Apple Expo

The Apple Expo was a European annual sales conference and technology exposition held by Apple Inc. The conference featured over 250 exhibitors annually, with Apple being its main exhibitor. This conference was most often viewed as the European counterpart to Macworld Expo, a similar conference that was held annually in San Francisco.

History
The first Apple Expo event was originally held in France around 1984 by the employees of the French Apple distributor Seedrin SARL, and its manager Jean-Louis Gassée. The Seedrin employees organised the event into an annual show, where third party software and hardware distributors could exhibit their Apple-related products.

The distributor was acquired by Apple Computer and became Apple Seedrin (later Apple France) and continued holding the expo every mid-September. Within the Apple France subsidiary of 100 people, a small team was organised by Adeline Domenjoz) to set up the annual event. Due to the growing size of the event, Reed OIP was contracted for show management.

Around 2000, the Apple Computer took control of organising the Apple Expo, and included co-founder Steve Jobs as part of the events. With this new corporate management, the employees of the French subsidiary slowly stopped being be part of the booth demo team. The focus of the expo gradually shifted from the Mac to Apple's iPod product line. Year after year, Apple stopped releasing new products during this event, removing much of its booth investments, and limited the amount of available new products on show. The last year was a Reed Expositions-only event, without even an Apple booth.

There were other similar events held in Europe, like MacExpo in London, but with no link with the Apple Expo.

Timeline
Listed below is a timeline of Apple Expo and significant product announcements: