The New York Times is upset that they were not included in the beta test Apples new Mountain Lion release. IN the past the Times interest when reporting on new Apple products served to benefit Obama and attack Capitalism. So the NY Times started running hits against Apple in recent months. As a result, Apple has left them out of the loop to test the New Apple IO Mountain Lion. Other news agencies were given the software and none of them leaked Apple’s plans to release a new OS.
The classic “keyboard, mouse, screen, hard drive” form of the personal computer has been smashed to bits and the bits ground to powder. What form should take its place? It’s a fluid concept. All anybody knows for certain is that users have completely rejected the concept of the computer as a stationary appliance that one approaches with reverence and humility.
Today, we all expect our computers to be at hand, wherever we go. We expect them to obsequiously comply with every demand we make of them in every situation, just like a very good dog, or perhaps a very bad celebrity physician.
Thus, this is a time when a company in the computer business needs to back a Philosophy rather than a specific technology or a specific design. A company needs to develop an abstract understanding of how people are meant to use their products, and then they need to commit to that philosophy across the product line. There’s room for plenty of different takes on the Computing Concept, but there’s no room for doubt or waffling.
Apple’s philosophy is no mystery. They see computing as a collection of functions, not a range of hardware or a suite of apps. Those functions should articulate themselves differently depending on where the user is and how deeply they want to get involved. And although these functions should be re-optimized for specific experiences (the phone, the tablet, the desktop) the experience should be so consistent that it all feels of a piece.
They laid all of this out quite explicitly last year with the release of Mac OS X 10.7. The whole theme of Lion was “Back to the Mac”: Apple took a cartload of ideas that seemed to have worked out well on iOS and figured out how to implement them on the Mac. On Thursday, Apple unveiled a preview of Mac OS X 10.8, due to be released sometime during the summer. “Mountain Lion” walks the Mac another mile down that same path. It brings more of the iOS experience to the Mac. Just as strongly, it emphasizes just how important Apple’s new iCloud service is to . . . well, pretty much everything they’re doing.
