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Apple's Missed Opportunity With Leopard Delay
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on OSWeekly.com, Apple missed a big opportunity by not releasing Leopard soon. They could've taken advantage of Vista's losing streak and one upped Microsoft, the author suggests. 'It's not uncommon for Windows users and technology consumers in general to say that Microsoft missed out on making the most of Vista both before and after its launch. Longtime fans of Windows have changed their tone due to Vista's inadequacies, and regular users are in many cases stuck with trying to figure out why they still can't get certain things to work within the operating system. Granted, it's not a completely horrific OS, but is that even a compliment worth accepting?'"
no longer acceptable. Ignoring your testers complaints on usability and performance issues will no longer get it done
But the people that 'actually' used Vista for a significant amount of time (i.e. the testers) don't see Vista as the horrible OS that others looking in that haven't used it extensively do.
Vista added a lot of architectural changes and paved the road for many new things the industry will just start seeing and using in the next couple of years. From hot dock Video to the revised audio and video subsystems that 'DO' increase application and even gaming performance in addition to pulling video out of the kernel for stability. (Latest tests now show Vista 5-10% faster than XP in 99% of the games on the market, it was NVidia and ATI that didn't put enough effort into performance optimizing the Vista drivers for games as they did with XP where they had 6 years to add tweaks.)
The other big shove Vista has going for it is the migration for development to not only a new set of APIs, but a new concept of development that is as revolutionary as Drag and Drop event based programming made popular with Visual Basic back in 1993. Vista's XAML and core WPF technologies are a graphic designer/developers wet dream in terms of abilities, performance and moving from basic UI constructs. This can also be witnessed with Silverlight, another technology based on Vista technology. People can say XAML or WPF or Silverlight is like Display PDF or Flash or SVG, but when they actually take a look at what it does, it is quite apparent XAML and WPF go further than the current technology hardware even supports. And this isn't even talking about its inherent 3D support and 3D UI hit testing and other features that have to be faked to appear 3D on OS X(Display PDF) or Flash.
Vista also added enough new features to the user side of the OS that it still offer more than XP, and yes still even offers more than Leopard, which makes Leopard look like a catch up OS - especially considering many of the Leopard and even Tiger ideas that were so coveted by Apple users first appeared in alpha versions of Vista.
Pick almost any Leopard feature and Vista has the feature, and architecturally there is no 'killer' feature of OS X that Vista cannot implement via 3rd part support. On the other hand Vista has technologies that OS X, Linux, etc don't have yet and won't have for several years.
Until OS X or Linux can handle and pre-emptively multi-task GPU operations, non-double buffer writes from system RAM to VRAM, or process sound with virtually infinite channels and bit discrepancies, there is a LOT of architectural work to be done to compete with Vista. On Vista you can run several CAD/High End graphical applications under the Aero interface and not lose performance in any of the applications, even with them performing side by side. (This is the same paradigm shift that pre-emptive CPU operations offered applications, and Vista has extended this concept to the GPU subsystem.)
And Vista as for the claim that Vista is buggy or broken or performs slowly, think about it in these terms instead. It is more stable than XP, OS X, and Linux and for an v1 OS release has shown that MS can get security on industry par and even best what is out there, as Vista has had fewer security flaws or bugs than OS X has in the last year and Tiger has been around a while where these issues should have been fixed a long time ago.
And as for Vista having 'poor performance' remember than using boot camp and using native versions of any Adobe CS3 product, it runs faster under Vista than it does on OSX on the EXACT same hardware. And this is with non-optimized Apple drivers for Vista, and a sad note to loss of performance OS X inherently has.
Another area of performance you can look at is the gaming, with the latest drivers OpenGL and DX9/DX8/DX7 games run 5-10% faster than they do on XP now. And DX10 games run faster on Vista than the same games running in DX9 mode on XP, and have better visuals.
So Vista