What if MacWorld became AppleWorld?

Or the secret plans to Steve’s new world…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or a die-hard Windows user who still thinks that Macs are toys and mentally tune out anything from Apple, you’ll probably have noticed that Apple have announced a couple of new products: the Apple iPhone and the Apple TV. If not, you can always watch the keynote address to catch up with what’s new.

Okay, assuming you’ve caught up you might have noticed a couple of things: firstly, they’re incredibly cool; but secondly, neither product has the word “Mac” in their name. Now many people might read too much into this and bemoan the fact that Steve hardly mentioned the Mac at all in the keynote, and point to the fact that “Apple Computer, Incorporated” is now just “Apple, Incorporated” as conclusive proof that Apple are getting bored of making computers and would much rather make cool gadgets instead, thereby completely ignoring the possibility that they might instead be waiting for a better time to preview Leopard, or show off new Macs, and that at two hours long any other announcement — Mac-based or otherwise — would have meant the first Stevenote with an official break for lunch in the middle. Perhaps he should have prank-called for pizza instead of coffee?

Anyway… let’s assume that Apple don’t get bored of making computers and operating systems, and also assume that neither the iPod or the iPhone are fads that will go away in the short term. The big question then is, since it isn’t just about the Mac any more, should MacWorld be renamed AppleWorld?

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t make sense to rename MacWorld as AppleWorld because — and this is the one last thing that Steve perhaps forgot to mention — AppleWorld is already ear-marked as the name of the new theme-park at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, to be situated between the Magic Kingdom and MGM Studios.

Little is known about this proposed new theme-park, which only got approved sometime after Steve became the largest individual shareholder in Disney, although the timing is thought to be entirely coincidental. However, since the rest of the Mac rumor mill was more concerned about finding out what they could about the iPhone, security surrounding AppleWorld wasn’t quite as tight and I can now reveal some of the forthcoming attractions at AppleWorld:

Pirates of “Pirates of the Caribbean”

“Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate‘s life for me!” — a rollicking boat-ride where pirates try to crack DRM’d DVDs and movie studios try to take all your money and then won’t let you watch your movie on anything other than the one DVD player you first put the disk in, and even then only if make sure you watch the whole thing, including trailers and commercials. You decide who the bad guys really are!

Spaces Mountain

What could be better than riding on one roller-coaster? Riding on two, three, four, or more — switching between them with drag and drop ease.

Big Thunder Mountain Ruby on Railsroad

Enjoy the thrilling ride as the Ruby on Rails train hurtles down tracks laid down on hastily-erected scaffolding, all to the big thundering screams of WebObjects developers.

Lucida’s Grotto

Ariel gets kicked out in favor of the much better-looking Lucida.

It’s a Resolution Independent World

“It’s a world of pixels, it’s a world of lines; It’s a world of vectors, it’s a world of splines; There are so many dots that we share; That it’s time we’re aware; It‘s a resolution independent world after all.”

And the rest…

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on your perspective — less is known about the rest of the attractions, other than their names: Enchanted Wiki Room, Honey I Shrunk the iPod, Spaceship Apple, Beauty and the Vista, Fantasmac!, the Great iMovie Ride, and It’s Tough to be a Bug Reporter.

And don’t forget, you’ll be able to take photos of AppleWorld using your shiny new iPhone!