It's Not Just Me
It’s not just me who’s disappointed with the direction Apple and Apple’s product lines and development focus are taking.
It’s also John Siracusa (creator of Keynote Bingo) at Ars Technica as well. His take on the 2008 WWDC keynote:
Yeah, I guess the developers attending WWDC do get the details, under NDA. But I can’t help thinking this has been another keynote usurped by The Platform With The Most Growth Potential, which is how I imagine Apple’s executive team views the iPhone. I guess we’re all on the same team here (and the same kernel), but those two bridges still seem quite separate, and not quite equal.
As part of this article, Siracusa references the disappointment he expressed in his 2007 MacWorld San Francisco post-mortem:
If WWDC 2006 was a bingo bust, then MWSF 2007 was a bingo blow-out, and I was on the losing side. No Leopard, no iLife, no iWork, no Adobe or Microsoft, no new Mac hardware or software at all. If I had included a square that read “No Mac hardware or software shown,” you all would have thought I was crazy. What a world.
The nearly vacant bingo card is a pixel incarnation of my disappointment. I’m not a phone guy (although I will talk about iPhone in a future post); I’m not an iPod guy (although I own a few); I’m a Mac guy, and this sure as hell wasn’t a “Mac”world for me.
I’m not a phone guy; I’m not an iPod guy; I’m a Mac guy. And Mac guys are not feeling the love so much anymore.
There it is in a nutshell. Woe to us Mac guys (and even more woe to us general computer guys who were starting to love the all-of-the-features with little-of-the-effort and few-of-the-annoyances of the other platforms). Someday I may end up falling back to the Linux option like Mark Pilgrim.
Post-script: If it’s true that “Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation” as the press release claims, I’d be sorely tempted to wait until 10.6 appears to upgrade, and skip the disappointments of Leopard all together — if it wasn’t going to be a year or more before we mortals can install it.
