Apple News From Yesterday:

[Guest Reimar]

Found something which is maybe for the Apple Fan's: Leopard looks like … Vista

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What struck me at the June 11 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) event wasn’t the glitzy demos, the rockstar-like worship of Apple CEO Steve Jobs or the “I’m Steve Jobs” parody video by the “I’m a PC” guy.

Instead, it was the excitement by the 5,000 WWDC attendees about many technologies in the forthcoming Mac OS X “Leopard” release that already exist in Windows Vista.

A few Mac-show regulars said they thought today’s WWDC audience wasn’t as engaged and enthused as Apple’s developers and customers normally are for a Jobs love-fest. Some said they thought developers were let down by Jobs’ failure to discuss the geekier bits, like Leopard’s use of the ZFS file system. others thought the crowd was subdued because they wanted more iPhone particulars and were let down by the lack of an iPhone software development kit. (Jobs told developers they could simply use existing Ajax and Web 2.0 development technologies to write to Safari, since the Safari engine inside the iPhone will be identical to the one for Mac OS X today.)

To this Windows-show veteran, however, the WWDC developer audience seemed positvely effusive.

I’ve sat through countless Microsoft demos of Vista at a variety of consumer and business events. I don’t remember ever hearing thunderous applause when Microsoft showed off Flip 3D or Vista’s ability to preview thumbnails of documents. The “wows” were few and far between. Yet when Jobs put almost identical versions of these features in Leopard through their paces, there were lots of oohs and ahhs.

But if you’ve seen Vista, there’s no way you could help but compare the feature-complete Leopard beta Jobs showcased with Windows Vista. And — surprise — Vista looked pretty darn up-to-date in comparison.

Jobs told WWDC keynoters that he would show ten of the best of the 300 new features coming in Leopard when it ships in October this year. Here’s what Jobs’ hit list looked like to this Windows user:

1. New Leopard Desktop: Not a whole lot different from Vista’s Aero and Sidebar.

2. New Finder: Many of the same capabilities as the integrated “Instant Search” in Vista (the subsystem that Google is trying to get the Department of Justice to rule as being anti-competitive). The new Leopard Coverflow viewing capability looked almost identical to Vista’s Flip 3D to me.

3. QuickLook: Live file previews — just like the thumbnail preview capability available in Vista.

4. 64-bitness: Leopard is the first 64-bit only version of a desktop client. Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit varieties. And most expect Windows Seven will still be available in 32-bit flavors. Until 32-bit machines go away, it seems like a good idea to offer 32-bit operating systems.

5. Core animation: Not sure what the Vista comparison is here. The demo reminded me of Microsoft Max photo-sharing application. The WWDC developers attending the Jobs keynote didn’t seem wowed with this functionality.

6. Boot Camp. You can run Vista on your Mac. Apple showed Vista running Solitaire in its WWDC demo. But I bet those downloading the 2.5 million copies of Boot Camp available since last year are running a lot of other Windows business apps and games.

7. Spaces: A feature allowing users to group applications into separate spaces. I haven’t seen anything like in in Vista, but the audience didn’t seem overly impressed by it.

8. Dashboard with widgets. Isn’t this like the Vista Sidebar with gadgets?

9. iChat gets a bunch of fun add-ons (photo-booth effects, backrops, etc.) to make it a more fully-featured videoconferencing product. The “iChat Theater” capability Jobs showed off reminded me of Vista’s Meeting Space and/or the new Microsoft “Shared View” (code-named “Tahiti”) document-sharing/conferencing subsystems.

10. Time Machine automatic backup. Vista has built-in automatic backup (Volume Shadow Copy). It doesn’t look anywhere near as cool as Time Machine. But it seems to provide a lot of the same functionality.

Granted, I am not an Apple user. So I’m sure I’m glossing over some subtleties regarding what’s new and cool in Leopard. But given how often I hear the “Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers” message, I was thinking that Leopard would be light years ahead of Vista.

So, Apple folks: What am I missing? I’m not trying to pull a Dvorak here and use this blog post for click bait. Why is Leopard so superior to Vista — other than the non-trivial fact that there will be just one version of Leopard that will be priced at $129 (as opposed to six-plus versions of Vista at a variety of price points well in excess of that amount)?

Source

[astral]

Found something which is maybe for the Apple Fan's: Leopard looks like … Vista

I am not sure if that is Good or Bad...........

[phazey]

Article is full of crap imho. MANY of the features listed there are available now in Tiger (and even Panther).

Spaces looks cool - alough i'm using "Desktop Manager" which is pretty much the same. I've just got hold of a VMWare Fusion beta which will obsolete Bootcamp.

[cdnvic]

I think Parallels obsoleted Bootcamp last year.

[Thaddeus]

Granted, I am not an Apple user. So I’m sure I’m glossing over some subtleties regarding what’s new and cool in Leopard.

Agree with Phazey.

Many of the features listed in that article are not new, they are improvements to features that have been in OSX for as long as I can remember.

I notice that the writer didn't say anything about security issues

//edit/quote

Edited June 13, 2007 by Thaddeus

[Guest Reimar]

Just read the 2. part of the Story and I believe that's also intereting for you all too!

Here is the 2. part:

Leopard vs. Vista: Take two

Let me try this again. Seeing that so many readers misunderstood my blog post from earlier this week about my take on Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote, I’d like to try to clarify what I was trying to say.

But first, let me say thanks for the many interesting e-mail messages and comments on the original post. And special thanks for the unsolicited advice, which ranged from “find a new career,” to “see a doctor about your time/space problem you seem to have,” to “you should be running a car wash in Frezno.” I have been trying to respond to all of my e-mail correspondents, but unfortunately many of you seem to be using fake e-mail addresses and names that aren’t your own.

I heard from some interesting corners. I heard from Windows users who think the Mac OS X is far superior to Vista. I heard from Apple users who said they thought Leopard would be a weak Mac OS X release. And I heard from quite a few Mac folks who thought Jobs’ keynote was too much of a rehash from January and was a lame representation of what Apple has coming on the operating system front.

My original post was not an attempt at a Vista vs. Leopard product review (in response to the reader who said s/he’d contact my managers to make sure this ZDNet reviewer was fired!). Nor was it a news story. It was my plain, old, biased opinion, as most blog posts tend to be.

Admittedly, my headline choice (“Leopard looks like … Vista”) for my original blog posting was poor. A lot of folks immediately assumed I was asserting that Leopard — the version of Mac OS X coming this October, which Jobs demonstrated at the Worldwide Developers Conference on July 11 — was copied from Vista. And seemingly read no further.

That isn’t what I was saying at all. In fact, I consciously stayed away from the whole “who copied whom” discussion, which has been debated for years now. I had nothing new to observe there and didn’t intend for this blog post to be a timeline. (I also didn’t expect it to be a forum for Linux users, yet still heard from a reader who told me that I was a fool not to mention Linux, since it was obvious Apple and Microsoft both had stolen their interface ideas from Linux. I’m not kidding.)

Instead, what I was attempting to ask was whether users out there, especially those who’ve had a chance to play with the closed Leopard betas, believe there are features and functionality in Leopard that will leapfrog what’s available in Vista. I was curious because I often hear Apple officials and users assert that Leopard will be light years ahead of Vista once Leopard ships. Yet in the demonstration I saw on Monday, I didn’t see much of anything — other than the beautiful eye candy, as noted by LifeHacker — that seemed to go beyond what Microsoft is doing with Vista.

As I noted in my original post, I am not a Mac user. Please excuse any Mac OS X subsystem names I bungled in my post; I simply used the terms Jobs used. For a better use of correct Apple terminology in comparing Leopard to Vista, I’d suggest readers check out Microsoft Watch’s follow-up post from July 12.)

A number of readers said they thought the Top 10 Leopard features list I cited was weak and chose to make Leopard look bad. Just a reminder: This wasn’t my list. This was the list of features that Jobs chose to highlight.

[Phil Conners]

One big difference may be that ... it works (Leopard that is). I just had the opportunity to test run Vista on one of my PC's and ... it sux. Every time you do anything it starts trashing the disk (this is a brand new 320 GB SATA disk btw, not an old grinder). Not much CPU activity and plenty of available memory, yet even logging in takes 3 minutes. Same with everything else, for example, open a network folder - 5 minutes. Back to XP for me, it does what I need anyway, I don't need the eye candy!

[Thaddeus]

I notice that he still failed to mention anything about security.

Two things that I would be very surprise at.

1. Steve Jobs never mentioned it.

2. The author didn't get any emails about it.

[cdnvic]

If Vista is taking 3min to login then something's wrong. I have Vista and XP on dual boot and Vista flies along much smoother than XP, and thats running Aero and everything.

[Guest Reimar]

cndvic is right! It seems to be a memory problem. I had a same pronlem on one comp and changing the memory was solving that! Some memories still working but only just sooooo but they may not 100% compatible with the system.

Edited June 14, 2007 by Reimar