Yesterday’s WWDC keynote was a welcome return to form for APPL – especially since the ARAT penalty for having the gall to live in Australia has dropped to “only” 10-15% or so. The new laptops look fantastic and it’s good timing; I’ll need a new one pretty soon. Needless to say, my single favourite features is the support for 8GB of memory. Sounded like I’m far from alone, too – the audience practically gave Schiller a standing ovation when he mentioned that.
Snow Leopard continues to impress and I’m particularly interested in GCD, and if/how it can be exploited in everyday applications. If it can be of use in “normal” tasks such as, say, compressing a video, or rendering a 3D scene, the next obvious question is – can the OSX machine be augmented by something like nVidia’s Tesla, to create the most powerful nearly-general-purpose machine available?
Some other features in snow leopard that I’m looking forward to include the new cocoa finder (FINALLY), the chinese character input mode, the bettter file sharing and of course the general “snappiness” improvements. One long-overdue feature which I am less hopeful for is the Quicktime “reboot”; I feel this is too little too late, at least in terms of the new “revolutionary” HTTP streaming, which of course is what Flash et al have been doing for years. HTML5 is imminent and I can’t help but think it will be the victor in any upcoming internet media reshuffle; open standards win, or should win, every time. If Apple really wanted to “take back the web” a complete open sourcing of the entire platform would be the only real option at this stage, especially with all the new linux netbooks and what not. Also no word on Windows (and Linux!) releases of even the updated client software; there’s little use in new internet technology if only Macs can use it.
Last but not least – the Exchange support, which is probably the single feature most likely to boost mac sales out of the whole ensemble. Many mac users and open source devotees spurn Exchange, and I can understand why, but having worked in corporate IT it’s hard to overstate just how important it is. Exchange is the heart and soul of any “Microsoft Shop”, and even many non-MS companies use it – it’s won the “corporate messaging, addresses and meetings” war pretty decisively, and honestly recent versions are not bad for what they do. Getting that into the OS opens the door to OSX usage in literally tens of millions of businesses – running Outlook or such junk in a VM was never a serious option – and I predict will do more for the platform’s marketshare than all the other enhancements put together.
Anyway, much to be excited about, both hardware and software, and not even much profiteering to be found. I’m starting to like Apple in “recession mode”!
