As well, those "complaints" of iOS and social media integration have merit as they have been focusing much of their software engineering on those features with less focus on OpenGL and improved graphics support (these beta's address such but as a developer there has been little momentum in advancements).
The 'social integration' has as much to do with their future as developing OpenGL except that OpenGL is already mature and social integration is a relatively new feature added to the operating system. Once mature I'm sure they'll move the engineers around to re-focus on other things. End of the day regardless of how large your organisation is, you have priorities not simply based on what end users want but the direction other divisions are going in - it isn't just about responding to demands but filling in features that are emerging so that you're ahead of the curb when it takes off. For me I have no interest in integration with Facebook but I'm sure there are people out there who are happy that it is there and is a tick list of features that compel them to go with Apple's products. I mean, there is exchange integration with Mail but how many would actually use such a feature? I use it to access my Office365 custom domain hosting exchange server but for most people it isn't of any interest yet I'm happy that Apple did spend the resources to provide such integration in the first place.
As for OpenGL improvements - end of the day the push for further development has as much to do with demand from developers as it is to do with a willingness by Apple to deliver - if developers are saying, "hey, we're pretty happy with what we've got right now" or "the feature set is great but more optimisation is required" then you'll see resources allocated appropriately.
Pro-Apps such as Aperture and Final Cut Pro X even have Facebook integration.
Integration with Facebook doesn't take away from the fact that there are pro's using such applications - it is about having a product that isn't just for pro's but also up and coming pro's without having to deal with the usual stripped down garbage ala Elements being peddled by Apple. IMHO the biggest two mistakes Apple did was them to stop selling FCP7 and not having a road map to give some sort of heads up to the professionals if or when some features were to return - communication isn't exactly Apple's greatest strength.
Many threads with professional photographers address the frustrations regarding Apple's lack of pro-apps aside from social media integration which most do not use as it leads to little business aside from people "liking" their page and asking for free head-shots or work. This has been a contention with those of us who have used pro-apps for years for work. Adobe has picked up in the pro department, their latest Lightroom release is winning praise from photographers as many are leaving Aperture due to Apple's neglect for Adobe CS6. A few years ago this would have been laughed at as Apple was doing well.
And Adobe is any better? Please, each company has its bad points and the question is whether those bad points over lap with what you want to do and thus whether you're affected by it. End of the day though work flows are changing and the question is whether it is worth the resources and time spent developing a product in a given direction for a mod of work that'll be out of date by the time the said enhancements is released.
Those who claim the pro-market is "niche" are now eating those words as Apple stock is tumbling and a large amount of the pro-market has switched to other platforms and pro-apps.
What has the stock price got to do with the pro-market? are you one of these people who try to make one to one relationships between an event and thinking there is a singular cause?
While not a large market as the consumer market, the consumer market has become over saturated, and growth (outside of China which has proven difficult for Apple to tap into) is flatlining.
And the high personal debt combined with a stagnant economy has no impact upon peoples purchasing? if you hadn't realised but at least in my country I'm noticing that people are alot tighter with their money in recent years as the focus has been to reduce personal debt. The high educed by cheap credit has worn off and now people have come back down to earth - people are no longer buying new gadgets as frequently and the obstacles outside of the United States in emerging markets such as India and China have more to do with the regulatory requirement (check Brazil for such protectionism) than their products failing because they're 'not good enough'.
The pro-market has bank, a lot of, and much of that goes into updating hardware and software licenses. Doing the math, that "niche" market is still a large percentage profit wise when studios and businesses have tens if not hundreds of thousands to spend on upgrades. That isn't chump change.
If the argument that Apple needs to diversify then I agree - I've been saying for years that Apple should buy out Adobe and push its middleware off into a separate company along with Filemaker and maybe have a separate division specifically for delivering high end Mac Pro's etc.
HFS+ is long in the tooth, especially as large volumes and servers are becoming commonplace in the average home (shame ZFS licensing fell to the wayside as Apple did explore ZFS in Leopard beta's, which would have improved OS X use of large volumes such as Time Machine and media storage).
That has been addressed many times - and I've addressed it myself. Firstly use ZFS with Solaris in a desktop environment then comeback and say you want ZFS. Secondly there is the matter of licensing - if Sun doesn't want to licence it then there isn't much Apple can do. As for the file system - there is Core Storage and Apple is doing the same thing as Microsoft is doing with ReFS where the guts will be sitting inside Core Storage and HFS+ will merely be a compatibility layer sitting on top that is transparent to applications.
My parents even have a Synology DS212j with a Mac Mini as their HTPC. Linux based, which means OS X has to use SMB or AFP to access media outside of Synology's Assistant app. 10.7 had the worst revamp in network protocols, much of which was remedied with 10.8 but still needs some improvements. A good deal would be facilitated by quicker adoption of wireless ac. Apple was ahead of the game when they adopted Wireless-N years ago before many big players, what is keeping them from being ahead of the curve in wireless ac hardware and supporting kexts? This is a deviation from OS X advancements that made OS X a better OS.
So apparently it is Apple's fault that Synology DS212j is bundling a copy of netatalk which is almost a year and a half old? colour me confused as to why Apple should be blamed for Synology's laziness.
I'm not disagreeing with you in the least, you have some very valid points that I absolutely recognize. Social media, whether fad or not, is a big market and Apple is wise in integrating such into their main products. However, much of Forstall's influence in Apple was strong arming OS X engineers into further iOS integration at the cost of a more stable and advanced OS X. Recall that
Leopard was delayed a few times as iOS development pulled OS X engineers away. Apple is notorious for hiring cross platform engineers and keeping a small team as Jobs wanted to know everyone on the teams and keep a tight hold on those engineers. This was one of many factors that lead to Serlet leaving and Federighi taking over OS X software engineering with 10.7. 10.6 Snow Leopard was (arguably) one of the most polished OS X releases to date. Serlet became increasingly frustrated with engineer focus on iOS and Forstall's influence over Jobs. Serlet had little to do with 10.7 Lion, that was Federighi's baby. We all know how that went.
I know first hand this has been happening with OS X. It is a shame as past OS X updates were generally ahead of the curve, that has absolutely changed since 10.7.
Or you could be looking too deep into it and Serlet left because he wanted to change. I've left work places and assumptions were made about why I left - none of them were even remotely correct in nature and yet they persist because someone gets an idea stuck in their mind that doesn't come close to reality. There is a gradual merging of the lower layers of iOS for example AF Foundation started of in iOS and it is now in OS X and being expanded with developers being told not to write new code on the Quicktime Framework (in other words it is there for legacy backwards compatibility reasons and nothing more), OpenGL ES, Game Kit etc. IMHO it is iOS that is catching up to OS X rather than OS X being ignored - people are wanting more features found in OS X to also be in iOS whilst at the same time Apple is trying to harmonise the frameworks so developers can aim for both platforms without too much trickery required. End of the day though we'll find out in WWDC how things are working but there are a lot of things occurring behind the scenes that we aren't privy too which is part of the problem - when there is a void of information then the obvious thing occurs where people try to fill that void with some sort of meaningful explanation of what is happening.
The driver version is 8.12.45 310.40.00.05f01. Not sure if that's changed or not.
So we're gone from GeForce 8.10.44 304.10.65f03 (10.8.3) to probably 8.12.45 310.40.00.05f01 (10.8.4) when it is released. Looks like a fairly decent leap at least in terms of version numbers but at least for me on my iMac the experience with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB has been pretty decent so far so I guess the issues that are being raised are those outside of what I use my computer for.
