Leopard Lives and Kicks Vista's Butt

[sjor]

Check this out!

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard

Watch the keynote too. This is going to slay Vista. And the new Mac Pro is out too.

[WMD]

Didn't Steve seem ill during the keynote?  He only did part of it, and he looked haggard and tired.  I hope it's not his cancer coming back or anything....

On the same note...that younger guy who did the Time Machine demo among other things...don't recall ever seeing him in a keynote, but he should do them if Steve ever can't.  He's great.  Certainly better than Phil Schiller.

Oh yeah, the computers.  I'm disappointed about the name Mac Pro.  It's so boring.  The computer itself is good, though.  Fact is, though, there's a big hole left where Apple could put in a lower-end tower computer.

[worker201]

MacPro is pretty pathetic.  So is MacBookPro.  I think they ought to have cooler names, like Falcon, Angstrom, Celegorm, or other such shit.  Or they should do like Volkswagen in the 60s - Type I, Type II, Type III, and Type IV.  The names are a little dumb.  iBook was cute, and G5 sounded manly.  MacPro sounds like "we couldn't think up anymore names".

[_kill__bill]

They could name it like guns:

Hey, check out my M16A1 Mac!

[pofnlice]

There's nothing wrong with "Mac Pro". Yeah it lacks creativity and imagination. However, tacking pro onto a product these days automatically associates it with high end business application or some sort of Power that others aren't rigged for. Yeah I'd like to see a name like "Studly Hungwell Computer that Kicks You Ass and Eats Your Breakfast", but they didn't.

[davidnix71]

The 'pro' part is so the average Joe will think commercial quality. Powerbooks are supposed to be much better made than iBooks. I still have a 113MHz powerbook (almost ten years old) that still runs well (with OS 8.1). It cost over $6k new, so it damn well better last that long.

I am not at all happy about having a new Mac OS every 1 1/2 years. The hardware and software changes so often that it limits the third-party software available. The changes make potential malware very hard to write, but I want more from my computer than just what comes from Apple. In fact, I use none of the iLife stuff and don't even use Safari.

If I 'upgrade' to Tiger, I would have to rebuy software. At least before OS X, pretty much anything that ran in OS 7 would still run under OS 9.

[hm_murdock]

What?

I've used a lot of the same software since 10.2 and never needed to change any of it.

[WMD]

The OS X APIs were frozen in 10.3.  All software designed for that should work in future versions for a pretty long time.  This isn't surprising - OS X is a very new OS, comparatively.

[worker201]

Agreed, 10.5 does not mean Aqua, Carbon, Cocoa, Quartz and Darwin are going to be scrapped.  Classic support is probably finished, but other software seems to be pretty stable.

On the other hand, a new version means more bigger bloat for larger more powerful computers.  Lots of gui extras that won't perform well on older machines.

On the other other hand, it's almost like they're officially fucking with Adobe.  First, they kill Premiere with Final Cut.  Then they switch to an architecture that Adobe can't/doesn't support.  Now, right as Adobe is probably going into the finalizing stages of CS3, Apple announces a new OS, probably with new features an Adobe product should be taking advantage of.  It's kinda funny to watch, as long as it doesn't get in the way of my workflow.

[piratePenguin]

Didn't Steve seem ill during the keynote?  He only did part of it, and he looked haggard and tired.  I hope it's not his cancer coming back or anything....

Hmm.. I was just reading Paul Thurrott's (the Windows supersite dude) (very negative) piece on Leopard, and he says:

OK, enough Jobs bashing. The guy's a visionary and truly important presence in the industry, and it will be a sad, sad day when he steps down from his post at Apple and fades into the sunset. (The reality of this possibility seemed all the more real this week. Am I the only one that though Jobs looked oddly gaunt and sickly during the WWDC keynote?) But as I've often said of Apple and Jobs: They do good work. It's too bad they feel the need to exaggerate so much.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/macosx_leopard_preview.asp
And also make sure you see: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/06/08/11/219216.shtml

[hm_murdock]

The problem with Apple and Adobe is the Patton/Montgomery thing. Like Patton said (at least in the film):

The difference between me and Montgomery is that I'll admit that I'm a primadonna.

Adobe has an unswerving 18-month product cycle. Hell or high water, it's 18Mos. Second, they have Software Company Syndrome. That is, "Mac users are a small segment, maybe they don't matter as much." Forget about the fact that the majority of their customers are Mac users. That can't matter. Only thing that matters is that market share.

As for killing Premiere on Mac: GOOD. I fucking hate that shitty ass garbage. Everybody I've ever known that used it has had the same problems. Randomly crashing, corruption of project files (even on clean close!), poor performance, worse interface than MS.

BTW, my shitty experiences were with 4 or 5 or something on Mac. All the other identical experiences were from people running 6 or whatever on Windows. So, it wasn't a bug with the version I was using, or a bug with the Mac version. Nope. Premiere SUCKS.

[davidnix71]

If the API's were frozen in Panther up, then why do I see so much software offered in Version Tracker that 'requires' Tiger? If the software uses added features like Dashboard Widgets, then it may not matter that the API's haven't changed.

I also have software that will work on a G3, or G4 but not a G5 (VPC 6.1), and certainly won't work on a MacIntel. Guest OS supports a G5 and isn't expensive, but why buy something all over again? VPC 6.1 doesn't even properly identify my G4 mac cpu (the clock speed is !?!).

There is other software I have that works (or 'should' according to the writers) from Jag up. I bought Mellel and there is a Jag only version, no longer supported.

Even VLC asked for money (and got it) so they could test a G5 with their software.

[WMD]

If the API's were frozen in Panther up, then why do I see so much software offered in Version Tracker that 'requires' Tiger? If the software uses added features like Dashboard Widgets, then it may not matter that the API's haven't changed.

I meant the other way: old apps won't stop working.  New apps that use new feature will, of course, require the new OS.  The API freezing in 10.3 would explain your broken Jaguar apps.  Hopefully, that won't be happening again.

[hm_murdock]

When a new Linux kernel is released or a version of GCC or whatever shows up and it breaks binaries, I don't hear people raising a stink about it. It's only when someone says "Hey, wow. This new version of OS X is going to be neat."

There's usually some jackass that has to crawl out of the woodwork to say "OMG OH NOES ITS TEH BAD!!!1" just to be a jerk. I don't mean that you're that person, davidnix... I'm just sayin'.

[piratePenguin]

When a new Linux kernel is released or a version of GCC or whatever shows up and it breaks binaries, I don't hear people raising a stink about it.

Uh, yea, you don't have to pay for them..

Apps will use this Core Animation stuff and you'll need to get Panther to see them. How much work could it possibly be to port that to Tiger? Has that much changed..?

Whenever Qt introduces major new features like graphics view (which seems like a similar idea to core animation), which applications will depend on, noone raises a stink because noone will have any problems obtaining and upgrading to Qt 4.2.