Is Leopard Evolution or Revolution?
All the Leopard reviewers and many, many posters on forums and blogs are kicking this topic around. The reviewers tonight are mostly saying "Evolution." so what do we think?
i vote for Revolution, but not the sudden kind. i mean, the "industrial revolution" took a century to unfold ... the internet, as a poster on another topic noted, is certainly revolutionary. but realizing the full scope of that revolution has taken over 15 years and is not nearly finished yet.
first, can everyone agree that OS X was indeed revolutionary compared to all other OS's before?10.0 was all new code from the bottom up. it was a new vision.
all the 'cat' OS updates since then have built on that foundation, each adding major refinements and new features. and i include in that the suite of Mac applications and services, like iLife and iTunes, and tightly integrated Mac peripherals - iPod/iPhone/Airport.
now it's seven years later, and to me Leopard is the "crowning" achievement of the OS X Revolution. the biggest single conceptual thing, not "feature," in my view is that now, with Boot Camp, a Leopard Mac truly is history's first totally easy to use multi-platform "universal" consumer computer (which Tiger's migration to Intel made possible). it's just not a surprise brand-new-thing emotionally since Apple put the beta out a year ago, and it ran ok on Tiger. but if they had held it back until this Friday (and they could have), everyone would be saying "wow - revolutionary."
so if i were a reviewer, i would write "Leopard is, at last, the full realization of the Mac OS X Revolution."
i vote for Revolution, but not the sudden kind. i mean, the "industrial revolution" took a century to unfold ... the internet, as a poster on another topic noted, is certainly revolutionary. but realizing the full scope of that revolution has taken over 15 years and is not nearly finished yet.
first, can everyone agree that OS X was indeed revolutionary compared to all other OS's before?10.0 was all new code from the bottom up. it was a new vision.
all the 'cat' OS updates since then have built on that foundation, each adding major refinements and new features. and i include in that the suite of Mac applications and services, like iLife and iTunes, and tightly integrated Mac peripherals - iPod/iPhone/Airport.
now it's seven years later, and to me Leopard is the "crowning" achievement of the OS X Revolution. the biggest single conceptual thing, not "feature," in my view is that now, with Boot Camp, a Leopard Mac truly is history's first totally easy to use multi-platform "universal" consumer computer (which Tiger's migration to Intel made possible). it's just not a surprise brand-new-thing emotionally since Apple put the beta out a year ago, and it ran ok on Tiger. but if they had held it back until this Friday (and they could have), everyone would be saying "wow - revolutionary."
so if i were a reviewer, i would write "Leopard is, at last, the full realization of the Mac OS X Revolution."
Comments
All the Leopard reviewers and many, many posters on forums and blogs are kicking this topic around. The reviewers tonight are mostly saying "Evolution." so what do we think?
...
You are mixing-up stuff. MacOS X was the revolution. Leopard is a version of MacOS X. By that fact alone, it can't be a revolution. It is, however, an example of dramatic evolution.
You are mixing-up stuff. MacOS X was the revolution. Leopard is a version of MacOS X. By that fact alone, it can't be a revolution. It is, however, an example of dramatic evolution.
Precisely.
I think the only one that actually said it was mossberg. Everyone else is just quoting him, or running with the quote.
I don't know how that guy got the reputation. Why is everyone quoting the old turd?
What did he expect? A new metaphor replacing the desktop? Operating systems are never revolutionary. Well yeah, Xerox did something revolutionairy years ago. The Internet was revolutionairy. The whole "evolutionairy/revolutionary" thing is just to think of a catchy quote.
Consumers- See a nice bevvy of small feartures that will improve their computing lives. Typically I see that revolutionary features are not understood at first blush because they represent such a paradigm change in behaviour and thought.
How many people thought that their connection to the Internet over 300 Baud modems decades ago would evolve into today's present day Internet?
Developers- are seeing a larger evolutionary leap. Developers, by nature, tend to be able to see the "forrest through the trees" a bit more than a consumerl They look at new features like building blocks or enabling technologies that allow them to do things that were previously too tedious or impossible. Leopard represents an enticing new collection of toys. Obj C 2, Instruments/Dtrace (for performance based visualization of your app), Xcode 3.0 and a new Interface Builder. Full Unix certification and a scripting bridge that allows tools like Python and Ruby peer level access in applications.
We must not look at the value of an OS from withing a narrow context. As a consumer I'm benefitting from the little features Apple enhances and I'm also benefitting from the more sophisticated applications developers will create.
So whether you call Leopard a revolution or evolution is wholly up to you because it really depends on the context of how you personally will use the OS and applications.
but for Mac users it is revolution.
You are mixing-up stuff. MacOS X was the revolution. Leopard is a version of MacOS X. By that fact alone, it can't be a revolution. It is, however, an example of dramatic evolution.
Sorry to say, none of it is "revolutionary", it is all evolutionary (see, folks, evolution does exist).
go back in time and enjoy leopard