June 10, 2009, 11:07 AM — SAN FRANCISCO -- I'm a bit befuddled by some of reactions I've heard to Monday's keynote presentation at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC) here at Moscone West. There was a lot of "mehs" and even more, "Where's the big news?" Okay, so CEO Steve Jobs was still on medical leave, leaving the headlining to an untucked Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of marketing and long-time Jobs foil. But there was a pretty good info download on the upcoming Snow Leopard operating system alone to keep me interested.
What did people want? Steve to show up and levitate onto stage?
If you missed the keynote address, a video stream of the event is online, and Computerworld blogger Seth Weintraub live-blogged the speech.
There were a few "if onlys," for sure. There always are. It would be nice to have video chat in the new iPhone 3GS, even better if AT&T weren't being such a big drip in terms of limiting MMS and tethering in the U.S. Who wouldn't want the improved-and-cheaper laptops to have the yet-unavailable Nehalem Intel chips. Oh, and antigravity would be a boon, too.
Maybe Jobs had loaned out his personal Reality Distortion Field (RDF) generator, but I bought into a lot of what Schiller was shilling.
In the talk about Mac OS X, or "Snow Leopard," he and the Apple crew worked hard to sell it to those beyond the audience of developers, who will, of course, be upgrading as soon as possible. "We decided to refine 90%" of the code in the non-snowy Leopard OS, said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering. Those refinements offer no visual changes to the Finder, which is now written in Cocoa, the OS X-native API, rather than Carbon, which primarily existed to provide compatibility back with Mac OS 9-based applications. We'll see how far this goes towards, as the Internet acronym goes, FTFF (fix the fracking Finder).
Many other items look promising, such as QuickTime X -- not just for the tech boost, but because users will be able to make clips and share them without needing a $29 Pro license; overall speed improvements; Stacks rejiggered to be more like tabbed folders in OS 9 and as such, actually useable; the new Dock Expose; and language input accomplished by drawing on a laptop's trackpad. The underlying technologies are exciting, too, in how they could open up Macs to the next Great Leap Forward in computing speed. Real multi-core and multi-threading support are baked right in, as well as Open CL, which will allow Macs to offload computing tasks to the video processor. I was surprised Apple's execs didn't go into more detail about the excellent developer tools (cue "Developers Developers Developers!" in sweaty Ballmer voice) that Apple built for these tasks, given the venue at hand.
And the demo of Exchange support got a huge round of applause.
For a more extensive list of what will be new in Snow Leopard, see Apple offers up the details.
The announcement that Snow Leopard will be only $29 as an upgrade from Leopard prompted a large amount of gasping and applause . This will pay for a year-plus of development, plus support, marketing, and other costs? The quick mention that the same OS upgrade will be only for Intel-based Macs seemed to slip by with little notice. Yet I can't help but think the two are inextricably linked.
It's been just over three years since Apple made the switch from Power PC chips to Intel processors. To the company's credit, the move went smoothly, and various technologies such as Rosetta, which enabled backwards compatibility, allowed cheapskates like me to get along with even-older iron.
This isn't good for Apple, financially, and never has been. Apple is a hardware company; it makes most of its dough selling Macs (and, now, iPhones and iPods), not by selling Mac OS X. This is something the people who want Apple to sell its operating system for use on PCs seem to forget.
Obviously, the future of the Mac is through Snow Leopard. And the more people see that, the more it will drive people like me to make new hardware sales. In a way, we're subsidizing the cost of the OS. Aren't the rest of you lucky?
Having seen the keynote address and what the announcements to emerge from it portend, I'd say yes, you're lucky indeed. You'll find out how lucky in about three months.
Dan Turner has been writing about science and technology for over a decade at publications such as Salon, eWeek, MacWeek and The New York Times.
