Apple OS X Lion: ‘Apple borrows so heavily from iOS that at times, cycling through features makes the whole thing feel like you’re merely operating an iPad with a keyboard attached.’
July 21st, 2011All I see is a large iPod that serves as a tamperproof vending machine.
—Apple’s iPad as Metaphor for The Nightmare Future of Computing
If Apple has its way, and if the sales of its mobile devices carry on in the manner they have up until now, a post-PC outlook will even fit devices that look alarmingly like… PCs.
—It’s Apple’s ‘Post-PC’ World — We’re All Just Living In It
The iOSification of OSX is now fully underway. How long will it be before every executable on the platform requires Apple’s blessing?
Via: Engadget:
In typically grandiose fashion, the company has declared OS X 10.7 “the world’s most advanced desktop operating system,” touting the addition of over 250 new features. The list is pretty uneven on the game-changing scale, with updates running the gamut from Airdrop (file-sharing over WiFi) to a full-screen version of the bundled chess game. If there’s one thing tying it all together, though, it’s something that Jobs touched on when he first unveiled the OS back in October: the unmistakable influence of iOS. Now it’s true, we already got a taste of that with gesture-based trackpads and the Mac App Store, but those were merely glimpses of things to come. Apple borrows so heavily from iOS that at times, cycling through features makes the whole thing feel like you’re merely operating an iPad with a keyboard attached.
Have you seen windows 8? More of a vending machine than iOS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I
I won’t be using that. Nope. No thanks. Physical keyboard and mouse for me. Windows and icons. Hate multitouch. Not for me. I guess I’m just getting old.
I heard some woman on the radio talking about how her ten year old son thinks keyboards and mice are for old people. Well, I turn 40 in a few months, so…
Creeping up on 45 here, and while I can see myself adapting in some areas (block diagram-style file management and flowcharting utilities, etc.) to the newfangled “touch” computing (one does touch the keyboard and mouse, after all), when it comes to text entry I expect I’ll be using some form of alpha-based keyboard until the day I die…
…and to think my first efforts at computing were Lunar Lander loaded off a tape drive to a Trash-80 and playing Colossal Cave at 300 baud using a Demon Dialer and a Diablo print terminal.
We’ve come along way, maybe… =)
“They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy deserve neither computers nor eye candy.”
— Danny O’Brien
I already wrote a screed to Kevin about the bias of the tech press, esp AOL owned Engadget so I’ll spare y’all here. So here’s my 2 yen as a longtime user of Macs/PCs.. but preferably Macs:
– Oh no! Apple stole good User Interface ideas from… *themselves* ..TEOTWAWKI! Apple is selling a lot more MacBooks than desktop machines. So they’re all about the touchpad.
Aside: Slouching your wrists on a mouse or the keyboard is REALLY bad for you. Carpal tunnel and all that. Of course you cannot slouch on a touch interface.
– One of the things that the *2* Engadget articles missed or omitted was that full disk ‘data protection’ (encryption) is now part of Lion. The previous ‘File Vault'(ing) of the user’s folder was.. a bad idea that broke a lot of software. Now that the entire disk is encrypted and it’s built into the OS, it’s military grade crypto for EVERYONE. Unless there’s a backdoor, this is the perfect thing to have in an NWO world.
– Expanding on this, not only is your /root disk encrypted, but your backup or ANY other disk can be encrypted. The password can be put in the Keychain (the password manager built into the OS). Example. The US TSA takes your laptop *and* your backup disk. If you do not surrender your password, they can access neither. Now it’s “safe” (note quotes) to take your machine + field back up across borders. Or maybe not.
– They went out of their way to slam Mission Control. But as I longtime user of virtual desktops, I’m finding that this ‘swipe between screens like pages in a book with three fingers’… even on my older MacBook Pro is really nice. I don’t need two screens anymore as it’s Code Editor, typing *swipe* Okay, look at PDF O’Reilly book on code, find reference *swipe* back to coding, huh? *swipe* back to reference, et cetera. Try it. I don’t need a page 2 monitor …. okay almost.
– Apple acquired high quality voices, about 600 megs each for Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Thai. Most folks won’t want or need these, but for me, studying Asian languages, it’s great to have a Japanese voice that ALMOST sounds native down to the intonation reading a JP Wikipedia page. Totally missed by the muckrakers.
– Mice still work. There’s even a Preference Pane for them. But seriously, gestures are great for bopping around pictures on a virtual light board, or long texts.
As to when Apps will require Apple’s blessing with no distribution outside the AppStore…. that’s the big question. Even with devs who simultaneously sell in both ‘channels’.
Okay, that’s enough. Don’t knock Apple’s kit unless you try it.. and as always, back up (in case you don’t like it).. but I think LION is a step up for users who can use it.
-Drunken Economist
Don’t knock Apple’s kit unless you try it..
Ha. I’ll do what I like, but since you mention it:
I’ve used Apple products since about 1981, owned three Macs, and supported Macs in corporate settings, so I’m pretty comfortable with my assessment of what’s happening.
The interface has nothing to do my concerns about the path Apple is taking. RBNZ pointed out above that MS is moving Windows to that type of interface too. So, oh well.
The locked-down vending machine nature of iOS, metastasizing over to MacOS X, is the problem.