• App Store was a Lion Feature but will be available four-five months before Lion is released
• Lion is a move away from the Finder
• Lion is a move away from the Dock
• Lion will make files, not apps, cloud-centric
Reschke writes, “Steve said he only had a limited amount of time to share with us some key features. What I think that really meant is he wasn’t quite ready to reveal the massive change (and improvements) Lion will bring to our computing lives. Lion will be the next giant step away from computing as we have known it for the past 25 years.”
Full article, with explanations of the four bullet points above, here.
@ anevilmeme
Make that OS XI
(or will that be OS XX)
Steve used to be very, very error prone. He’s much better now. His biggest issue/failing was the he could almost always tell what the thing was going to be right after the next big thing. His view was far out there often 10 to 15 years or more. He had trouble figuring out what people wanted in the next six months or even the next year. There are many examples of this.
Think Lisa, a $10,000 “personal” computer with a GUI. Both of which really started to catch on almost a decade later (and no, the personal computer with a GUI did not catch on with the Mac).
Think Display Postscript (in the NeXT system). Vector graphics based display interfaces didn’t catch on until OS X and Windows 7 more than a decade later.
Think only an optical drive (in the NeXT cube). This didn’t catch on until well after the first iMac. Some computers from some manufacturers *still* ship with 3 1/2 inch floppies.
Think dumb printers and smart printer drivers (again in the NeXT system). Today’s sub $100 dumb printers are pretty standard but that’s not what most personal computers — even Macs — supported until recently. Even in the NeXT days a “dumb” printer was still pretty expensive.
I won’t even mention things like the hocky puck mouse or the Cube which never caught on.
Steve’s track record over the past 10 years has been much, much better than his record of from about 1980 to 1995.
Anyone who thinks putting all their data into the cloud *today* is a brilliant idea is an idiot. The Internet is just not up to it. Doing an IMAP kind of thing might work for a limited number of people, but even that has drawbacks today.
Just think of the security nightmare. One ISP hacked and all that data can go anywhere. With the evolving personal information laws this could be a nightmare no ISP wants to tackle. Just think of two examples: one hacked ISP with all your lawyer’s documents about you (even a court can’t order these to be released but your local hacker can be paid to get them by your oposition!) or your medical records (the HIPAA be damned). Thus putting all your most sensitive information in the cloud is asking to be taken.
Just think of speed. Even in an IMAP kind of situation sincronizing that will take time. Like to take photographs and have one of the better prosumer DSLR cameras that does 14 to 24 Mpixels per image? Take a couple hundred pictures of some significant family event? Hell, just importing that into the local HD can take many minutes. Try syncing that over the net. It could be a few hours or more depending on your connection and your ISP’s connection (as well as user base).
Just think of space. Many people have said you only need a limited amount of local space with cloud access. So where is that 100 GB to 2 TB or more going to be? The infrastructure just isn’t there to store all that data in the cloud today — and probably not for several years to come. Current estimates run at about 100 million Mac users worldwide. Even at 100 GB per user — on average — that’s 10 million TB. Who’s going to store all that even in the next few years?
Just think of cost. Right now I can buy three 2 TB drives for about $400. That gives me a very large main drive, a local mirrored, bootable backup and a third mirrored, bootable backup that I can store in my local safe deposit box. Refreshing the local backup is trivial and swapping it out once a week is easy. AND CHEAP. Even in a theoretical worst case scenario where a terrorist blows up my office along with my primary and primary backup drives I don’t lose more than a week’s worth of data. Now having that storage in the cloud (with guaranteed backups for virtually 100% guarantee of no data loss — barring that terrorist event, of course) will not be cheap. I’d bet that over the course of two or three years (easily within the lifetime of those drives) the cost will be more for cloud based storage.
Will cloud computing happen? Yes. But not today and not in the next five years — and quite possibly not in the next 10 years.
When people have access to the ‘Net at 100 Mbps or greater speeds from both primary and secondary locations. When people have access to the ‘Net at over 99.9% of the places they want to go. When the ‘Net connection has over five 9’s reliability. When your ISP can give you five 9’s of data assurance. When the cost of the monthly fee is comparable to or less than the cost of having the local equipment. THEN cloud computing might become a reality.
For a very limited few cloud computing is a reality and viable today. For many it will arrive in five to ten years. By 2025 I’d expect cloud computing the be the norm, not before.
@ Shadowself
Agreed! But then, I can relate to what Thelonius Mac is getting at as well.
The thing is, storage is so cheap now (and constantly getting cheaper) that there’s no reason not to have local storage for files and media content. I’ve got around 6000 songs and around 40 movies in iTunes and they don’t take up 20% of the 500GB drive in my iMac. 1TB external backup drives cost a little over $100 now. Even if my double collection of music and movies I’ll still have plenty of room to spare.
This being said, I can envision keeping that kind stuff on the “cloud” as time goes by to access with things like the iPhone, iPad and MBA or MBP while on the move. I still wouldn’t want to *only* store sensitive and really important files on the cloud though – maybe as a backup. I think a good balance between the cloud and local storage and access (normal desktop computers like the iMac) is the way to go for a long time to come as you say.
I don’t particularly care about Apple being a forced intermediary between shareware authors and me, particularly if it results in a higher cost to me.
I don’t care to consume bandwidth to access my files; bandwidth isn’t free unless it’s my own device to device wifi.
I don’t launch apps as much as I launch documents in selected apps — more than one app per document sometimes — and it’s become significantly harder to do that.
I don’t care to touch my screen; I like using the mouse. It is fast and precise.
I don’t use full-screen apps. I need to have multiple apps and documents opened when I’m doing some work.
I like managing my files manually, even if I don’t do a particularly good job at it. So iTunes doesn’t manage my media files and iPhoto doesn’t manage my images.
The Dock is a convenience, but I use a hierarchical folder of app aliases at least half the time.
I don’t like small screens or keyboards without a numeric keypad. Give me big any time: screen, keyboard, storage, RAM….
Conclusion: the future looks grim indeed.
@Buster
the best
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />
NO FREAKIN’ CLOUD!!
I don’t care how much THEY want it, I DON’T. And unless they are going to wire my home with FIOS, and pay for most of the monthly cost, AND make sure I can access the cloud from where ever I am on the face of the earth… you know… like I can with files stored on my laptop, or my iPod, or my iPhone/iPad… I ain’t interested!
I’m just curious, is it a programming compiler/IDE that supports many languages. If so, how many languages does it support?
http://www.wellnessstarts.com/nitro-muscle-mass-review.html
Pointless speculation. Instant gratification (or whining).
We’ll see…
Well said Shadowself. You just bitchslapped theloniousMac’s idiot idea nicely. You also bitchslapped theloniousMac as well.
Usually that means that the image or applet could not be found. Do a few reloads, or quit and restart the browser, and see if that helps.
http://www.healthproductreviewers.com/leanspa-acai-reviews.html