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.
(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.
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