And in non-Apple news: Here’s an AllBusiness.com column I wrote on Windows XP, the operating system that won’t go away (and why it should).
Tag Archives | Operating Systems
I Tried to Love Samsung’s Chromebook. I Failed
Last Thursday morning, as I packed for a three-day trip to San Diego for Comic-Con, I couldn’t decide whether to take my trusty first-generation MacBook Air, or use the trip as an excuse to review Samsung’s Series 5 Chromebook, which I’d just received. So I didn’t decide–I took both.
And then, once I’d arrived at the airport, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring the Air’s AC adapter. The Blogging Gods clearly wanted me to try the Series 5, one of the first commercially-available devices that runs Google’s Chrome OS.
The notion of using a laptop purely as a window to the Web–which is the Chrome OS proposition–isn’t inherently unappealing to me. (In fact, I tried to do just that back in 2008, in a project I called Operation Foxbook, long before Google announced Chrome OS.) Using Google’s first Chromebook, last year’s experimental CR-48, had left me more skeptical about Chrome OS rather than less so. But I still want to be impressed with a truly Web-centric computing device. Sadly, my time with the Series 5 at Comic-Con was frustrating in multiple ways. Google and its hardware partners are selling Chromebooks to the public at prices which aren’t lower than those for similar Windows laptops, but the Series 5, like the CR-48,still feels like an experiment.
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Windows 8 in April 2012? Could Be!
ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley is reporting on a rumor: Microsoft may be trying to finish up work on Windows 8 by April of next year. She thinks it’s plausible–or at least not obviously crazy. Me, too. For one thing, the conventional wisdom that the OS is likely to show up for the holiday 2012 season is, as far as I know, based more on history than on anyone knowing anything specific about Windows 8. For another, Microsoft has a huge incentive to get this thing out the door–not so much for its PC business, but for tablets, where it’s not yet really in the game and won’t be until Windows 8 is available. And Steven Sinofksy, the Microsoft exec in charge of Windows, has a pretty good track record for exceeding expectations when it comes to shipping products in a timely fashion. (Enough so that I think that anyone who parrots the classic “Microsoft never gets anything out the door” meme hasn’t been paying attention over the past few years.)
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In Case It Wasn’t Clear Already, Apple Likes to Build Software for Apple Devices
Over at This is My Next, Joshua Topolsky has a thought-provoking piece that says that Apple is going to discontinue its only major browser-based Web apps–the ones that are part of MobileMe–next year after iCloud is fully up and running. There’s a lively debate going on via Twitter between Topolsky and some folks who say that he has it all wrong: the MobileMe Web apps will survive the iCloud transition.
Even if the MobileMe Web apps don’t get the ax, the gist of Topolsky’s piece remains relevant. Apple filled last week’s WWDC keynote to the gills with news, but it was all about operating systems, apps, and an ambitious piece of Internet plumbing called iCloud. No surprise there: there’s never been much evidence that Apple is terribly interested in creating Web apps. But it loves to create traditional software that runs on hardware devices it builds.
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Windows 8/Lion/iOS 5/iCloud Wrapup
Between Windows 8, OS X 10.7 Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud, we’ve been inundated with previews of new operating-system stuff over the last week or so–and the one thing they all have in common is that they look beyond the era of the PC as we knew it. (Even Windows 8–when Microsoft seems to be thinking in post-PC terms, you know something’s afoot.) That’s what I wrote about for my Technologizer column for TIME.com this week.
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A Quick Look at iOS 5
Engadget’s Jacob Schulman has a nice walkthrough of iOS 5’s major new features on the iPhone and iPad.
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Ten Questions About Today’s Apple News
Almost 38,000 folks turned out for Technologizer’s live coverage of Apple’s WWDC keynote this morning. We had a good time. But as the comments came in from attendees, there was clearly a serious contingent of folks who still held out hope that Apple was going to announce a new iPhone today–and who just didn’t care that much about software and services. For them, no new hardware meant that the event was a letdown.
On Twitter, I responded this way:
Dear everyone who's irate there was no new hardware: THIS WAS MUCH MORE IMPORTANT & INTERESTING THAN NEW HARDWARE.
— Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) June 6, 2011
This was among the most news-packed Apple events I can recall, and in its own way it was one of the most wildly ambitious ones. Apple is finally making the iPhone and iPad into autonomous devices that don’t rely on a Mac or Windows PC. It wants to store vast quantities of data for us and be responsible for safeguarding it and getting it to the right place. It’s making iOS look more like OS X and OS X look more like iOS. It’s not yet clear whether all of this stuff will pan out, and people who already bristle at Apple’s approach to the world will like this new, more fully Apple-centric version less than ever. But if you think the event was a big yawn because there wasn’t a new iPhone that was a bit thinner and a bit faster, you live in a different world than I do.
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The Next Version of iOS: Predictions, Please!
[UPDATE: I’m closing the survey and compiling the results. Thanks, folks!]
At 10am PT on Monday, June 6th, Apple will hold its WWDC 2011 keynote, with news about OS X 10.7 Lion, the next version of iOS, and something called iCloud. I’ll be there in person at San Francisco’s Moscone West for Technologizer’s live coverage, joined by Ed Oswald and Techland’s Doug Aamoth for color commentary.
You can join us on Monday at technologizer.com/wwdc11, and I hope you will. (You can also head there now to sign up for an e-mail reminder.)
With less than 48 hours to go, time is running out to make predictions about what we’ll learn. We already know most of the details about Lion, and iCloud remains fairly enigmatic. So let’s focus in on iOS 5, or whatever the next version of the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad operating system turns out to be called.
I’ve put together a survey that’ll let you make predictions about iOS 5 features and enhancements, (It’ll take you a minute or two to complete.) I’ll report on our aggregate predictions as a group before the keynote–and after Steve Jobs and company have spoken, we can see how accurate we were.
Click here to take the survey. Thanks for participating, and see you on Monday.
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More Windows 8 Musings
I like Michael Mace’s take on Windows 8–hey, I know it’s smart, because it’s an awful lot like mine. (We both end with exactly the same thought: this is going to be fun.)
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Windows 8: It’s the Applications, Stupid!
Word for Windows 1.0, 1989
In the end, operating systems are merely a means to an end. Nobody runs Windows to run Windows, or OS X to run OS X, or Linux to run Linux. They run them to get stuff done, and they get most of that stuff done in applications.
I’ve been pondering that fact as I’ve been processing the news about Windows 8, which Microsoft showed in public for the first time this week at the D9 conference. It’s got both a radically new touch-centric interface and the one I already am thinking of as “Windows Classic”–a duality that brings to mind the days when most people ran both DOS apps and Windows 3.x ones.
Windows 8 is a giant-sized, risky, fascinating bet–but in the end, it’s the apps that are going to matter.
During the D9 demo, both Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher brought up Office. Would it be reimagined for Windows’ new look? Windows interface kingpin Julie Larson-Green, as you’d expect, didn’t confirm or deny anything. She said “They may do some things in the future.” and “I’m sure the Office team will look at what we’re doing.”