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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:

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?

2 Responses to “An Apple a day bankrupts you”

  1. 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?)

  2. 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.