Live Reaction To The Steve Jobs Keynote At WWDC 2006
(Updates in place)
Stay tuned for live reaction to the Steve Jobs keynote presentation at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference.
There are now 0.75 million registered developers for the Mac. Off the top of my head that compares to about 5 million Java developers, and around 30 million software developers in general.
There were 1.3 millon macs shipped in the last quarter. Jobs said market share “sky rocketted”. I wonder how much that really is. The latest Gartner figures put the market share percentages thus: 1 - Dell, 32%; 2 - HP, 18.9%; 3 - Gateway, 6.2%; and 4 - Apple, 4.6%.
(Update: thanks to Colin for this:
the market share numbers Jobs was quoting as a dramatic increase were very specific - *retail* notebook share - basically up from 6 to 12% in the last quarter ( in the US I assume). Laptops have about 40-50% of all computer sales now, but I have no idea about the retail/online spilt.
)
The new Mac Pro boxes have two of Intel’s dual-core Woodcrest CPUs. A configuration with two 2.6GHz chips, 1GB RAM, 256GB hard drive costs $2499. Says a comparable Dell box costs $1000 more. Mac Pro starts shipping today.
And new XServes on the server-side. Apple is claiming here to beat Dell on pricing by a few hundred dollars. Of course, Dell routinely offers big discounts to customers buying more than a couple of computers e.g. 30% discount. So you will have to work out for yourself how price-competitive Apple are.
After taking the piss out of Microsoft for not delivering new OS products like Vista, the big news is - Leopard isn’t ready. Not saying what all the features are either for some - seemingly worried that Microsoft will copy them.
One new feature in Leopard is: Time Machine - built-in versioning and backup of all files. This will be a great feature - definitely the “right way” to do things. Windows XP has this for applications, but not for data. I wonder how you really delete something, though? Sounds like a great recipe for filling your hard drive, particularly if you’re into editing video.
Another new feature is “Spaces”. This looks a lot like virtual desktops. Are we supposed to get excited by virtual desktops? I mean - they’re great. But they’ve been around for more than a few years, at least they have on Windows and UNIX OSes. Maybe I’m missing something on this one…
Then shows new text to speech capability. Voices appear more natural than before in the demo. However, you need to reserve judgement on this one - it’s always been easy to get great results on text-to-speech by carefully choosing a “typical example”.
Now onto enhancements in the e-mail app. They’re pushing HTML e-mail. Some people like HTML mail. Some don’t. Personally, I dislike it. One really neat new idea is “notes” and “to do lists”. Like Steve, I used to send e-mails to myself for this kind of thing. Now, though, I either use a private Wiki on an Internet server, or WebDav. However, integrating this into e-mail as Apple have done is a good idea. You can do this kind of thing in Outlook too, although it’s not as well done there. Not sure that trying to differentiate a platform with email capabilities is a good idea, though. Everyone uses email; and most everybody is happy enough with what they’ve got.
At this point, I have to say I’m really hoping they’ve saved the best til last…
Now talking about Widgets, over 2500 of them. I can’t get excited. The most popular uses for these kind of things are weather forecasts and clocks. Great! Not sure how many Gadgets (equivalent of Widgets) Microsoft has.
So, that’s the Leopard preview over. And the keynote over too. Was it good for you? I didn’t see much there that was really interesting. Time Machine looked the most revolutionary feature on display. We’ll have to wait for the full release in Spring next year, to see if they’ve held back on the real “wow factor” stuff.
That’s all folks.
Asam Bashir wrote:
They have to keep shhhhhhh about certain features incase MS tries to copy them - Leopard only of interest to the public once it is released.
More goodies will come at Mac Expo Paris…..
Posted 08 Aug 2006 at 4:43 pm ¶
simon wrote:
I simply don’t believe the “we have to keep it secret in case Microsoft tries to copy us” line. It’s much more likely that this was simply the best they could demo right now. When you’ve reached the point where you have to demo virtual desktops as a major new feature, you’re officially scraping the bottom of the barrel…
Posted 08 Aug 2006 at 5:25 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Are you kidding, with MS track record in the past. There are some big things coming up, but until deals are final they can’t be revealed. Delivering the Mac Pro, Xserve, moving the whole range to Intel in 210 days is a lot for now and a 64 bit version of Leopard is a big deal for Apple’s growing developer base.
Did you notice the core graphics demo? The one where he takes the iTunes screen saver and then build’s a virtual city out of the covers - does that remind you of some other GUI interface where files where being grabbed and organised with hand gestures?
Posted 08 Aug 2006 at 11:36 pm ¶
simon wrote:
All the companies that build OSes copy ideas off each other, and incorporate features from other OSes. And sometimes, people think of the same idea at the same time - often, it’s just “the right time” to introduce new features, because of where the hardware technology is at.
I’m not denying that Microsoft has copied much of what Apple has done over the years. Of course they have. I’m just saying that the “Top Secret” line wasn’t really about keeping things secret - you can be quite sure that Microsoft knows *exactly* what new features are in Leopard. It was just saying, “There’s more to come, in case you think this is it! We’re just not ready to show it to you yet.”
So, Core Animation… It looks great. But so does Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). To me, they look pretty similar on the surface. What will differentiate the products built on these systems are the tools and the programming models. These will determine how easy it is to build cool, rich interfaces. You do *not* want to be coding these kind of interfaces by hand in a text editor. Tools are what you need. Microsoft has two tools for building these kind of interfaces in WPF: Sparkle and Cider. They look promising. I’ve not seen the Apple tools.
As for other new stuff from Apple. I can understand why they decided not to show some of the new stuff here: it’s a developer conference. Focussing on the Leopard preview was a perfectly reasonable thing to do - keep the Mac developers excited about building for the MacOS X platform, by showing them what Apple is trying to do keep growing its user base.
And I’m sure there are other new features coming in the OS…
It looks Apple is going to be doing something interesting with multi-OS virtualisation, right in the core OS. That is, I assume, why Microsoft gave up with Virtual PC on the Mac platform.
They’re going to be incorporating DTrace and possible ZFS; both technolgies from Solaris (which is now Open Source). Actually if you combinted ZFS with Time Machine, there would be pretty interesting possibilities that could see Apple make real inroads in the Enterprise.
Front Row - I believe they’re going to be doing something interesting for the consumer here. Putting HDMI outputs on iMacs and Mac Minis would be transforming for them there. And of course, the deals they’re doing surrounding downloadable movie subscriptions should play a part here too - if they do this bit right, iTunes will no longer just be about the iPod, it will be about Front Row too.
Posted 09 Aug 2006 at 10:30 am ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
I sure would like to try a new Mac Pro quad x 3 Ghz maxed out with 16 Gb ram, 2 Tb raid, with dual dual gfx card connected to 4 x 30″ screens running Mac OS X server and VMWare running XP and Solaris 10, no other system out there can do that, legally, he-he….
Posted 09 Aug 2006 at 8:42 pm ¶
simon wrote:
One 30″ screen wouldn’t be bad
Posted 10 Aug 2006 at 7:18 am ¶