Is Apple Setting Itself Up for a Massive Let Down?

Friday 13 April 2007 - Filed under apple

As technology matures it’s becoming harder and harder to “wow”. I’ve been amazed by Apple many times over. The overall quality and attention to detail are almost cliches. But you know what? Since the mac is all I use day in and day out, you get used to it. In fact, you start noticing some flaws (what’s up with finder?).

OS X in its current state is very mature and stable. I can get nit picky or dream up a wish list of what I want if I try really really hard. Okay, so Apple is going to delay the release of Leopard until October. Big deal. Do I want a bug-ridden piece of trash to tank my mac? Definitely no.

Do I believe their lame excuse for the delay:

However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us.

Apple – Hot News

It’s obvious that they’re banking on the iPhone to be their new “iPod”. You can only sell so much of one product and the world is already saturated with iPods. They got massive publicity with the iPhone that’s almost unrivaled by anything else in recent memory.

Seeing mac as a music player and now a handset manufacturer is difficult and painful for an OS X user. You keep wondering, “What happens when Apple drops the ball on OS X?” iPods and iPhones are great but the two of them combined don’t add up to the experience of having an awesome computer. The iPhone’s a major launch so shifting resources in that direction is understandable but still sucks.

It just makes you wonder if Apple is running out things to “Wow” about. Maybe Leopard will be a really awesome release that makes Tiger look like Windows XP minus the Service Pack. Maybe it’ll be another anticlimactic “meh” moment. It’s going to get harder to create a product head and shoulders above the previous release.

What’s going to happen post-Leopard? That freaking mac is going to have to read my mind or something to amaze me. Unlike most others I’m really not hurting for Leopard. About the only real reason I can think of for buying it is that Textmate will get CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) input support. Unless you’re really passionate about your computing experience, I think Apple will have a hard time wowing switchers from Vista (once that thing stabilizes).

Plus who’s going to maintain the distortion field when Steve is gone?

2007-04-13  »  baron