Saying "Meh" to Mac OS X

Today's Technology Guardian carries an opinion piece by Charles Arthur titled "Why the world says 'meh' to Apple's next product". Thankfully, it's not yet more iPhone commentary, but instead a piece on why the world isn't caring about Mac OS X 10.5, or as Apple would rather we called it, Leopard*.

Largely I think he's about right. There is more innovation on the web, and in web services, than in desktop apps generally and operating systems in particular (for obvious reasons; a web service can throw away convention at will, whereas something like Vista can be hamstrung by decades-old apps that must remain compatible). He also points the blame at a couple of high-profile demos of the OS, at developer conferences, and he's probably right that they're both underwhelming yet overfamiliar.

However, I do think he's missing something; the role of third-party applications as upgrade drivers. I wrote about this back when 10.4 was due, because despite the fact that, as he has it

People were excited about the Spotlight search facility, the Dashboard widgets system, Smart Folders to create dynamic views of files or emails, and RSS detection built into the Safari web browser

I was deeply suspicious (sometimes of the same features; for me the HFS+ b-tree catalog provided a useful search index 99% of the time, so Spotlight's additional metadata isn't much of an improvement and the UI was a regression). What finally prompted me to upgrade was the fact that almost every application I wanted wasn't available for 10.3.9; neither Lightroom nor Aperture, for example. Even BBEdit, once a poster child of running on old OSes, now insists on a 10.4 for its latest version.

I probably could have squeezed this observation into a delicious note, except for one thing: this is particularly important in the light of Wil Shipley's post today on the iPod, iPhone and Apple's greed:

I don't write programs for Apple because I worship Apple. I write programs for them because they have the best development environment. But I've always said that I will move from the platform the day Apple starts acting like a monopoly -- trying to make money by using its marketing position to extort money from users, instead of innovating so quickly that users willing throw money at Apple.

For all that I dislike Delicious Library, I don't doubt that version 2, which is 10.5 only, will encourage at least a few people who would otherwise have thought "10.4 does all I want" to upgrade. Multiply that by all the applications out there which have already declared they're going to be Leopard only, and you have a powerful marketing tool that Apple are being given, free. Now think about these developers chafing as they go out and spend money on iPhones, yet find them less useful than they could be, and the touch of resentment creeping in. That's the thought Steve Jobs needs to be having, or there'll be a lot more "meh" out there.

* In a rare concession to non-Mac types, I prefer using the version numbers to the code names. Maybe that's also partly because I don't find them that memorable. Do you? Quick, how far before Panther was Cheetah?