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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

My WWDC 2004 overview

Here's my quick take on Apple's announcements during the Steve Jobs keynote at the WWDC 2004 event yesterday, in chronological order:

AirTunes/Airport Express. Previously announced, and pretty much a niche product. I ordered one though, so relax: It looks neat.

PowerMac G5. Jobs pulls a fast one on his failed promise to hit 3 GHz by stating that moving to 90nm technology is an industry-wide problem. Heads-up, Steve: No one else makes your bold pronouncements. You're the problem, not technology.

Displays. They look beautiful. They absolutely should have shipped last August, however.

Mac OS X. 12 million users. Steve noted that the "conversion to OS X was complete." That means there are 12 million Mac users, not 25 million, as the company has continually claimed. I accept the 12 million figure as reasonable, despite the fact that many OS X users have probably purchased 2-3 versions of the OS.

Mac OS X "Tiger". Derivative, not innovative. "Revolutionary" search stuff that Microsoft already announced for Longhorn. A shameful Konfabulator rip-off. Won't ship until "firt half of 2005." 150 news features? Dear God. Mark my words: 12 of them are widgets. 11 are command line apps. And so on.

Safari. My favorite browser picks up an RSS aggregator. Snore. Like Tiger, this kind of thing is available all over the place. It's nice that Apple is adding it, but it should arguably be part of Mail, and not Safari.

Core Image and Core Video. Another Longhorn rip-off. "We're doing processing in graphics processor (GPU), not the CPU. It's all done with floating point precision." It sure is. And despite the non-original nature of this, it's still a good idea.

.Mac. I was an early proponent of .Mac, and it's nice to see the service finally taking off, with 500,000 paying subscribers. Tiger will be more closely integrated with .Mac, which makes sense.

Dashboard. Rip-off alert. Rip-off alert. These guys are pissed. They should be. But they shouldn't be surprised. God help any third party developer that makes something cool for the Mac.

Automater. This looks nice. As a visually-oriented company, Apple is good at taking difficult tasks and making them visual. On the other hand... what's the market? The businesses that would use this type of thing don't use Macs, and the people that do use Macs are creative types, students, and home users; they don't have much of a need for automation.

iChat. Wow. Multiple users. Imagine that.

One more thing. There wasn't one. No iMac G5? No color iPod?

[ Posted at 10:43 AM | Permalink ]