Beijing MUG gathering

I attended the BeiMac 5th anniversary gathering today. the turnout was great with about 70 people showing up for the special occasion. They had a display of old apple computers which was really nostalgic like the venerable old Classic, LC, first generation powerbook 145B (which really look like a brick). old warhorses would point out museum pieces like the Classic to new users who are more used to PowerBooks and iPods.
the song n dance sequence to kick off the event was somewhat painful, altho I think they were trying very hard. but my best accolade goes to the great organisation. everyone were given well-designed event passes (can use for future events as well) and new membership passes were issued at the end of the session,

BeiMac is well organised with many services like Macinwiki, news letters n forums and a help line. I can see that the team put in a lot of effort to promote mac usage. we were told that the MUG started off in 2002 with 7 members and now there's 370 members.

A comm member said that she was not comfortable intel processors in the new macs (hear hear!) and worse, seeing ppl running windows on mac! must liberate the window users (I like the edited revolutionary poster they used in the Keynote). we were told that there will be an OSX Leopard sneak peek when its released.

Interesting strawpoll of those present showed that majority used QQ (Chinese version ICQ) and MSN (clucks of disapproval). turns out very few used AIM or google talk and only 2 iChat users (I was one of them). apparently it cost RMB800 (S$180) for an iChat account in China? as a service, David Feng (the BeiMac Pres) demo-ed BeiMac Chat, accessable from the BeiMac site.

the iPhone presentation was really cool. BeiMac will demo the actual hardware, once release in US in June. Straw poll: everyone want to buy one. bulk purchase was mooted when iPhone is released.
a very brave vendor did a demo of Parallels: for those who need to run windows XP in their work (egads!). Seeing Windows desktop on Apple machine was quite disturbing, I watched with shocked disbelief. There were sniggers when it seemed the thing was gonna hang. Good thing was that Parallel can support linux, solaris apart from windows and mac os. Can partition hard disk into diff servers. the chap was actually quite apologetic and said that he's a mac user (fearing a lynch mob?).

BeiMac gatherings are quite different from the relaxed Mac meetups in Singapore, where we just gather in MacDonalds or Burger King as long as there were free WiFi. In S'pore, we like the personal interactions and sharing of useful applications and trouble-shooting. In Beijing, I think the mac users prefer more structure and like presentations and demos.