Apple OS X Leopard

I watched Apple's keynote speech on their next "major" release on Tuesday, and quite frankly, some things made me lol. Seriously. My first impression on Leopard was, "I want a Mac now." But after thinking about it twice, I realized that Apple is made up of a bunch of arrogant marketing hoo-ha's who feed their fans propoganda to make them feel better than they really are: second place.

Steve Jobs claimed that Leopard has 10 new "big ones." They're not. Spotlight was implemented faster than Microsoft's Windows Search, but Windows Search was being developed way before Spotlight came into fruition. Time Machine is cool, but the interface is just silly. And Windows 2003 had an identical feature called Volume Shadow Copy.

Leopord now has native support in x64. Woah! Wait, didn't Microsoft have an x64 OS? Oh right: Windows XP Professional x64!

One thing that made me laugh was Core Animation. Now developers, not end users, can code beautiful 3D animation in less lines of code. In fact, you can imitate the iTunes album art commercial in only 2000 lines of code! TWO THOUSAND!

Improvments in iChat are aimed at teens and tweens - Photo Booth effects and backdrops. I can see an employee who will call in sick with iChat with a backdrop of his room, when he's really at the beach. Good job, Jobs, you've made it easier for peole to play hookie. Imagine a business meeting in "Hawaii." Woopee.

Then there's the Mac Pro. If you take a look at the Mac Pro website, http://www.apple.com/ca/macpro/performance.html, perfomance gains are barely 2x more. Sure it's still a blazing fast computer, but announcing that something is "1.6 times faster!" is somewhat embarassing. It's fast. We get it.

I must admit I was wide-eyed watching the keynote. But let's face it - for one thing, Microsoft keynotes are much more entertaining (if not also embrassing due to technical screw ups): they had Conan O'Brian and Justin Timberlake a few years back! That should've gave the attendees their money's worth if they got nothing out of the keynote itself. And when Bill Gates showed off his vision of the future with touch screen technology in the living room and kitchen, that was truly cool.

Apple's constant Microsoft bashing was truly immature and not professional. But then again, since when were geeks mature?