in magnitude. The best MacWorld in recent memory enthralled thousands of Mac fans this week, starting Tuesday with Steve Jobs’ keynote address. While Steve’s presentation was amazing and captured most of the attention, MacWorld is really Phil Schiller’s stomping ground.

Phil made his first appearance right at the beginning of Steve’s address, coming out to demo the first software announcement (the first overall new announcement being Burton’s AMP iPod jacket). Final Cut Express couldn’t have had a better intorduction than at the skillful fingertips of Schiller, who demostrated to the crowd not only that the app was cool, but also that he was a master of video editing. Where do Schiller’s skills end, or do they have a limit at all?

Steve went on to make many more awsome announcements and do some killer demos of his own, but Phil came back just like he always does: in video form. The intro video for the new PowerBooks was a classic Schiller piece; with him setting the scene in only the way Schiller can. It can’t really even be described, you just have to watch it. Nice body language Schiller!

The Keynote was just the beginning of Phil’s activities at MacWorld though. After the big festivities of the Keynote, Schiller got to throw his own party. This year’s Power of X was a strictly Schiller event, unlike last year’s which was co-hosted by Apple’s foremost programming wizard, Avie Tevanian.

Despite the absence of Avie this time, the Power of X presentation was much the same in format as the last time. Phil spent a little time talking about some of the new features of OS X, like Safari’s WebCore and Force Feedback. Then he demonstrated his ability to rock out at video games. His Nascar demonstration was totally righteous of course

In the end, the second Power of X may not have equaled the first in excitement level, but it was certainly enjoyable and we hope it becomes a regular feature of MacWorld.