MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) Preview
I had a brief look at the Leopard preview material on Apple’s website this morning before work (Jobs’ WWDC 2006 keynote started around 3am Australian time), and was disappointed. Time Machine looks gimmicky (and, as someone who already has an automatic back-up mechanism, is not the sort of thing I need), though Apple’s long-overdue multiple-desktop feature, Spaces looks intuitive and useful, a good replacement for Desktop Manager and Virtue, which I expect it to kill off. Otherwise, the major updates were updates to apps like Mail, and iChat, which I don’t and won’t use because there are open-source alternatives.
In the keynote video, which I got to watch tonight, Jobs promises that there’s “top secret” stuff in Leopard which they don’t want to reveal too soon. When we’ll start to see these, I don’t know. Leopard is due in May 2007, and if Vista appears before then, I expect Apple will show its trumps to the media soon after. But they’d better be good. Improvements to Spotlight are in the works, and with Google Desktop and Beagle around, they need to be. Nautilus on GNOME is already a far more capable file-manager than the anemic Finder, and it’ll be more so by May. If we don’t see serious improvements in MacOS’s usability in Leopard, top-flight Linux distributions like Ubuntu will probably eclipse MacOS as the most useable desktop OS by the time 10.6 comes around. That’s a healthy thing: free and open-source is the future of software, and a usability victory over OSX would be a great achievement. I’m thinking of switching. Apple, you’d better make Leopard a revolution, because it could be your last chance to keep me on the platform, and I won’t be the only one to go if you don’t…
I was very disappointed with this latest and rather lame WWDC also. Spaces is nothing new, Time Machine seems like a poor differential backup solution, there were many improvements to inconsequential things like spotlight and widgets. Finder, as you say, needs a kick in the pants.
The Mac Pro looks pretty good though. Wouldn’t mind one.
David Lo Pan
9 Aug 06 at 6:21
Don’t tell me you’re a Mac user, too…
I often like Apple’s hardware, and as you say, the Mac Pro looks pretty good. Nice little signature touches like the snap-in hard-drives are what make the stuff great. And yet, I always have to think how much more power I could be getting for every dollar I spend. Last night I was looking at Dell’s 6400 laptop range, and realised that for the extra money it takes to turn a MacBook from white to black, I could get an extra gig of ram and a 1600x[something] screen on a Dell, and probably more besides.
And then at work I use Windows XP, and notice just how fast applications opens on a P4… So the interface sucks, and there’s horrible screen redraw issues, but it seems really zippy...
Ben H
10 Aug 06 at 19:17
I have a black macbook with 2gb ram and a 100gb 7200rpm disk. it’s my primary machine. before that i had a 1.2ghz 12” ibook with 768mb ram and a 30gb disk which was my primary machine.
my desktop is an a64×2 3800 (2ghz dualcore) with 2gb ram and about 700GB of storage with a 7900gt. it’s a delight to use, but i hardly ever use it (well, i hardly ever sit in front of it, i use it remotely a little). it runs linux, but has windows for games. very, very fast machine, but the macbook aint far behind. I’ve not touched it once in the last fortnight. I’ve been pondering replacing it with a mac pro, but i think it would be as neglected as the current one.
sure you can get some other kit for cheaper, but it aint as nice. in general though, most apple kit is actually priced fairly well. the mac pro seems expensive, but its using xeon processors and fb-dimms which aint cheap, and you’re not really gonna find them in a lot of alternative machines for quite a while.
in regards to os x, i agree, xnu is the slow red-headed stepchild you love to hate, and is nowhere near as fast as linux or windows. however, if you’re using a modern machine they’re just as fast as each other for the average user experience. tbh, i much prefer linux to os x on pretty much every type of machine. especially servers. on laptops os x has some saving graces though. particularly expose, comes in incredibly handy on single screen machines.
I wouldn’t describe a P4 as zippy. clock for clock they are slower than their predecessor, and the amd k8 owned them for a long time. a 3ghz p4 performed about on par with a 2ghz k8. Also, i’m pretty sure they’re single handedly responsible for global warming.
The only thing I hate about apple/macs/os x in general is the majority of the userbase. christ some of those guys are fucking morons.
David Lo Pan
11 Aug 06 at 10:15