Paul Thurrott on Leopard: Lay off the Copycat Jokes

I think I'll go and bury myself until this is over.

...wait, bad idea, it never will. *sigh* what to do.

 

The funny thing is I watched the Key note, and was very impressed by the new hardware, the Mac Pro, is a sweet box. And its pretty cheap when it comes to bang for the buck. I even found myself thinking, hum… maybe next time I need a computer.... However each speaker made more and more straw man statements about Vista, and each time I just got more and more annoyed.

My question is this, why can't apple just stand on its merits. Could they not have just said, "this has been done, but we decided to do it better." I could live with that. But no every freaking thing is "revolutionary" and a brake thru. Please apple, can you just say. "We make cool sh#t, buy our stuff." without trash talking everyone else and making yourself look like snobs.

Apple has always been good at taking existing ideas and polishing them up to a high shine. I absolutely love my G4 Powerbook and I think OS X was a great improvement in the OS space. But I'm tired of the whole "we invented EVERYTHING" attitude. For the longest time too, it was mostly just the fans who kept at it, kept picking at the PC users. Now, it's the official marketing stance of Apple itself. It was annoying when it was the rabid fanboys. It's insulting when it's the company.

I was quite impressed with a few new features shown in the keynote, such as Time Machine, and Spaces, and the Backdrops in iChat, however I have never owned a Mac, and probably never will. But, like everyone else is saying, and Paul is saying, they surely aren't breakthroughs... which they are calling their new features probably because of the graphical appeal that they provide to the end-user. Time Machine's implementation of Core Animation is quite impressive, and that very fact is quite cool... but they sure do push their features out to the people as if they were never seen before. Even when I was watching the keynote, and they introduced Spaces, sure, that was cool, but all along, there's always been virtual desktops (mostly)... that's nothing new at all. But the way they did it, I sure like.

That is the only thing I respect about Apple, is their ability to make things flashy, and graphically appealing. With animations, and Quartz (the graphical presentation system of Mac OSX), it's bound to impress... but with their features as opposed to the PC, simply cannot match, no matter how "good-looking" it is.

Vista's WPF (Avalon, .NET 3.0) is gonna blow things away too, though. I've seen examples, and everything, and it's awesome! The way that it utilizes DirectX 10 for rendering everything.

But, like, I couldn't imagine myself being part of a cocky, snobby community of "1337 Mac us3rs" that only live to bash Windows, and Microsoft.

While waiting in my doctors surgery, I read a magazine article that portrays Jobs and co as running scared of MS, having tested Vista through its various stages and finding it to be a highly competitive OS to their own. Although Vista is not completed as yet, Jobs was reported to have said to one of his colleagues that Vista will snare a greater market share than XP if given the chance, thus they are bashing it in the hope Leopard will fare better when Vista is finally released.

Furthermore, the article went on to say that the Apple ad campaign was false and misleading, not just by virtue of the fact they are using self-praise to promote 'first' use of technologies and softwares that have been around for a while, but also by virtue of the fact their ads portray Mac users as average joes with great vision, whereas the Windows user is an un-trendy stuffed shirt type with no vision. The truth is, according to the article, is that it's more likely the other way around, given Apples niche market strategies and pricing policy, which generally targets the upper crust/echelon, yet often precludes the average joe from being a Mac owner.

I suppose opinions are a dime a dozen, but the general consensus here is that Apple has gone beyond the pale with its most recent ad campaign....making false claims and using smear tactics rather than standing on its own merits. Personally I have nothing against Mac machines or OS-X, as I intend to own one in the new year, but what does annoy me is the smug, elitist attitude being created by Apple...the fact that many of its fanboys embrace that and think it's funny to rubbish PC's, Windows and other OSes.

In my short time with computers, I have seen more open mindedness within the Windows community, a willingness to try out other Oses and hardware, etc, but I've not seen that in the Mac community. All too often I've come across the smug, arrogant and holier than thou attitude, which is a persona Steve Jobs embraces and portays only too well, so it comes from the top and is probably why Apple's exclusive prices will never fall...the current situation better feeds Jobs' ego than to have a greater market share through lower prices. With all his other holdings and interests, he doesn't need the money, so why wouldn't he feed his smug ego in this way...bugger the average, not so wealthy user who'd like to try out a Mac and OS-X.

Apple and its zealot-like fans have always tried to give Apple credit for things that first existed on the PC.

A few examples in which we've been flamed for as "copying" Apple even though we did it first:

1. Alpha blended shadows (first done by WindowFX in 2000).
2. Dashboard's widgets (first done by DesktopX in 2000 -- 3 years before Konfabulator).

Thsoe are two I've seen a lot of flaming about, more on #2 really.

But now we have:

1. Spaces. Done by Stardock in 1994, virtual desktops have been part of every version of Object Desktop since 1994.
2. Time Machine. Done by KeepSafe.

And it always makes me feel ridiculous having to point this stuff out because I don't think we were particularly innovative. I think these ideas are obvious. And obviously we didn't invent all this either.

But any time Apple suddenly decides to put in a feature into their OS, its rabid fans will retroactively claim credit for it and reach out onto the net to start bad mouthing deveopers who have been doing the same thing for years.

Please apple, can you just say. "We make cool sh#t, buy our stuff." without trash talking everyone else and making yourself look like snobs.

I think the answer to that is pretty obvious.

But any time Apple suddenly decides to put in a feature into their OS, its rabid fans will retroactively claim credit for it and reach out onto the net to start bad mouthing deveopers who have been doing the same thing for years.

The proof of the pudding here is that IF Apple's 'being first' claims were true, there'd be various developers in the courts, courtesy of an Apple lawsuit. Surprises me, actually, that software developers haven't banded together to take Apple to task in the courts, given it has repeatedly laid claim to being first in many technologies that have been around for quite some time. Oh well, better they don't!

It's sad really, that the reputation of good hardware/software is tarnished by zealot dipsticks who have little better to do than rubbish other manufacturers while laying claim to being the best and first, etc, etc.