iPhone 3G S? Let's talk about Snow Leopard instead
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).
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