Jobs' Lion to marry Mac OS X and iOS Steve Jobs announced today what he suggested was a marriage of iOS with Mac OSX. Called Mac OS X Lion, the next version of the Mac's operating system will bring iOS features to the Mac, including bringing the App Store — and, possibly, its limitations — to the Mac. Jobs told his "Back to the Mac" audience at the company's …
Seriously, I had fond memories of KDE 3.x on Mandrake and tried Kubuntu 9.04. With KDE 4.x - what an abomination that is. I guess I just don't "get" widgets.
So... stuck on Gnome on Ubuntu. Gnome's not my fave, but at least not a total developer wankgasm with 0 usability, like KDE 4. Almost as "clever" as the Office 2007 ribbon.
Guess I could try to push in KDE 3.x but that seems hardly worth the bother unless distributions actually revert back to 3.x.
yup, can predict some major downvotes on this one.
I was watching the keynote. Ilife utterly failed to impress. Certainly not a "must have". As to Lion, well it may be too early to say, but from what I've seen, it could well be a backwards step. The MacbookAirs? did you notice the silence when the price was revealed? $999 for a crippled laptop? No doubt £999+ in the UK. I like OS X, I use Snow Leopard every day on a Mac Pro, but all these things like Apps stores for Macs, just seem another way to sell more stuff. If IWorks becomes an app, that can be downloaded, what features will go? Will the price drop as there is no physical product? Nope? Didn't think so. For once I'm totally unimpressed, I started to get miffed when it was all IPhone and IPad, all the Mac sites focus on them. To me they are just toys. There are so many things that could be refined, improved in 10.6.4, but it seems they will jump to another set of code. Not happy. I must be getting old, happy not to update, stick with what I have.
...of $1 = £1 pricing? It may have been more common 10+ years ago, but I can't think of a single product more recently that has been priced this way. And I'm not just talking about Apple products, but pretty much anything.
(That said, given the way the GBP and our VAT rates are heading, we may well see a return of $1=£1 in future)
If you'd take a moment to look at the Apple eStore (iStore?), you'll see that the price for the entry MB Air is £849, same as the entry MacBook.
And what's wrong with "another way to sell more stuff" - isn't that what Apple are in business to do?
Finally, are you expecting what they showed last night to be everything that's in Lion? I'd very much doubt it - this was a preview of some of the press-grabbing features. Which is what Steve said.
I'd suggest none. Most full programs can be downloaded these days, and just cos you download MS Office, for example, rather than buy it from a shop, that doesn't mean the dictionary is only half the size, or you only have half of the fonts, or can't create tables in Word.
I'm pretty sure I heard Jobs say "The App Store will be a great place – but not the only place – to buy apps", or something along those lines, suggesting that developers will be free to sell applications through their established channels without having to fork over 30% to Cupertino for the privilege of being able to annoy people by automatically shoving applications into their Dock. Auto-updates are nice, but why not just open Software Update to third parties?
Overall, the Lion presentation was pretty weak. Wooh, Spaces/Exposé/Dashboard rethought because it's become a mess of overlapping paradigms that needs to be tidied up. Wooh, auto-save for applications that don't already do it (got that Time Machine drive plugged in to capture the good version of your file that's about to get overwritten?). Signs are that there's a UI overhaul waiting in the wings to be revealed closer to launch, but there wasn't enough meat on the Lion today.
While I think I am beginning to understand why the man does what he does, I think he would be very foolish indeed to lock down the Mac the way he's done the iPhones.
There are those of us who are extremely critical of Apple who bought macs anyway.
Why? For some we see that despite the eye candy and hoopla, underneath that facade beats the heart of quite a usable 'nix. And, by and large their lappies aren't half bad. Pricey, but aren't half bad. I am personally relatively platform agnostic.
Jobs, you screw around with the way we currently use our macs, and I promise you, this is going to be the last mac I ever use.
Yes, as others have intimated: I might not personally agree with everything that Apple does these days but the Mac still seems like a much better commercial consumer platform than Windows. It avoids all of the pitfalls of Windows without being a "garden of pure ideology". This can be useful for those of us that are not totally clueless.
Don't destroy the Mac. I want an other option I can suggest to people I know that insist on running Windows for whatever reason.
Just a comment on this.
I am not saying I like it but there's something to be said for paying someone to look after the headache of distribution. Especially if you're a particularly small shop. It just may look like the way to go for some.
But I'd read the fine print on who owns what eventually.
And be very wary about the capricious nature of the store minders in deciding what is allowed and what is not.
" "The App Store will be a great place – but not the only place – to buy apps", or something along those lines, "
Yes, I heard this too.
And many big, important apps wouldn't meet the App Store requirements. The App Store is for relatively little apps. The Adobe CS5s, the Matlabs, the Mathematicas, the Microsoft Offices and loads of other software are going to continue to be distributed the same way as ever.
Anything with loadable code plugins, custom licensing or security systems, etc, isn't going to go through the App Store. Drivers, kernel extensions, VMWare, things that you need to install as root, aren't going to go through the App Store.
Mission Control and Launch Pad - that's the demo for a major revision?!? Will QuickTime X be extended? Will the iTunes threading bugs be fixed? Will very large amounts of hard disk and RAM be used more efficiently? Will SSD replace spinning swap? Will there every be API support outside Objective-C?
Quicktime, threading, HD and RAM use, and API support are of great interest to developers and those with a tech bent, but that wasn't the audience Jobs was trying to reach. If he'd talked about that, I can guarantee most eyes would be glazed over in minutes. The bulk of his audience was engaged, and that was the whole point. The finished product is probably 9 months off yet - this presentation was just a taste.
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It's about time there was a central place to go to browse and download software. Sure, there's google, shareware.com, versiontracker, but the sheer convenience of the iPhone/iPad app store has been great.
As a customer, I like the idea of being able to download an app from that place with some confidence that it's, errm, genuine.
I don't expect Apple to create the walled garden of the iPhone/iPad -- they can't as one can simply install apps from anywhere. But I do like the idea of telling numpties that the only place they can get apps is from the app store and having a good chance that they'll listen.
I'm pretty sure His Steve is trying to get more control over OS X to funnel more money into his pockets, maybe by 10.9 we'll have mandatory app signing if the user gets programs from outside the App Store for their own safety, locking out most freeware/open source...
(Your commentard correctly called the complementary App Store by the way... http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2010/04/26/jobs_squelches_mac_app_store_rumor/#c_750245 )
Like Linux, except even easier to use, prettier and with paid, professional applications.
I know Ubuntu has a paid application as well (see what I did there) and will readily confess that this is one of the main features which I have coveted from Linux for a while.
Somebody mentioned "like debian has had for 10 years"..
Well... yeah, kinda, sorta...
The full APT-get (or Synaptic if you want to use something graphical) isn't really all that nice and usable. Sure, it is REALLY flexible and twenty five colours of awesome, but it's neither nice nor easily usable for novices (or pointy haired bosses who might otherwise buy your application) mainly due to it being quite cluttered and confusing with less than helpful explanations (is this a program or a library? Which version of what do I take. Crap, I need to...).
Ubuntu software center is almost amazingly good, they just need one or two more versions to take it to incredible quality, and Linux in general is just getting to pretty nice to use for most day-to-day tasks.
But Apple will steal the thunder...
Tux 'cause Linux ain't all that bad
> It's about time there was a central place to go to browse and download software.
You mean like Debian apt-get that was available 10 years ago?
Until Quicktime can do what Totem does on Ubuntu I will remain unimpressed. That is the real potential of a centralized package manager. Replacing well mannered Internet download sites is not terribly interesting.
"Until Quicktime can do what Totem does on Ubuntu I will remain unimpressed."
What, be a big wobbly pile of poorly documented, obfuscated things held together by a hidden morass of almost human unreadable parameters?
Totem, and the stuff underlying it, are *horrible*,
Decide what you're looking for, type it into the search box. Up pops a package. Hit install, few warnings about other required packages, download packages, bang- it's installed and, where applicable, has an entry on whatever you call the start menu in Linux.
Want another repository (like the third-party app stores on iPhone/Android)? Go "Add Repository" and type/paste in the address of the repository.
Yeah, it's a real brain buster. No-one'll ever find their way around that...
> They are implemented in a so much more user
> friendly way than most Linux repositories.
You must be joking.
Even with the much overhyped Apple iStore I still have to wade through a bunch of dreck to get to something useful. I will likely not find what I am looking for or something worth having without going to an outside source for recommendations.
H*ll, I get more useful information HERE about what's in the App Store.
Both provide a simple means to install something once you realize it's what you want. If you can't call it by name, then the "store" interface probably won't help you.
This is an opportunity for small developers to get their apps noticed my people who would not normally find them. There must be throusands of little apps, some more useful than others, that are only available through the Kagi Store, MacUpdate or Download.com. If you don't happen upon a review in a magazine, you wouldn't know about them. They are generally freeware or low cost and bundling them together in an App Store seems like a good idea to me. The low price will be counteracted by volume and I'd rather have 70% or 10000 sales than 100% of 100!
'all apps will be fullscreen'
Why do they say this as if it's a good thing? Are they trying to un-invent windows (after they created the idea in the first place). Next they will try and un-invent multi-tasking.
I still think the end game is a neutered desktop experience where all apps have to be blessed by Apple. Obviously they are not going to do this now as current mac developers would scream, but if the app store for the mac becomes dominant it will be a matter of time before they start building a wall around the garden.
The precedent has been set in the mobile world and if anyone is capable of bringing it to the desktop world by packaging a removal of user rights with some shiny new bling features and a sprinkling of PR pixie dust it's apple (unfortunately).
In 10 years we might look back with fondness on the windows era - when you could install whatever software you wanted on your desktop computer.
Apple created the idea of windows? I'm sure the developers who worked at Xerox PARC will be delighted to hear this particular revision of history.
Contrary to the dogma of the Cult of Jobs, the fruit factory are not some kind of creative, idea generation Mecca, rather they are masters of packaging, marketing and productising other people's ideas. And they are very good at that indeed, so I am sure that this re-branding of software repositories (similar to those used by other OSes for well over a decade) will succeed.
The convergence of Mac OSX and IOS (which I predicted long ago) may be a step towards moving the MacBook line towards using ARM processors instead of x86.
Apple has changed processor architectures for their Macintosh line before: They started in 1984 with Motorola 68K, moved to PPC in 1994 and to x86 in 2006. So another change is not unthinkable. The move from PPC to x86 was motivated (according to Jobs) by lower cost and power use of x86 compared to PPC. Since ARM is both cheaper and uses less power than x86, this would argue in favour of such a move. Currently, ARM is not quite as powerful as x86, but the gap is getting smaller with multicore multiMHz ARM processors coming out. And the ability of Apple to build their own SoCs around ARM cores is another benefit that such a move would give.
So my prediction is that within 5 years we will see ARM-based MacBooks.
Windows Marketplace and Games For Windows Live Marketplace have both been around for ages, quietly failing to find an audience. Oddly enough, I've never heard a rumour about it becoming impossible to install Windows apps any other way.
Personally, I think this is just an attempt to counteract the jump Steam just took on them in the desktop gaming arena.
Sure I use my Mac Pro for the usual web, email, photo, iTunes nonsense that everyone else does but my hobby is music creation using Logic and 3rd-party plug-ins, quite a few of these are over 100GB's to install and are supplied on dozens of DVD's or even come on their own hard drive. Just can't see how all these things could be contained and wrapped up in a simple 'there's an App for that' distinction all via a single vendor.
So what 'apps' could be on the App Store, can't be just talking widgets and ports of iPhone games?
A move to ARM processors to give greater battery life and thinner macbooks. (and possibly being able to install Mac OS on £80 CE 'netbooks'?)
iOS for Mac (MaciOS 11?) with OSX sandboxed on a virtual PC emulating an x86 processor, similar to the 9 -> OSX transition.
Totally walled MacApp store, the heavyweights such as Office and Photoshop will be downloadable but also DVD orderable "additions" to the app store which have to be authenticated against the app store when installing.
Full screen windowless apps, the effective "alt-tab" to allow multitasking will be a swipe on the mighty mouse / mighty trackpad / mighty tablet, similar to browsing pictures or album covers on the iPhone.
KDE 5 starts stripping windows of the borders 5 years afterwards. Linux app repositories continue their dependency hell. (and me a pre-trendy ex-mac Linux fan!)
8 years later, Microsoft Windows 9 aka NT6.11 debuts "windowless windows" and the "Windows Live store" similar to the xBox store, which is effectively ignored (see Zune, Windows Phone <7, Windows for Tablets)
One thing apple have also announced yesterday is that the new release may not come with Java.
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/JavaSnowLeopardUpdate3LeopardUpdate8RN/NewandNoteworthy/NewandNoteworthy.html
While this may mean nothing to most end users, for us developers of server-side Java apps, what Jobs is saying is "we are not the desktop you should be using". Ubuntu it is, then.
Convergence around duo core Atoms or their own in house built dual core arm chips isn't out of the question. They're already doing it with the iPhone and iPad. Seems inevitable that they will do it with the Macbooks, but the Mac Pros will definitely need the horsepower of desktop class chips for some time, due to Intel's iCore CPU's. But if Intel can figure out a way to make their Atoms more powerful while using less power, who knows?
It's also a natural progression to converge iOS with OSX since they are already related. That would also make porting apps between them all, very easy.
io_uring is getting more capable, and PREEMPT_RT is going mainstream The Register 
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