Post: An Apple a day bankrupts you
Chances are you’ve heard of the MacWorld ’05 product announcements. You may even have watched all 2 hours of the streamed version. If you haven’t, here’s a summary:
- iLife ’05 – a nice (but not apparently revolutionary) update – nothing massively exciting here.
- iWork ’05 – an apparent grab at some of Microsoft’s share in the office suite market, comprising Keynote (PowerPoint) and Pages (Word). I have to admit I wasn’t too impressed by these, although I wasn’t the target of the marketing: It was very much pitched as “Hey, I can use these cool templates and pretty pictures” which, as you can see from my site, isn’t a top priority for me.
- FinalCut Express HD – video editing software. I’m not a video editor. Next.
- iPod Shuffle – Apple’s attack on the MP3 flash-based player market. Very tiny, very sexy, and very tempting (should provide some accompaniment for my new year resolution of going down to the gym).
- Mac Mini – hoo baby. This is so pwetty, and likely to boost Apple’s desktop market share significantly.
- Finally Tiger, the next version of OS X. Apple are continuing in their wonderful tradition of saying “up yours, Microsoft”. You may remember they started this by letting MS announce they were going to have shiny hardware-accelerated graphics in Longhorn, only to have Apple implement it in Jaguar (a.k.a. OS X 10.2). They’ve followed this up in style with Spotlight, due to arrive with Tiger within the next 6 months. Near as I can tell, this does a significant chunk of what Microsoft claimed for the perenially-delayed WinFS. In fact, Steve Jobs referred to this in his keynote speech, with an awful “this will arrive long before Longhorn” pun.
In summary, it’s looking like this will be a good year for Apple, and the arrival of Tiger could well be my cue to switch. Along with this whole ‘graduating’ thing, which I’m planning on doing at some point, and this ‘getting a job’ thing. That said, I’m planning on ploughing through my savings for 6 months or so after graduation, taking the gap year I never had, so money may be a little on the short side. Of course, by then it’ll be time for the next MacWorld expo, so who knows what Mr Jobs will have up his sleeve?
For the time being, I’ve managed to put off the urges to get a Mac Mini. As far as getting a system that, in the grand scheme of all things financial, is not very expensive at all it’s a fantastic opportunity to try out MacOS X (rather than invest in a Powerbook and never recover if you didn’t like it).
Personally, with OS X 10.4 “Tiger” due before June I wont be running for one immediately, but if I fall into some money (tax to claim back, return of house deposit… ahem) then it might well get nabbed.
The only slight reservation to have is that Stevie BM of aqua-soft informed me that the Radeon 9200 that it has inside isn’t actually capable of some of the graphics acceleration present in Tiger, so maybe it’ll be worth holding out for Tiger to be released and see if they upgrade the graphics chips at the same time (that’s a completely made up idea, but it would make sense to do so, wouldn’t it?)
Oh, one more thing… Spotlight is indeed super-cool and as far as user interface goes provides much the same kind of thing as the recent “Desktop Search” products on PC from Microsoft (MSN EDS isn’t bad, rips the task bar interface from Spotlight), Google (apparently not up to their reputation) and Copernic (supports Firefox bookmarks, hoorah!).
WinFS is going to go a lot further in the backend than any of the above (and Spotlight). As well as user-facing tools like Spotlight and indexed searching there’s a lot of work going into the developer API side and there’s going to be a whole load of additional ‘stuff’ (God knows what, mind) on Longhorn server. WinFS is going to be a huge thing if you write Windows applications. Spotlight is being talked up as a handy user tool. It’s certainly extensible, from what I gather, but I doubt (given the amount of time it was produced in) that it has anything like the backend scope of WinFS. It may not be relevant to you, but it is important to keep in mind when using Spotlight to bash Microsoft. WinFS is one thing that although it may be late (and we’ll see if it’s worth the wait in 2007…), but it is one of the projects that Microsoft seem to be doing very right indeed.
If you need to bash Microsoft, call out Sharepoint. It’s gobshite. Nice feature set, nauseatingly awful internals.