"Aesthetics" is a completely personal thing. No one at Apple is telling you, "This is our vision for Mac OS X and we're gonna do everything in our power to keep you from making it so you like it."
Don't like the reflective Dock for some reason or another? (It's distracting; it's useless; I don't like the look; the 0.1% extra processor usage is gonna melt my Performa 5200; whatever) You can hide it. Hey, its gone! No need to look at it anymore! I'm sure a good portion of users hide their docks already anyways to reclaim some screen real estate on laptops.
I don't see what all the hubbub is about. Obviously everybody is not going to love every aspect of the new interface, but I doubt Apple expects you to. Obviously Apple is trying to encourage more people to switch, and I think that the design changes being made in Leopard directly reflect that. A unified window theme throughout the entire OS adds to the experience of using OSX because different programs feel less disjointed and more whole, more integrated into the OS. There have been numerous improvements added in Leopard that, from a programmer standpoint, are merely flashy front-ends to simple little tasks or daemons. Look at Time Machine, for example. It's really just a simple backupd daemon running every hour, woopdeedo for that. Where's the part that screams "Apple" to an everyday consumer? Of course its in the flashy front-end.
Your everyday consumer likes eye candy. The new Dock is eye candy, the transparent Menu Bar is eye candy, Stacks is functional eye candy, Time Machine's front-end is eye candy for a Unix daemon. Do you notice a trend here? Apple wants new customers that are drawn to Mac OS X without having to go into why OSX is actually superior under-the-hood. Your average John Doe isn't going to understand what improvements in 64-bit computing or better multithreading support means, he gets nothing from that. So how do you get his business? Eye candy. So what do you do? You add eye candy.
You may see it as a frivolous addition that does nothing for you because you're a power user. You want the hard, under-the-hood improvements, and you'll get those. But Apple wants to attract the John Doe, eyecandy-loving user because he pays just as much for a new OS as the poweruser except there's more John Does. So what does Steve push when he talks about Leopard? Well, actually, he pushes both types: the eye-candy, and the under-the-hood improvements...just with more emphasis on the former at the moment.
That's what Apple is doing to themselves. It seems clear to me.
/rambling
Don't like the reflective Dock for some reason or another? (It's distracting; it's useless; I don't like the look; the 0.1% extra processor usage is gonna melt my Performa 5200; whatever) You can hide it. Hey, its gone! No need to look at it anymore! I'm sure a good portion of users hide their docks already anyways to reclaim some screen real estate on laptops.
I don't see what all the hubbub is about. Obviously everybody is not going to love every aspect of the new interface, but I doubt Apple expects you to. Obviously Apple is trying to encourage more people to switch, and I think that the design changes being made in Leopard directly reflect that. A unified window theme throughout the entire OS adds to the experience of using OSX because different programs feel less disjointed and more whole, more integrated into the OS. There have been numerous improvements added in Leopard that, from a programmer standpoint, are merely flashy front-ends to simple little tasks or daemons. Look at Time Machine, for example. It's really just a simple backupd daemon running every hour, woopdeedo for that. Where's the part that screams "Apple" to an everyday consumer? Of course its in the flashy front-end.
Your everyday consumer likes eye candy. The new Dock is eye candy, the transparent Menu Bar is eye candy, Stacks is functional eye candy, Time Machine's front-end is eye candy for a Unix daemon. Do you notice a trend here? Apple wants new customers that are drawn to Mac OS X without having to go into why OSX is actually superior under-the-hood. Your average John Doe isn't going to understand what improvements in 64-bit computing or better multithreading support means, he gets nothing from that. So how do you get his business? Eye candy. So what do you do? You add eye candy.
You may see it as a frivolous addition that does nothing for you because you're a power user. You want the hard, under-the-hood improvements, and you'll get those. But Apple wants to attract the John Doe, eyecandy-loving user because he pays just as much for a new OS as the poweruser except there's more John Does. So what does Steve push when he talks about Leopard? Well, actually, he pushes both types: the eye-candy, and the under-the-hood improvements...just with more emphasis on the former at the moment.
That's what Apple is doing to themselves. It seems clear to me.
/rambling