Stevenote 11.6.2007
I did a very rough and dirty test of Firefox vs Safari in Vista this afternoon, and Firefox renders pages about 2-3x faster than Safari. I'm talking solely of typing a url, hitting go, and waiting until the page is fully loaded. It was... dismal. Firefox on the OSX side is sluggish there's no doubt, but once it goes Cocoa in v3 maybe it'll be nicer. Nonetheless, Safari is so ugly and feature-deprived versus Firefox I can't see giving up the 'fox.
As for the Leopard features, not counting the ones already discussed/known, nothing is exciting. Transparency and 3d effects in the Finder... whoopie tilt. How about fixing the bugs instead of padding the fluff? The unified look and feel, well, it's about damn time. There's no good reason why the Finder, Mail and iTunes (arguably the three most-used apps for OSX users) each look different from the other. Coverflow in the Finder? Yawn. QuickView? How 1980s. Stacks? How 1970s. A fixed download folder in the dock? Wasted space!
Leopard is a fine-looking OS, it has a lot of spiffy features that I know I'll use, but I couldn't contain my yawns while watching the Stevenote transcript coming flooding across Firefox. I've said it before and I'll say it again... the more new stuff Apple releases, the more I realize I'm nowhere near their target demographic.
Other remarks from me not yet posted elsewhere:
I realize the WWDC is a software event, but why were there no hardware announcements? Last year we get the Mac Pro, this year we get... zilch. The iMacs and Mac Minis are each long overdue for a refresh. The Cinema Displays are even longer overdue for a refresh.
How about even having better price parity here with the US Apple store, thanks to the dismal US dollar? The Canadian dollar is trading above 94c US as I write this, making (for example) the recently-released 15" MacBook Pro 2.4GHz about a $150 premium ($2799 CDN is the Canada store list price, whereas the US store $2499 USD list price works out to about $2650 CDN). I don't doubt it's as bad or worse in other parts of the world either... for instance, at the UK Apple Store the same 15" MacBook Pro sells for £1599 (including VAT) which translates to about $3150 US... a $650 premium! Exclude the VAT and it's $2680 US, a nearly $200 premium ($2499 US translates to roughly £1270). Maybe Canada's not so bad off after all!
Colour me disappointed and move along, I guess.
Labels: apple computer
posted by chris burgess at 23:07
1 Comments:
Yeah, this was a let down for a lot of things, I'm not surprised that Safari is slower under vista and probably XP. I was just surprised that Apple did bother to make a Windows version of the browser.
Coverflow is pointless they could have come up with something better. I came across one persons comments about it comparing it to the Aero effects of going through the different windows. Spaces: What took them so long to add this in after all Linux ha had this for how long? Quick Look: not sure if I'll use this seems like they have just done this for more eye candy. Time Machine: a lot of eye candy for a feature that Apple has had to catch up on. All in all I was not surprised that there was no new hardware announcements. But as for those 10 features that they show I would have rather seen 10 of the other 300 new features that are suppose to be in the new OS.
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