It's just a little annoying when Apple finally integrates tech that's 20+ years old and gets heralded as being "ahead of the curve" or "very cool" for doing it.
I don't care if it's been around for decades or done a thousand times before on other OS's, it's being done by them now, and I find it useful.
I'd rather see them do stuff like this and be praised for it than do stuff like this and get shit on by people with the tiresome "it's about time" or "Linux had this a zillion years ago and did it better" crowd.
It's just the whole culture around Mac. Apple gets lavished and rewarded, heralded as "clairvoyant" (the term used in a big thread yesterday about iPad) and similar silly pronouncements, seemingly no matter what they do -- whether the idea and existing implementations are older than the average age of Apple's workforce or not. People go around with Apple bumper stickers and define themselves by their association with the Apple brand. They hire people and choose friends based on whether the candidates use a Mac. And, when Apple finally implements an old idea, they are super awesome for getting around to it 20 years after almost everyone else.
It's just a bit annoying for those of us not infected, I guess.
(I have a MacBook Pro, for the record. I run Arch Linux on it. This has caused several Mac fanboys much distress.)
Sometimes, it seems like just as many people define themselves by their lack of association with the Apple brand..
Besides, I think there is something valuable in making tech simple. Generally, the applause for Apple is misplaced under "look at feature/concept X" when it should be placed under "feature/concept X 50% simpler".
When it comes right down to it, I don't buy into this whole OS religion thing. I've had more than a passing exposure to quite a few of them, and they all have/had their place.
Case in point, I started my career on IBM 3081's and PDP-11's. I even have a full rack of gear in my home office that includes a bunch of boxes with various flavours of Linux installed, a Tadpole laptop running Solaris, an operational NeXT Cube, SGI and HP boxes running their Unix variants, a cluster of Sun Netras, and on and on. I've also got a few different laptops with Windows and Linux installed. And a couple of MacBook Pro's.
They all have good features, and bad, but none of them have everything.
Do I care what someone else uses? Nope. Do I care if they gush over it and think it's the coolest thing ever? Nope. Do I feel some overwhelming urge to "educate" them on why their choices are "wrong"? Nope.
I just know what works for me, and am happy to discuss things with like-minded individuals. I'm not a fanboy, and I haven't drunk the Cool-Aid. I also don't think everyone who owns a Mac is like that either.
Call me crazy, I guess.
(Started my career on a DEC-10, followed by a Vax 11/780, a couple 11/750s and a smattering of PDP-11s (11/44, 11/70))
Had Linux (and NeXTstep) running on an early Tadpole P1000 (100MHz Pentium laptop, it was the sh*t when it came out.)
Mostly all Macs now.
To be fair, the main problems I had with Solaris on SPARCbook 2 were more to do with Java being too slow and Sun's insistence on making everything Java-i-fied around the time I was using it.
Or if someone asks me why I've got an android phone and not an iphone and I casually respond that I don't like the way Apple devices get locked to iTunes, I get groans and eye-rolls. Fuck that shit, you ask me a question and then you socially punish me because I prefer to go a different way, damn right I get pissed off at the 'Apple Cult'.
Fanboys of all stripes are painful as hell, and the Apple Fanboy Cult is currently ascendent, that's all.
Second, this has been Apple's post NeXt philosophy, and it is much better than the Not Invented Here philosophy that preceded it. Many OS X features are simply a better user interface for some Unix feature or other.
Apple should be applauded for this. Too much great technology has failed to make a difference in the lives of Muggles because of the incomprehensible incantations required to invoke it.
To offer an alternate perspective: This will likely be a new thing to lots of people who aren't very technologically literate.
I will be curious to see if you actually need to know your IP address. This seems like exactly the kind of thing Apple would abstract away for the user, which is one reason why many people are willing to pay a premium for OS X over Linux.
This stuff has been part of every Linux distribution for years. People have even written shiny interfaces for it, see remmina or vinagre or any other remote desktop management suite (and yes, these ship with many distributions by default).
That OS X has more marketshare than Linux shouldn't automatically make OS X more "cool" on its own merits; after all, Windows has 8-9x as much marketshare as OS X, but I don't see a bunch of threads pop up lavishing MS with praise every time they integrate a new feature into Windows.
I don't think Apple should be hailed as super cool and great by technical people just for finally getting around to doing something that has been done thousands of times before for decades. I can understand an ignorant person thinking a feature that's not found in Windows makes Apple "cool", but it's silly for anyone browsing Hacker News to ascribe a bunch of street cred to Apple for this.
It's a nice feature and I'm glad to see it go in, it's nice that Apple is adding nice features, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend like Apple is the coolest kid on the block just because they finally got around to writing a semi-normal implementation of VNC, just as my mind wasn't blown when Apple finally integrated workspaces after 15-20+ years of availability on all other respectable WMs. It's more of an "about time" than an "Apple is consummately cool".
If you think I'm giving Apple "street cred", whatever that means, you've misunderstood me. If you think I'm hailing Apple as "the coolest kid on the block" indicates that you may not be looking at this situation objectively. Please don't put words into my mouth.
By bringing something to the masses I mean making it accessible to less technical users. It's available and usable by anyone, just because OS X doesn't have 80% market doesn't make it any less available. I really feel that you have misunderstood me on many levels. It's apparent that you're tired of people hailing Apple for no good reason but I have not done so, so don't take it out on me. I'm not a blind Apple fanatic.
Nobody has done that before, except for a company with about 90% of the Desktop market share, first party remote desktop services, a third party market with services to 'go to your pc', implementations of some sort of VNC-type service and goodness knows what else to secure it all.
The evidence shows that VNC isn't from much before 1997 or 1998.
X Windows was designed around running multiple thin-clients as a primary purpose. Wiki says X started in 1984, with X11 being released in 1987 - it'll be 24 years old this year.
I ran X9 on a Decstation in 1985 or so.