Oh look, an iPad
marco.org
marco.org
Basically, I agree with the article that progress (or "change", if you don't agree it's progress) has slowed significantly in the OS X line, and so my most recent computer is an Arch Linux box.
In my day to day life, I haven't really noticed any practical difference. Maybe expose on the dock, which I haven't developed a habit for using.
We now have coverflow in the finder, which I did use one time to flip through a photo directory quickly.
That's really all I can think of. I know there were many under the hood changes with Grand Central and OpenCL, but it hasn't made any difference to my day to day life.
I will admit that I've become accustomed to my workflow so it's possible that some great new features are waiting there for me but I'm too lazy to learn.
The emails Jobs sent to Greg had headers from the version of Mail.app included with 10.5.
Yes, computers are progressing a little more slowly in a sense. This isn't a bad thing. You shouldn't have to buy a new one every two years. But they're still different.
And that's what makes it more useful to more people.
OSX's .app drag-and-drop is the closest to the right answer. Linux's package management is a working but hugely complex solution to a problem that should be entirely sidestepped. Windows is totally broken.
Each app should live in its own world. Management of libraries and support infrastructure should also be neatly modular. An app should not have an "installer" and should not be allowed to mess with the OS.
Let's say there's a 80/20 split, between what is really easy or quick or fun --some subjective measure of "better"-- to do on the console vs what you need a general purpose computer for. At some point, the console is going to win out and those 20 percent items, and tasks that you'd need a general purpose computer for are going to somehow change. Either you'll find another way to accomplish the same general task or tools for the console will arrive that are "good enough". So the question would be, does the console do enough of what people generally do to change the things they rely on a general purpose computer for?
Granted, the successful consoles I can think of are all TV related, and the TV has key advantages over general purpose computers for those consoles (bigger screen, setup to be watched instead of worked on, better sound, etc).
I'm not excited by Apple spending less resources on OS X, surely they can do both?
BTW, part of the problem with computers not progressing faster is that the software world is dropping the ball. We're not taking advantage of things like GPGPU, multicore, etc. because we're too busy building me-too whiz-bang webapps.
And the desktop software world has been consistently dropping the ball since the beginning. Today's wasteful code that ignores processing resources has solid company among yesterday's wasteful code that was pissing away ram and CPU cycles with locked-in middleware, sloppy code and the rest of our sins. It's nothing new.
And it's not the fault of a shiny new horizon. Desk computers seem to have simply hit a local maxima.
(What is virtualization but an industry-wide condemnation of the state of modern operating systems? We can't get a single box to run a dozen services reliably; instead we run a dozen isolated OS images on that same hardware and things are better.)
The obvious ways to notably improve desk computing require massive change. But we can't quite sell the idea of massive change when things are working reasonably well and most of the planet is accustomed to the current, weird state of desk computing.[1]
So the small incremental changes are the only things left.
[1] I think mobiles and the web are so popular with developers right now precisely because they present the chance to work with and on platforms designed from the ground-up with modern techniques, for modern hardware and services and without all the cruft in the corners.
Still, Im very impressed with the sort of technology we can deal with in our own homes. It's insane to realize just how beefy gpu's are today. Yeah, it'll be a while before desktops are on the out and out. At that point, the few of us using them will be grateful linux can be installed on anything.
Just having billions in the bank doesn't mean you get top engineers when you are hiring. I rather have a somewhat slower developing OS, if the result is good, than a faster developing crappy OS. I was going to compare to Windows, but that is slow in developing and crappy. Oh well.
This might tie back to John Siracusa's recent observation that Google is "a huge gravitational sink for engineering talent," and Apple is not. There's a small discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1257201
(1) Snow Leopard was released 8 months (Aug. '09) ago. (2) Leopard was out about 20 months (Oct '07) before that.
Given that, Apple could announce 10.7 at the 2011 WWDC, release that Fall, and be within their normal timeframes. I think for Apple this is the "Year of the iPad (and OS 4)." We just have to get used to that.
for apps.
The author is surprised? They just launched a new product category. They're probably pretty sure that most people, by now, already know that they sell laptops.
As long as the hour was one when I was using it, I would immediately notice. But then, I usually only work on dual and quad-core boxes and our optimizing compiler isn't. Maybe I wouldn't notice if I were on a 16 core box and it was just one of the cores.
I am quite happy with 10.4 actually. I have no reason to spend $140 for 10.6. I'll continue as long as there is a workable Omnigraffle version for 10.4 :)
You are hindering real discussion with your trollish comment.
::sigh::