Not harsh, Just bitter and cranky and pessimistic

Oh come on Kostís, stop beating a dead horse. The remark wasn’t really directed at you anyway: Your opinion stopped counting after the zillionth bitchy rant about the PS3 and Sony at Spitaki. :)

The keynote sucked really hard and Leopard is only going to be great because it’s the ‘evolution’ of an amazing OS and — most importantly — because the third party apps are going to carry it with (what’s hopefully going to be) impressive use of Core Animation and increased requirements for its APIs. As a product, for the end-user, it’s not much better than Tiger. I wouldn’t even call it evolutionary. Tiger was evolutionary, in lieu of Spotlight, Dashboard and whatnot. Leopard is an eye-candy laden Tiger with an over-the-top backup and a Finder that thinks it’s iTunes.

My post was sarcastic — sure — and conveyed my mild disappointment (even though I knew in advance of the — lack of — features). Cranky, bitter and pessimistic? Well, only if you’re naive (and/or indifferent) enough to not get it. :)

I know. I was trying to cut them some slack as I’m often criticised (by people that should really know better) that I’m too harsh on Apple. :)

Not harsh, Just bitter and cranky and pessimistic : )

It’s true that it’s harder for them to innovate, but it’s pretty much harder for anybody, even MS with their MS Research division. What would a truly revolutionary next-gen OS be like? No one knows. Until somebody comes up with something, we’ll be stuck with evolutionary upgrades.

I think Apple is not keeping anything for 10.6 or 10.7 for that matter.

I know. I was trying to cut them some slack as I’m often criticised (by people that should really know better) that I’m too harsh on Apple. :)

I lean towards your opinion: they had nothing, Steve just talked bull, as usual, trying to postpone disappointment; the thing is, developers are — typically — not as stupid as your average fanboy.

Still, as I wrote above, I too think that Leopard is going to be great; perhaps not worth it (for those concerned with its price) straight away — it doesn’t offer anything groundbreaking — but nevertheless great. And that’s not because of its new features, but because it’s based on what’s already there: A great codebase and a great ecosystem. I’d like to believe that Apple has interesting stuff to present in future versions in its arsenal; Sadly, I don’t think it does as it lacks the capacity for basic research that it had twenty years ago. That’s too expensive for them and they’re already stretched too thin.

Having said that, I love Leopard. There is probably nothing more I could ask from Apple for a new O release, other them actually sticking to ZFS and hooking up screen sharing with iChat, as opposed to be dependent on the computers sharing facility of Finder.

As far as the WWDC event goes, I am truly let down by the total times iWork, iLife and the new iMac were mentioned ( zero ). I love those products and I was expecting announcements on that front ( core-animation enhanced effects, this and that ).