Gruber's WWDC 2009 Predictions
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
I’m completely convinced that the tablet is real. But I
am almost just as convinced that it is not ready to be
announced. Patience on this one.
In my mind, at least, he might break even or float something like a 60% accuracy/trust rating. It would be interesting to see hard numbers of his actual predictions.
Anyway, I think many people want to remember him as more accurate than not, because he is one of the most vocal Apple prediction-related pundits there are.
Ala, a bit of the ole RDF/DF in action. :)
For Snow Leopard I agree that Apple will probably offer it at a highly reduced price compared to 10.4 or 10.5. There will probably be at least a few surprises we haven't seen yet but nothing that is going to justify a $100+ price for most people. The worst thing that could happen for Apple is for 10.4 & 10.5 to continue lingering around XP style if users don't quickly adopt 10.6. Between lax copy protection and a low price tag Apple could easily move 70-80% of their Intel users to 10.6 within a year. There have been rumors Windows 7 upgrade pricing is going to be quite cheap so Apple has to at least match that price. (both 7 & 10.6 are basically maintenance releases and probably have the same approximate value to consumers)
I don't expect any other big surprises. Apple wants the new iPhone to be the #1 story coming out of WWDC.
Did anyone else here notice that a new iTunes update is out, which enables support for iPhone OS 3.0? This seems like jumping the gun if the hardware isn't due out for another month. Are we going to see hardware availability immediately this week?
It seems to me like an App Store for Mac developers would only benefit Apple with their profit from it.
simply put, they can't. the genie is already out of the bottle. mac users can install apps from any source right now.
iphone developers don't enjoy being bottled up in apple's app store. they'd love to sell directly to iphone owners, but apple has made that impossible. it's not impossible for the mac, so a theoretical apple mac app store would have almost nobody developing for it.
The app store is a double edged sword, for sure. But for all the complaining about the grueling approval process, I don't think anyone would be in a hurry to abandon the store if Apple opened the iPhone up for alternatives.
The 30% fee is quite reasonable. It covers all of the variable costs such as transaction fees, bandwidth, etc. Not to mention the fixed costs of developing a store. It greatly lowers the barrier to entry for selling software.
The top 10 lists, the featured apps, and all the other perks of a central location have created significant wealth for a number of lucky developers. Otherwise, those developers would have had to make a significant marketing investment (in terms of either money, or sheer effort, or both).
Sating that "they can't" is completely unimaginative. If Apple released an App Store for OSX, developers would flock to it. Many would keep on selling software the way they have been doing it through the web, or through brick and mortar locations, but the ecosystem would flourish. Anything that increases the value of the OSX ecosystem, sells more Macs.
Apple would be crazy not to do this. Microsoft would have done it long ago if the EU would let them...
So place your bets :-)
My take: If they want to build an App Store for Mac, this year's WWDC keynote will include a quick reference to something like 'streamlining' or 'expediting' the process — just enough to let people know they're aware of the problem and have some interest in fixing it. And then if they do fix it, they can announce the Mac App Store at next year's WWDC to rousing cheers.
I was just trying to highlight the fact that an OSX app store would be...
1) not mutually exclusive with self-distribution
2) a boon to Apple's OSX ecosystem
3) welcomed with open arms by developers despite the complaining from developers about the issues with the iPhone's App Store processes
Both Macs (and to a much lesser degree, Windows) were both designed to allow applications to be atomized into easier to install "drag-and-drop" installs. The problem is from those development houses who get too ambitious or too paranoid to allow users to keep their installs in just one folder. (Either they are being too worried about library versions, which is really a red herring, since in the real world, apps can only maintain reliability if they keep they're own copies of the libraries separate from other apps. Or they're too afraid of software piracy to allow apps to be too easily moved.)
The classic Mac architecture did things right by having a simple key/value lightweight DB built-in, to allow apps to have all it's components in one file. (Actually two "forks", but that's ancient history.) Even under OS X, the OS provides the "bundle" folder concept to keep an app's state in folder, save for a prefs file.
I've worked with package managers like Fink, and they strike me as solving a problem that should not have existed in the first place: Unix's insistence on breaking apps into little teeny tiny pieces strewn over half a dozen directories. It's sad that Windows succumbed to this by the time of Win 3.1, and OS X is heading in this direction too.
I miss the time where I both knew what files were on my system, and that the organization was simple enough to do things "manually" without too much technical knowledge. We didn't have to have the current byzantine system of thousands of files in an install; it's not progress, but technological laziness and paranoia to keep the underlying technology complicated enough to cow most end users.
edit: if so, send me an email.