Harry Marks on Apple’s True Legacy—it’s all about the user
Harry Marks, writing for his Curious Rat website on Apple’s true legacy:
Apple is getting ready to finish the first volume of its 10 year long opus on the true definition of “ecosystem”. With your iTunes ID, you can make sure any music, apps and books you purchase on your Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad are automatically downloaded and synced on all your devices at once. If you start a document in Pages on Lion, it automaticaly saves each change and uploads it to iCloud, then syncs it back down to your iPad where you can work on it later at a coffee shop, or waiting for your train. No buttons are pressed to initiate the sync, no wire is required to transfer the files. Everything is done in the background without the user’s knowledge. Apple’s iCloud is one step closer to making “user error” a thing of the past and that’s the brush being used to paint the bigger picture.
That’s a thing a lot of people are missing about Apple’s plans and also the iterative nature of its OS evolution. Apple very rarely these days pushes massive new features, resulting in people screaming that everything past the original Mac OS X release has been a service pack. But things like Quick Look (instant, browsable previews of items in Finder) and upgrades to Preview (which has gone from Acrobat Reader Very Lite Indeed to a really good app for PDF edits, scanning and basic image manipulation) are attempts to make computing easier, a little at a time.
With iCloud, iOS 5 and Lion, though, Apple’s digital hub dream finally comes to fruition, but in a manner even Apple couldn’t have foreseen a decade ago. Assuming it works, you’ll get seamless computing across devices, a massive reduction in user error for tasks we take for granted but shouldn’t have to deal with (document sync, saving work on a regular basis), and that’s why people like Paul Thurrott look like dolts for dismissing what Apple’s doing as ‘more of the same’ or nothing different to the competition. It’s not about any one feature—it’s about everything. And until Microsoft, Sony and others get this, the playing field won’t be remotely even.
Seems a little disingenuous to say Thurrot is dismissing what Apple’s doing. He’s not particularly impressed by the overall updates in iOS and OS X, and he has some justification. They’re not all that interesting. But he is positive about iCloud, which was the major annoucement at WWDC and that it will be ushering in “an age in which we–rightfully so–store the “master” copies of our data in the cloud, not on a single PC that could get stolen, suffer a hard drive failure, or otherwise be rendered suddenly useless”. Which is surely what you’re praising as well? He does argue that all those services exist already from Apples competitors but that Apples true innovation with this is that they’ll be first to tie it all together cohesively.
But he is dismissive—he writes off both systems as 3/5-style bog-standard fare, and he’s done this with EVERY update Apple’s put out. His reviews almost every time are ‘more of the same’ and ‘minor updates’, ignoring the fact iteration of this sort has turned both Mac OS X and iOS into robust, user-friendly systems.
The fact that he sees the benefit of a single aspect of Apple’s ecosystem doesn’t really counter his general writing off of everything else as nothing remotely special.
Thurrott sounds like every update should be an XP-to-Vista-level transition (not in terms of Vista’s performance, just to signify the level of change between OSes).
Apple has been refining OS X over the years, adding new features where necessary, but mostly trimming the fat. I loved Snow Leopard for speeding up my machine and giving me a few gigs of space back.
Also, Thurrott brushes Mac users off as simply going for the beautiful hardware and ignoring the software. If the software wasn’t good, people wouldn’t use Macs, regardless of how nice the brushed aluminum looks.
Apple’s building a full experience for users while everyone else is just trying to invent new features or match other ones on competing platforms. There’s no cohesion.
If you’re displeased with your house, do you burn it down and rebuild, or do you repaint the walls, swap the furniture and build an addition onto the back? Microsoft is in the demolition business. Apple’s into remodeling.
When a company doesn’t do anything with it’s OS for 3 to 6 years, its releases look so dramatic when it gets a point release. As with the iPod, the iPhone and now the iPad, pundits can continue to dismiss the incremental nature if Apple’s changes right up until the point that the current software/hardware are radically different from the original and they won’t know how it happened. Put the first iPod next to a Touch and explain how we got there without all those “boring” updates. Or as John Gruber pointed out, put “Cheetah” next to “Lion” and weep with joy.