Gotta Love Apple
OK, there's no doubt that their systems are more expensive than the Wintel ones, but after today's MacWorld Expo keynote, you still just have to love Apple for what it's doing for their platform. Sure, I wish .Mac was still iTools - and free, but it's not, and I can appreciate Steve's point that it was costing too much to keep it free, and they still wanted to invest in it. They certainly could have handled it better, but they could have charged less for Jaguar too... matters of degree certainly, but their steps are in the right direction.
So today we see that they have a new browser, and sure, it's not perfect, but it's a lot nicer than IE and the other browsers I've tried for Mac OS X. I need a browser that just plain works, and was forced to use IE simply because many of the sites I need to get to are really best viewed in IE. Now that Apple has a browser of their own I see this as a terribly good thing for me. I acknowledge a good job in IE for OS X, but I don't like the idea of supporting Microsoft, the company. Now I don't have to. That's a big win for me.
Also, adding X11R6 to their list of supported apps is excellent. I have used XDarwin (XFree86 on OS X) and while it's OK and works, it wasn't ever what I wanted to do as it seemed like too much of a hack - I mean there's already the display system, and X11 is just a protocol... anyway, with Apple giving us X11 I'm about as happy as I've been in a while. It's fast, nice, and completly integrated into the OS X environment. Clearly, both Safari and X11 are only going to get better.
Of course, I'd love to have one of the new 17-inch PowerBooks, but I can wait on that for a while. I'm not ready to be the early adopter for that but if I had to get a machine right now, I'd work awfully hard to make a case for getting that laptop. It's got to be exceptionally nice.
One thing that I'm a little disappointed in with OS X is the JVM. Specifically, loading a Swing-based app is terribly long. I'm sure there's a cost to the JIT, and another to the loading of the JVM, but on a 600MHz G3 with 640MB of RAM it shouldn't take 15 sec. to load a simple app. Once it's loaded, it runs fine, and that's the trade-off I'm sure they made - speed durnig runtime to speed of loading. But still, it makes quick debugging and running something that you just really can't do.
Hopefully in the future, there will be an update that will make this less of an issue. Certainly every problem I've had with OS X to date has been addressed by an update in the not-too-distant future. Like I said - you gotta love Apple. It almost makes me want to pay $99/yr for .Mac
Almost.