First, let's get one thing out of the way: Everyone views the world in an entirely different way. No two people will see the exact same event the exact same way, because each 30-year-old viewer has a different 30 years of experience leading up to that moment that causes them to see things in their own unique light. Part of growing up is realizing that just because everyone else sees things differently doesn't mean they're wrong.
In the case of the WWDC keynote there are several very different opinions that have been voiced on the Internet. While I can't summarize them all, some of the most vocal ones are:
- The keynote was fairly underwhelming. There should have been some more earth-shattering stuff in there.
- Sub-opinion: Wow, Steve looked a little thin. Is he OK?
- The keynote was absolutely fantastic! Look at all the cool stuff that you can do with Leopard! And did you see the price of that hardware??
- I can't believe that Apple has to resort to MS-bashing in order to get their keynote done. They're so full of crap its not funny.
I'm not going to put labels on each of those opinions, but you can probably guess, in general, to whom those opinions belong. I was definitely of the second opinion, with a mix of the first and last. Being someone who spends at least 12 hours a day (my lack of a real life here is not the issue, so don't even start with me on learning how to step away from the compiler!) designing and coding on PCs using XP, Windows 2003, and even Vista - I don't get much day-to-day exposure to Macs and Apple software in general. When I saw that keynote, and basically every time I experience OS X, its like a breath of fresh air. A lightening, stress-relieving, enjoyable experience. So for me, I'm pretty stoked about whats coming up in Leopard, even if it isn't ground breaking or earth-shattering...though the background "delta shift" technology for the backdrops in iChat video conference is insanely cool.
So here's a summary of some of the things that I got out of the keynote. Keep in mind that my perspective is VERY Windows-slanted, but I'm trying to keep an open mind:
- Apple did a lot of Windows bashing. Frankly, I'm dissapointed. The recent onslaught of anti-Windows commercials has actually reminded me of mud-slinging political campaigns. Apple theoretically holds themselves to higher standards than the rest of the industry - so why has no one called them on their childish behavior in bashing Microsoft. Its one thing to point out flaws in your competitor's product, but the extent to which Apple is going to badmouth MS and Vista is just very, very immature, and I think its a bad move from a business and marketing standpoint. Everybody loves a good blue-screen-of-death joke or a Windows crashes all the time joke... but Apple I think has gone too far here, so far in fact that I believe some of the "facts" pointed out about MS products were inaccurate, all the way down to the fabrication that the Apple guy called Microsoft's true logo (it wasn't their real logo... Apple obviously photoshopped it...which could get the MS lawyers all fired up)
- iChat. Oh. My. <diety/>. This thing is awesome, and makes Windows Live Messenger look like so much rubbish from the 90s.
- Time Machine. A lot of people are actually accusing Apple of copying Microsoft here. MS has the Shadow Volume Copy and the System Restore features, and the "Previous Versions" feature on Windows Vista. That's like saying Ferrari copied the Ford Escort when they made a sports car. Sure, Ford built the first car, but when you compare today's Ford versus today's Ferrari - you know who makes the better car. So what I'm saying here is that Time Machine is the super-fancy, ultra-powerful, hot-rod version of whatever it is Windows has in this space. Did I mention that it looked awesome?
- Improvements to some of the other core applications are coming and have been long-awaited. Nice. This is typically where a lot of people take the opportunity to complain about the lackluster keynote, citing that there was nothing earth-shattering revealed.
- Hardware. Bottom line: QUAD CORE dual-processor 64-bit Xeons with 1GB RAM and a 256MB Vid card for $2499. They spec'd an equivalent Dell at $800 MORE than that price. I went to Dell and tried to reproduce the specifics of the demo machine and for some reason, their configurator would not let me line things up apples-to-apples (hahah, get it? Comparing Apples and Apples??? too funny.). Really Bottom Line - If you can now get Mac hardware for at or less than the price of equivalent PC hardware, and the Mac hardware will boot Vista using Bootcamp and the PC hardware hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of booting OS X - why is there a decision to be made here? The Mac hardware is undoubtedly the best bang for the buck now. I never thought I would ever see those words printed, but for the money, unless Dell can come up with one whopper of a discount on the same hardware, the Mac is actually cheaper than the PC.
- Xcode 3.0. One word: XRAY. This thing is going to blow developers away, and I need to find an Apple store with a Leopard preview on it so I can play with it.
So - Did Apple do their job? Did they succeed in hyping OS X Leopard? Actually - I don't think so. If I already owned Tiger, I would probably have a fairly luke warm reaction to Leopard. I would want to buy it as soon as it came out, because its an upgrade, but I wouldn't be waiting in line at midnight in a Leopard costume like some fanatic.
On the other hand, for those of us who do not currently own Macs - I think Apple did their job in spades. How do I know? Because I'm currently making plans to sell all the PC laptops and spare servers in my house and replace them with dual-bootable Macs. This coming from a guy who writes .NET code 12 hours a day, on Windows. I will still be able to do that with Boot camp, but with the Macs, I can use OS X for everything other than coding, and who knows, I might even get back into tinkering with Objective-C and Cocoa - I loved them when I tried them out on OS X Jaguar, but I thought the developer experience was years behind the current dev experience you get with Visual Studio 2005. Let's hope Apple puts some serious effort into trying to lure Windows developers over to the "dark side". tags: mac osx keynote wwdc review
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