Wow… Was that yet another WWDC keynote without even a mention of the Mac platform? Are all the developers there now iPhone and iPad developers? And now the iPhone OS is being renamed iOS… I suppose that makes sense given the introduction of the iPad, but I hope that doesn’t prefigure any other major changes.
Not even a mention of the Mac platform? Not even a passing reference to 10.7?
I’m not sure it’s such a great time to be a Mac developer any more. I love the Mac - I wish Apple would show the Mac a little more love too.
Ha. It seriously wouldn’t surprise me. Would it have killed him just to mention OS X, given that he’s addressing a roomful of developers? Maybe the majority of them now are iOS developers. After all, for the past few years Apple have been a phone company that just happen to make the best computers.
I’m guessing 10.7 won’t be announced for sale for another year—maybe some teasers in January. An interesting indicator is tracking OS flags in HTTP logs. Apple employees browsing the web hit major sites like MacRumors and TechCrunch, and it is possible to see the 10.7 identifier in those hits. According to TechCrunch, 10.7 hits have increased 25% in the past month, with a larger spike in the month before that, meaning it is likely that internal betas are starting to circulate and are being used on a regular basis. So it wouldn’t shock me if we get some news in half a year.
All of that aside, I agree that its unconscionable to just omit the entire computing platform entirely. I do wonder if this means 10.7 will be rather more like Snow Leopard in terms of having a priority over refinement and fixes. If fancy things were on the way, and betas are in circulation, why say nothing at all? I wouldn’t be opposed to that. There are a lot—a lot—of things that need to be fixed with OS X.
You can’t blame them for maximizing the PR around their fantastically successful new products. I wouldn’t start to get worried for a couple more years. (Avoidance of tech blogs will probably reduce heart rate without any long-term losses.)
That’s not quite true - they are both built on the Cocoa frameworks, but they are entirely separate OSes. That’s like saying that TextEdit is a fork of Pages.
And I don’t blame them for maximising the PR around their successful new products (even though I really can’t get excited about any mobile phone, iPhone included - yawn). But this is a developer’s conference. Would it have hurt to have had just a mention of the platform that many of the developers in the room surely must develop for? But maybe all developers who attend WWDC these days are iOS developers, who knows.
The iPhone and iPad are very successful, yes, but isn’t that also a good opportunity to remind all those new iPhone and iPad users how great Mac computers are, too? Hey there, new iPad/iPhone user: if you like these products, OS X is the computing equivalent. But no.
Every developer’s conference these days is predominantly about promoting the wretched iPhone - it’s just a phone! I’m sure it’s a very nice phone, but really, it’s just a ruddy phone. (Cue the bores who will point out that it is really so much more than a phone… But… FaceTime - really? “FaceTime”? That has to be the most vomit-inducing name for an app I’ve heard for some time. What next? MeTime?)
Well, there we go. I’m not Apple-bashing; I’d just like them to show some sign that they still love the Mac as much as I do. I have to moan about this after WWDC every year. I’ve now done my duty for 2010.
2009 Moan (at least they spent 45 minutes on the Mac last year, in all fairness)
2008 moan (when dafu again told me not to get too hot and bothered about it)
Seems to be contagious - I really don’t know how to put it; maybe its time for an analogy again: right after the advent of pretty cheap DV-Camcorders for everyone to use, nearly everyone started to think “hey, I’m a director” or “hey, I’m the new Ballhaus”. In fact, the quality of TV shows in terms of precision of the shot, color, lighting and cutting decreased dramatically. Thats what we see now.
Now, that’s the way Apple - and anybody else - seems to go: make great things somehow available to even the dumbest idiot out there. And since thats the audience, remove all the stuff that appears to be too complicated (to remain in the analogy: remove manual exposure settings, manual white balance and so on. In fact, remove anything which might have “manual” in its first name). Thats the iPhone/iPad way.
Don’t get me wrong here, I do use my iPhone pretty often and think it does its job amazingly well. And yes, I will get an iPad soon.
However, if I ever get stuck using only iPads, iPhones and what else is coming along, I might as well start lobotomizing myself. Without my OS X-machines using any of these iDevices would be pretty pointless, more like transmutating into a couch potato.
Well, thats what it is for me, anyway. Probably I’m a bit oldfashioned, but I do think that any tool is just that: a tool and not an automatic decision maker. The latter is my field of work.
I think iOS is a fork of OSX. Think “embedded” OS. Kind of like Windows CE. The OS is super striped and highly optimized for very specific HW. At the core though it is still a BSD derived kernel, memory management, and file store with apple extended features. The ATV OS is a less customized example of the same embedded optimization of OSX.
I still agree that Apple seems to be forgetting its “core” from our perspective. Which is my sly way of posing the question
I think this answer to this is becoming obvious: No. Apple’s core is the masses of iOS users. iPad, iPhone, iPod. These outnumber the actual computer users by orders of magnitude. Oh, and these devices are cross platform.
As much as I hate to say it, Apple’s focus may be on the right market.
I assume this is tongue-in-cheek irony, and not really a ridiculously off-the-mark comparison that implies iOS is an advance over Mac OS X and that I am a dinosaur?
Jaysen - I still don’t get how iOS can be considered to be a fork of Mac OS X; as you say, they are built on the same things, but doesn’t that really mean that they are both forks of the lower-level thing (Cocoa)? From my understanding it’s not “embedded” like CE. I could be wrong, though.
As for their focussing on the “right market” - well, yes. I think I’ve already said that up-thread. Obviously most of their customers are now phone customers, and maybe soon they’ll have more iPad customers than Mac customers. So I understand why their focus is there. Does that mean I’m unjustified in worrying about their commitment to the Mac platform? As a customer who has paid thousands of pounds on their various Mac products, and as a developer who has spent years developing for the platform? No, it doesn’t. They may have more iPhone customers - they also have many iPod customers. (The iPod doesn’t dominate the keynote, though.) I didn’t even say they shouldn’t focus on these platforms or that they shouldn’t take up a chunk of time of the keynote. None of that did I say. All I actually said was, at a developer’s conference, would it kill them to throw a bone to all the Cocoa developers in the room and watching who develop for the Mac platform? They’ve had a billion events recently - the iPad announcement, the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. At the developer conference, thirty minutes on the Mac would have been nice.
Let’s just say that I’m not too sure any more that my decision to develop for the Mac was a good one for the long-term (and I have little interest in mobile devices). But hey, we have this conversation every year, and most Apple users really don’t care, so I’ll shut up now.
Intel and the 386 (still the most widely used processor)
I agree with you in the “it is frustrating” view of the conference. But conferences are showcases. The flash and bang of the company magic show. Why bring up the hunchback the rings the bells when you can look at the new choir robes?
I had a sort of daydream today while coming home from work on the bus, that the reason for the silence on the Mac is that having developed the “Retina screen” or whatever it’s called for the iPhone, they’re now working to build that into all their displays, and that work on 10.7 is finally getting down to implementing full display postscript which will be needed for computer-size displays of such high resolution. Hence the resounding silence.
Well we are allowed to dream, aren’t we?
Mark/Mr X
Edit to add: by the way, I love a display ad on the outside of the latest expansion of Xiamen’s electronics retail centre — which rejoices in the name of “Buy Now”, though it’s really 百脑 in Chinese ‘bainao’, or ‘100 computers’! — an ad for Toshiba, which announces that they are the “Leaders in innovation”. Really?
Mark, remembrance of past glories, I suspect, when the display banner may perhaps have had some truth. I bought my first Toshiba laptop around 1989 when I think they were claiming to have marketed the first practical laptop in the world. And later, after an upgrade or so, I bought my first Toshiba with a colour screen when they were claiming a first for that too. But I stopped upgrading with Toshiba when I read that some of their chips had a flaw they’d known about for years.
Toshiba provides more of the guts for “innovation” than most folks realize. I think the statement is accurate if you think of it like the sports team office worker saying “we’re number one!” because he provides back office support to the team.
if Apple decides OS X and the Mac platform are the floppy disk of the 20xx’s and drop them in favour of iOS, what happens at L&L, apart from a lot of profanity?
Do you develop for iOS or Windows? Or start over and create the World’s Best Fountain Pen?
That may be the case, but apart from those deep in the world of such geekery, people see that slogan over a picture of a bog standard Windows laptop — and the only visible innovation in those which I think is down to Tosh, and which Apple has followed in its newer MacBook Pros — is the inclusion of an SD card reader. And the rest of them, Asus, BenQ, LG, etc. etc. are not really any different. And wow! they make their laptops in colours … Chinese girls love really livid pink, it seems … and for the rest, they’re playing catch-up with Apple — or else going in for “shanzhai”, imitative versions of Apple’s products, but without the design sense — except for NetBooks which his Jobsness has eschewed.
Ah well … the view from here is different from the view from there.
Right. It is the latter part of that quote that is important. Toshiba is a “back office” player in innovation. Kind of like the grounds crew at a stadium. You can’t succeed without them. If they claim their importance publicly everyone has the same reaction you are having to Toshiba.
The same is can be said of Apple (Jobs), MS (Gates), and politicians (Obama). The folks gaining the glory really don’t do the work. They are just a public face that gets the applause. Another illustration is the statement “Behind every good man is strong woman”.
So we actually agree. Toshiba is not a visible force of innovation. Yet without them there would be much innovation in your hands.
As in the LCD in your Air. Many of those are Toshiba. Same with the LCD in the iP*. But whose counting.
