Apple CEO’s WWDC keynote was probably one of the least impressive for years, but there are one or two things that are of some importance:
It’s payback time
Judging from the attractive pricing of the Mac Pro (leaving aside the mediocre standard configuration Apple has presented the world with; Geforce 7300GT is surely not worthy of the ‘Pro’ branding now, is it?), Intel is eager show its former exclusive shops — viz. Dell and co. — what kind of pricing deals a loyal and flashy company like Apple can achieve. But there’s more to it. Intel is very keen on being associated with Apple; because of Apple’s brand value, not as a computing company, but as a lifestyle company. It is also keen on being associated with Apple as an innovator, a technology leader, even if that role has been compromised by its use of ‘conventional’ generic hardware. These are traits (and a treatment) that Dell could not possibly achieve with its marketing strategy.
Capitulation? Never!
Leopard seems to be demonstrating existing ideas, albeit presenting them as originals; so common with Apple. Take for example backup and virtual desktops. I have missed virtual desktops on the Mac for years, and it was only Desktop Manager, a program using the old API calls from *STEP that brought them to OS X that kind of remedied their absense. Spaces, Apple’s implementation of virtual desktops on Leopard, seems interesting from a usability point of view.
The Time Machine seems like a great implementation of versioning on the surface, only to prove to being much less than promised. As indicated by the Time Machine page at Apple, it is clear that a clean, incremental backup GUI with a fancy animation is used to ease retrieval of previously stored information on the machine. Yet, I would expect this to occur at the filesystem level, say on ‘write’, and not periodically, as a launchd script for example. With this in mind, Time Machine is really a fancy incremental backup GUI, with — apparently — a simple application API to visually interface with it, as opposed to a true versioning system, of the sort WinFS was promised to be.
Another feature that is presented as innovative, although it has been available for years is desktop sharing; Microsoft’s Netmeeting has had it since 1997. Windows XP and MSN Messenger include ‘invitations’ for remote desktop sharing that serves the same purpose. Still, it’s inclusion in iChat is welcome, although the program’s lack of support for other IM networks (MSN/Yahoo being a major omission) is off-putting to say the least.
Incremental
Some of the features in Leopard are incremental improvements of Tiger. Core Animation, 64bitness at the Carbon and Cocoa levels, the Mail.app silliness, the Spotlight and Accessibility improvements. All of these have been features that were either expected or under development for years. For example, I recall joking with friends about Apple’s voice synthesis quality in contrast to, say, Festival, back in 2002.
Closing Words
All in all, unless Apple is performing a lot of development behind the scenes in preparation for a (truly) major upgrade sometime in the following years it has stopped striving for innovation on the personal computer. Innovation in hardware is out of the question when commodity hardware is involved; from a software point of view, I feel Apple is doing less every year; along with many others, and although I appreciate OS X’s quality compared to the competition, I feel that Apple is not doing enough to take its software where it should be. OS X, its robustness, UNIX roots, eye-candy and general quality aside, is a very minor incremental upgrade to what has been available to the average user for more than 10 years. From a development point of view, it is also void of any significant, stable APIs; Cocoa and Carbon are both dated and insufficient for many of the functions of a modern mid-sized to large application. It is noteworthy to mention that Apple’s applications are largely using their own, private and undocumented frameworks.
Finally, from the oh-so-important aspect of industrial design, Jonathan Ive seems to be doing less by the year. Apple has not demonstrated a new radically different computer design for years, although its competitors are not even trying to compete. Jef Raskin, a few months before his untimely death stated, in an interview for Guardian: “One only cares about getting something done. Apple has forgotten this key concept. The beautiful packaging is ho-hum and insignificant in the long run.”.
It seems that even the (truly) beautiful packaging is going away too. Besides OS X very little is setting Apple apart from Dell and the rest. Fortunately, the commoditisation has brought more configurability to the consumer than ever.
By the way, does anyone know whether the new Mac Pros can get common PC graphics cards without flashing their firmware with Mac specific versions? [They cannot! Bummer.]
[Update: You can watch the keynote online here]
[Update 2: Andrew Orlowski from The Register seems to have similar qualms about the lack of innovation in Leopard, at least as presented in the WWDC]