aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, November 30, 2007
Innovation has moved from the desktop to the web
Leopard is great for me. Unlike others (like this Slashdot rant or Dave Rosenberg’s own complaint), I’ve never had Leopard crash. Not once. The upgrade from Mac OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) was completely painfree. Everything just works.
Maybe this is the problem.
Over the years I’ve come to expect operating system and application upgrades to be, well, upgrades. I pay for something new: new functionality, new user interfaces, new something. With Leopard, everything just works, same as it did before with Tiger. Time Machine is new, but I haven’t gotten around to using it. Spaces? Not interesting to me. Expose in Panther? That was cool. New look to the Dock in Leopard? Snore....
So why did I upgrade? I mean, besides the fact that I’m clearly a mindless Apple zombie? I figured the new applications would take advantage of the power and functionality under the Leopard hood, and in this I assume I won’t be disappointed. But for now, everything is the same.
Not quite, of course. Apple has released new software that actually has changed and visually improved. iLife ‘08, for one, is definitely worth the upgrade. I like some of the innovations in iPhoto and iMovie. But I didn’t need Leopard to get the new iLife.
It may well be that we’ve tapped out the desktop metaphor and won’t be seeing much reason to upgrade, whether on the Windows, Mac, or Linux client. Maybe all the innovation is now happening out in the Internet cloud. Maybe it’s time to stop feverishly clicking on “Software Update” to get the latest patches and functionality updates to Leopard (or Vista, if that’s your persuasion).
Perhaps it’s time to just capitulate to the perpetual beta that is the web. There’s always something new happening there.
