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Apple Mac OS X Leopard Preview: Who is the Copycat Now?
Friday, August 11th, 2006
Sometimes I wonder how Apple CEO Steve Jobs can sleep at night. He appears to spend half his 
waking hours ridiculing Microsoft’s admittedly behind-schedule operating system, Windows Vista, for copying Mac OS X features. But this week at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), he announced ten new features for Leopard, the next version of OS X, most of which will seem more than vaguely familiar to Windows users. I’m not dim: Microsoft does copy Apple on a fairly regular basis. But seriously, Steve. Apple’s just as bad.
More important, perhaps, is that the new OS X features that Jobs and company announced this week aren’t, by and large, all that impressive. Two of the new features–Time Machine and Spaces–are valuable additions to OS X and worth discussing, though both, interestingly, have been done before in other OSes. The other Leopard features Apple announced, alas, are almost all a complete waste of time. They’re the types of things one might expect of a minor, interim update, or from free Web downloads. They are certainly not major features as Jobs claimed.
OK, enough Jobs bashing. The guy’s a visionary and truly important presence in the industry, and it will be a sad, sad day when he steps down from his post at Apple and fades into the sunset. (The reality of this possibility seemed all the more real this week. Am I the only one that though Jobs looked oddly gaunt and sickly during the WWDC keynote?) But as I’ve often said of Apple and Jobs: They do good work. It’s too bad they feel the need to exaggerate so much.
Anyway, what I’d like to do here is address Apple’s comments about Windows Vista and Microsoft, and take a look at the Leopard features Apple announced at WWDC. It’s important for you to understand, however, that I don’t have Leopard. I’m basing this only on what Apple showed off at WWDC. Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Apple Mac OS X Leopard Preview: Who’s the Copycat Now?
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