I think you mean "the most convoluted OS Apple has ever released." What on Earth is the point of this "Launchpad" when I already have the Dock, Stacks and Spotlight for launching my applications? It's just one extra, pointless application I don't need. The OS should be getting lighter, not more bloated.
Ahhh, makes me nostalgic for the control-strip and launcher.
Remember the launcher? Who actually liked that thing?
Not that I'm condemning the new GUI elements. Its hard to tell without living with it for a while, just how good it will actually be.
I don't think it's just about money. If they commit to making any of their products with Blu-Ray drives, any products they leave it out on will seem inferior. The future of notebooks is what you see in the Macbook Air and there's no optical in there at all.
1080p video is probably the highest resolution consumer format that will ever be distributed and H.264 at 8Mbps bitrate is plenty so a movie download is under 6GB. On a 10Mbps connection, this would stream down in real-time or you could download it in under 90 minutes.
Optical disc authoring is such a pain. Just going straight to a digital format and uploading it somewhere is so much easier. Blank Blu-Ray discs aren't all that cheap yet and most come in at £5 each but some packs come in just under £2 per disc.
They take nearly an hour to burn a 25GB disc and your sanity would wear pretty thin hitting a burn error in there. I'd much rather fill 8GB USB pen drives at £8 each that take 10 minutes for each and I could copy 4 at once on a desktop and 2 at once on a laptop.
Once Nand memory halves in price next year, 8GB drives come down to £4 and so on to the point where Blu-Ray is meaningless in 2 years for personal authoring. Netflix are now starting to go streaming-only:
The thing I find really confusing -besides M.C. - is having both a dock and the launcher around together. Why should the dock exist when there's a launcher? Not that I dislike the dock, it's just confusing. The dock is a launcher, so why do we need two launchers?
I think it's needed for the same reason it's needed in iOS. Wherever you go, the dock remains, and you keep your most needed jump-to apps there. True the way it was démodé made it look a bit redundant with the first page of launchpad mirroring what was in the dock, but not for every page beyond that, AND, not at all depending on how you build your dock/home screens. You could very well have 5 items in the dock (or just Finder/Stacks), and every other app organized into Folders on the first home screen. That's very well how I might use it.
Also I think the demo of mission control was inhibited by some bugs which were obvious, and shaky-as-hell vp who was so nervous that I almost felt bad. That and the magic mouse was the worst piece of apple input to use for the demo. Magic trackpad or any apple trackpad would have worked far better. Multitouch on that mouse is just bad.
1. Just how much software do we need? A more salient question. I've used Macs for years and i've never seen a more vibrant market but the issue is more about exposure as the most exciting software IMO is coming from smaller indie development houses.
2. Theft can be defined by any number of criteria. It's purely subjective.
3. If developers refuse to distribute their software outside of the Mac App Store that would likely mean the success of MAS would a given and the value to the developer was great enough to warrant going exclusive. So long as innovative software is available for the platform I see the danger as being fairly trivial.
4. The App Store has delivered 300k apps that are priced so low it's almost beyond belief. The only way to deliver low cost or free apps is a drop dead easy distribution system that thwarts piracy and potentially ads advertising. The more paying customers a developer can attract the less they must charge for their app to cover development and other hard costs.
I doubt 90% of computers run windows. No one really knows what Windows marketshare is and if they think they do I'd love to know exactly how they've accounted for every percentage point.
I'm sure I can determine how many customers Apple lost because of their iPhone and App Store policy to at least a logical degree. Current share price is over 300$ per share and Apple completed a 20 billion dollar quarter. There is no need to become the app police for the entire platform but with the current infrastructure for software delivery and payment processing in place Apple would be fools not to take advantage of a gold mine and some developers would be fools not to hitch to this ride.
In the end H.L Mencken was right. Man doesn't desire liberty he desires security. The app store comes with peace of mind and security by being a walled garden and that's enough for enough people to make it a rousing success.
You make many valid points. Obviously, your opinion is shared by Apple executives. Also, I wouldn't disagree with a "Global Moderator" unless I had good reasons to do so. The most important question is "Why?" as it explains the reasons why things happen.
I have been with the Mac for 22 years which gives me a more substantiated opinion and older age (I am 2 months younger than Steve Jobs to the day).
I have come to the conclusion that Apple's decisions through the years explain its current revival and half-failure as a viable computer platform. I will not disagree with Apple's last quarterly financial results as they say exactly what they do, i.e. Apple sells a lot more computers and the iPhone's profit margin (~ 250%) makes Apple a highly profitable and highly valued company for the time being.
Call me a contrarian. Call me a prudent investor. It's when the sky is blue that one should worry about the storm that will come in the future.
What worries me is the anticipated success of Android phones and how much it will slow down the sales of iPhones in the future. And I regret deeply that Apple has chosen to repeat the mistake it made by not licensing either the original Mac OS or the new iOS. Windows 95 slaughtered Apple once and Android has the same potential. And all of this could have been avoided if Apple had licensed the Mac OS or the iOS. But greed and control lead to Apple's debacle once and history is repeating itself.
I came back to the Mac after 8 years on Windows XP because there are many things to like about the Mac. And because I am a contrarian. And because I want to encourage an innovator, or "the little guy" who struggles, but gives me a better service. But I am not blind to the weaknesses of the Mac platform.
You can measure the success of a business by the number of customers it attracts, or you can worry about the customers it doesn't attract. I belong to the second category. The growth of a business will come from new customers, i.e. the customers it doesn't already have. That's why a business cannot be complacent and must question its past and current decisions.
The Mac App Store strikes me as the decision of an accountant, not a leader or an innovator. The 30% explains everything. Control and greed. Again.
Wasn’t his comment specifically about a Task Manager in regards to seeing what apps are taking up HW resources. As you stated, Fast App Switcher just shows recently used apps with no indicator of which ones are still running in the background.
Right, I assume that's what he meant. If Lion goes the same way as iOS, and there's basically no meaningful need for the average user to know what is running and what not, then what is the Dock for? It's for favorite apps. In other words... what is the real meaning to the user of running/not running, if "apps resume when launched", as Jobs' slide said?
When you launch Mission Control (...), you can apparently see what's "running". ... But, Macrosheep on page 2, like me, noticed that there was no longer any glowing circles below the app icons in the Dock. So how will this actually work? Maybe what you see in Mission Control is the only way you'll see what you are working on, ie, what applications currently have documents open and "run"?
Auto-save and resume-when-launched seem like an intriguing puzzle when put together! To start with, because apps on Mac don't monopolize their documents like they do on iOS. Right?
Also, what really happened to Spaces? Was that the seemingly buggy sense around Mission Control maybe? There seemed to be some confusion going on in the wordage between Jobs and the vp demoing Lion about the role of Spaces in Mission Control. Will have to re-watch...
it clearly needs gestures to work. Also - and what SJ didn't note - the difference between the touch on the screen and the touch on the pad is visibility. i can see my fingers on a screen.
I think the idea is more that spaces, expose and all the other interface features still work on their own but also show up all at the same time in Mission Control. I hope that is the case.
Comments
Thank you for saving me from having to type that entire thing, again.
I think you mean "the most convoluted OS Apple has ever released." What on Earth is the point of this "Launchpad" when I already have the Dock, Stacks and Spotlight for launching my applications? It's just one extra, pointless application I don't need. The OS should be getting lighter, not more bloated.
Ahhh, makes me nostalgic for the control-strip and launcher.
Remember the launcher? Who actually liked that thing?
Not that I'm condemning the new GUI elements. Its hard to tell without living with it for a while, just how good it will actually be.
I don't think it's just about money. If they commit to making any of their products with Blu-Ray drives, any products they leave it out on will seem inferior. The future of notebooks is what you see in the Macbook Air and there's no optical in there at all.
1080p video is probably the highest resolution consumer format that will ever be distributed and H.264 at 8Mbps bitrate is plenty so a movie download is under 6GB. On a 10Mbps connection, this would stream down in real-time or you could download it in under 90 minutes.
Optical disc authoring is such a pain. Just going straight to a digital format and uploading it somewhere is so much easier. Blank Blu-Ray discs aren't all that cheap yet and most come in at £5 each but some packs come in just under £2 per disc.
They take nearly an hour to burn a 25GB disc and your sanity would wear pretty thin hitting a burn error in there. I'd much rather fill 8GB USB pen drives at £8 each that take 10 minutes for each and I could copy 4 at once on a desktop and 2 at once on a laptop.
Once Nand memory halves in price next year, 8GB drives come down to £4 and so on to the point where Blu-Ray is meaningless in 2 years for personal authoring. Netflix are now starting to go streaming-only:
http://iptv.tmcnet.com/topics/iptv/a...ice-the-us.htm
"Three years ago we were a DVD-by-mail company that offered some streaming. We are now a streaming company, which also offers DVD-by-mail."
QFT and QFVH.
The thing I find really confusing -besides M.C. - is having both a dock and the launcher around together. Why should the dock exist when there's a launcher? Not that I dislike the dock, it's just confusing. The dock is a launcher, so why do we need two launchers?
I think it's needed for the same reason it's needed in iOS. Wherever you go, the dock remains, and you keep your most needed jump-to apps there. True the way it was démodé made it look a bit redundant with the first page of launchpad mirroring what was in the dock, but not for every page beyond that, AND, not at all depending on how you build your dock/home screens. You could very well have 5 items in the dock (or just Finder/Stacks), and every other app organized into Folders on the first home screen. That's very well how I might use it.
Also I think the demo of mission control was inhibited by some bugs which were obvious, and shaky-as-hell vp who was so nervous that I almost felt bad. That and the magic mouse was the worst piece of apple input to use for the demo. Magic trackpad or any apple trackpad would have worked far better. Multitouch on that mouse is just bad.
1. Just how much software do we need? A more salient question. I've used Macs for years and i've never seen a more vibrant market but the issue is more about exposure as the most exciting software IMO is coming from smaller indie development houses.
2. Theft can be defined by any number of criteria. It's purely subjective.
3. If developers refuse to distribute their software outside of the Mac App Store that would likely mean the success of MAS would a given and the value to the developer was great enough to warrant going exclusive. So long as innovative software is available for the platform I see the danger as being fairly trivial.
4. The App Store has delivered 300k apps that are priced so low it's almost beyond belief. The only way to deliver low cost or free apps is a drop dead easy distribution system that thwarts piracy and potentially ads advertising. The more paying customers a developer can attract the less they must charge for their app to cover development and other hard costs.
I doubt 90% of computers run windows. No one really knows what Windows marketshare is and if they think they do I'd love to know exactly how they've accounted for every percentage point.
I'm sure I can determine how many customers Apple lost because of their iPhone and App Store policy to at least a logical degree. Current share price is over 300$ per share and Apple completed a 20 billion dollar quarter. There is no need to become the app police for the entire platform but with the current infrastructure for software delivery and payment processing in place Apple would be fools not to take advantage of a gold mine and some developers would be fools not to hitch to this ride.
In the end H.L Mencken was right. Man doesn't desire liberty he desires security. The app store comes with peace of mind and security by being a walled garden and that's enough for enough people to make it a rousing success.
You make many valid points. Obviously, your opinion is shared by Apple executives. Also, I wouldn't disagree with a "Global Moderator" unless I had good reasons to do so. The most important question is "Why?" as it explains the reasons why things happen.
I have been with the Mac for 22 years which gives me a more substantiated opinion and older age (I am 2 months younger than Steve Jobs to the day).
I have come to the conclusion that Apple's decisions through the years explain its current revival and half-failure as a viable computer platform. I will not disagree with Apple's last quarterly financial results as they say exactly what they do, i.e. Apple sells a lot more computers and the iPhone's profit margin (~ 250%) makes Apple a highly profitable and highly valued company for the time being.
Call me a contrarian. Call me a prudent investor. It's when the sky is blue that one should worry about the storm that will come in the future.
What worries me is the anticipated success of Android phones and how much it will slow down the sales of iPhones in the future. And I regret deeply that Apple has chosen to repeat the mistake it made by not licensing either the original Mac OS or the new iOS. Windows 95 slaughtered Apple once and Android has the same potential. And all of this could have been avoided if Apple had licensed the Mac OS or the iOS. But greed and control lead to Apple's debacle once and history is repeating itself.
I came back to the Mac after 8 years on Windows XP because there are many things to like about the Mac. And because I am a contrarian. And because I want to encourage an innovator, or "the little guy" who struggles, but gives me a better service. But I am not blind to the weaknesses of the Mac platform.
You can measure the success of a business by the number of customers it attracts, or you can worry about the customers it doesn't attract. I belong to the second category. The growth of a business will come from new customers, i.e. the customers it doesn't already have. That's why a business cannot be complacent and must question its past and current decisions.
The Mac App Store strikes me as the decision of an accountant, not a leader or an innovator. The 30% explains everything. Control and greed. Again.
Wasn’t his comment specifically about a Task Manager in regards to seeing what apps are taking up HW resources. As you stated, Fast App Switcher just shows recently used apps with no indicator of which ones are still running in the background.
Right, I assume that's what he meant. If Lion goes the same way as iOS, and there's basically no meaningful need for the average user to know what is running and what not, then what is the Dock for? It's for favorite apps. In other words... what is the real meaning to the user of running/not running, if "apps resume when launched", as Jobs' slide said?
When you launch Mission Control (...), you can apparently see what's "running". ... But, Macrosheep on page 2, like me, noticed that there was no longer any glowing circles below the app icons in the Dock. So how will this actually work? Maybe what you see in Mission Control is the only way you'll see what you are working on, ie, what applications currently have documents open and "run"?
Auto-save and resume-when-launched seem like an intriguing puzzle when put together! To start with, because apps on Mac don't monopolize their documents like they do on iOS. Right?
Also, what really happened to Spaces? Was that the seemingly buggy sense around Mission Control maybe? There seemed to be some confusion going on in the wordage between Jobs and the vp demoing Lion about the role of Spaces in Mission Control. Will have to re-watch...
it clearly needs gestures to work. Also - and what SJ didn't note - the difference between the touch on the screen and the touch on the pad is visibility. i can see my fingers on a screen.
I think the idea is more that spaces, expose and all the other interface features still work on their own but also show up all at the same time in Mission Control. I hope that is the case.