Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

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I know it's not a popular opinion, but yet again I feel like Apple has decided to simply keep status quo with Mac OS X, which is very much the same Mac OS X we got from about 10.3 onwards (Panther, wasn't it)?

Think about how different Ubuntu is now since then. Windows 8 is a real risk-take from a company that does not take risks (whether they were forced to do so or not is another argument). Mac OS X is... Mac OS X again.

I've been using Mac OS X since 10.2, and I will get another Apple machine for my next one, but I really don't know why they bother putting anything out if they're just going to phone it in each time. Pretty much everything added to Lion I really don't care for, and what they did add was minimal anyway.

I wonder if they really have the vision and the tenacity to actually move things forward, or whether iOS and Mac OS X are going to remain the way they are until the company can't take it anymore. They need a software person like hardware needs Johnny Ive. Someone to put their foot down, say "we're doing this" and follow through.

The next 10 years of Mac OS X cannot be the same as the last 10 years, can it?

Mac OS is at a point where they simply can't take these drastic jumps that you may see in the competition. For one, they're now at a yearly cycle. Two, the audience has expanded and continues to expand it's user base.

OS X's yearly cycles allows them to take a loyal user base who will upgrade and gradually introduce them to paradigm shifts, like cloud storage. Apple is taking calculated steps to make sure any of their risk taking features are done right and presented to the consumer correctly so they're adopted. I think they definitely have the vision. Something they do even better is have the patience to make sure their vision comes to fruition (mostly) correctly.

I can understand your point, but I'm not sure what progress you want. I'm more inclined to say that you're a segment that Apple doesn't quite need.

It seems to me that Apple doesn't think that the Mac is a segment it needs at all.

I would place money on Apple killing the Mac within 10 years, moving all consumers to iOS (which, let's face it, they're doing all by themselves), and releasing Xcode onto a Linux distro and wash their hands of desktop computing once and for all.

Apple clearly doesn't see a lot of future in the desktop, and that may well be right.

What is it you're wanting?

A feeling that I'm not buying the same OS each year.

Personally, I think Microsoft's strategy of bringing back the hybrid desktop/tablet, where you can do tablet-type things on the road/in bed, then drop it into a dock and go back to mouse and keyboard for work, is pretty sound now. I like what they've done with Windows 8. I like that they're trying.

What do I want from Apple? Probably something I don't know I want. I want to be able to drop an iPad into an iMac enclosure and have a hybrid work area. I want iCloud to be more than some weird, feature-free Dropbox (the new organization structure sounds like a misery for anyone with more than a handful of files). I want them to fix Finder and rethink the Dock.

But this is like asking what I want from an iPhone before I ever saw one, and I think most people's ideas of what they wanted were so wildly off, and then Steve comes out and says "You want this" and he's right. That's what I want from them, to know me better than myself.

How would you improve Finder?

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