Seems the larcenous relationship between Redmond and Cupertino can flow both ways, with Apple taking a page out of MS’s Vista handbook – the page entitled “cut all the good features before launch so nobody cares anymore!” Great page to steal, that one.
Don’t get me wrong, I love MacOS, I’ll be using it no matter what. But where’s the features? A new dock? A new finder? We waited almost 2 years for that?
One of the improvements I’d been hoping most for is full OS support – hopefully bootable – of Sun’s revolutionary ZFS file system. After a thankfully short-lived rumour that ZFS support had been dropped entirely, we have this clarification from Apple:
As a result, we have included ZFS — a read-only copy of ZFS — in Leopard.
Wow!!! Read-only access! That’s the best type!
You know what? That is a fucking worthless non-feature and they may as well not include it at all. Can someone tell me the point of a read-only hard disk? To say I am disappointed would be an understatement.
What next? It seems every second RSS update from the mac news sites are about some other feature being pulled. Just in from macrumors, about a cool-sounding fast restart feature in bootcamp:
I have it on good report from someone attending WWDC that this feature has been nixed.
Why?? Don’t they have enough people or something? The things I care about that will definitely be in Leopard are now these:
- better, multithreaded finder – care factor 10/10
- 3d dock with “stacks” – care factor 8/10
- updated internal, especially multicore scheduler – care factor 7/10
- quick view and spaces – care factor 6/10
I had to go look at the features list because I couldn’t even remember anything else. All the updates to iChat, etc are routine incremental updates to what amounts to commodity client software – I rarely use iChat since it doesn’t properly support GTalk/Jabber. It can’t even do a fucking file transfer. Mail? I don’t need “stationery” and actually dislike it when people format emails with HTML. Don’t really care about any of the other apps, I’m looking forward to iLife updates more than any of them.
It’s horrible to say but this is beginning to remind me of Vista. Delay, delay, delay, for no good reason – and all the interesting stuff gets cut. In the absence of any truly amazing interface improvements, the number one thing I was looking forward to was first-class ZFS support, and with that out of the picture, my anticipation has plummeted. I still look forward to it, sure – but genuine excitement has turned to routine “oh yeah, I’ll upgrade when it comes out, if I don’t hear of any major problems …”
UPDATE: OK, OK, after re-reading this it does sound kind of childish. I’m just pissed off god damn it. Every serious problem I’ve had with my computer in the last 5 years has been something to do with the fricking filesystem. Corrupt headers. Directory mismatch. Laboriously booting to DVD for the thousandth time and running Disk Utility from there, wasting half an hour. That’s why I was so hyped for ZFS .. and so disappointed when it doesn’t seem like it’ll be in. It’ll still be great, though. Just maybe not as amazingly great as I had been hoping.
