Could OS X's success become its demise?

[macrem]

When a highly innovative product like OS X first releases, early adopters lap it up. These are people who readily, but carefully, adopt new ideas and are willing to give up old habits.

Based on the evolving tone of posts here, I feel as though OS X is getting a lot of attention lately from skeptical late majority users, per the innovation adoption curve. These users are influenced by a need for familiarity & have their established habits mostly as Windows users. Some will go as far as arguing against logic in favor of familiar functionality.

Could this noise be effectively filtered or will it become a bad sign for the future of OS X in the eyes of innovators/early adopters? What if Apple's innovative leadership shifts to more passive management sympathetic to a swell of users seeking familiarity, drowning the voice of the innovators and early adopters who helped shape a very cool product?

I think that Apple is still a very innovative company & can point its own innovation inward to find ways to remain innovative, although it seems this can be quite a heavy challenge in the corporate world.

Thoughts/Ideas?

 

[maflynn]

I think Snow Leopard is quite innovative and a lot of great features. Those features are not directed towards the end user but rather developers. So if you compare what changed/didn't change between Snow Leopard and Leopard, very little has occurred.

You can then make the assumption (incorrectly) that apple isn't innovating but nothing could be further from the truth. The reason why they only charged 29 dollars for the upgrade was that there is very little to offer the consumer. I believe we will see significant updates to OSX in 10.7 because 10.6 has laid the ground work for embracing the newer technology.

Just read this very indepth review and you'll see the level of innovation in SL Ars Technica

 

[Eidorian]

Tiger was OS X at its prime. I was able to move to Leopard but Snow Leopard isn't usable for me. It's a $29 coaster for now.

 

[maflynn]

Tiger was OS X at its prime.

I'll agree with you there. I'm hoping the updates/changes introduced in 10.6 means that 10.7 and up will see some exciting new features directed at the consumer and not the developer.

I'm happy with 10.6 but I'll not argue the point that there's very little in 10.6 for the consumer to use. In fact a user would be heard pressed to know which OS he's in 10.5 or 10.6 but given the price point and relative stability of 10.6, I'm content with it.

 

[Eidorian]

I'll agree with you there. I'm hoping the updates/changes introduced in 10.6 means that 10.7 and up will see some exciting new features directed at the consumer and not the developer.

I'm happy with 10.6 but I'll not argue the point that there's very little in 10.6 for the consumer to use. In fact a user would be heard pressed to know which OS he's in 10.5 or 10.6 but given the price point and relative stability of 10.6, I'm content with it.

Leopard added enough features to make up for breaking my workflow. Snow Leopard breaks it but the majority of the feature set you never see and some of the changes are half hearted too.

To this date each new version of OS X past Tiger has reduced my productivity slightly. I'm still on Leopard for that and the extra 30 minutes of battery life.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

To this date each new version of OS X past Tiger has reduced my productivity slightly. I'm still on Leopard for that and the extra 30 minutes of battery life.

Tiger really seemed like it was just meant to run your applications with few OS features that got in the way (other than dashboard, but that's so minor I never even see mine). Since Leopard the OS has come with a few "look at me" features, that always seem to slow me down. Plus Tiger was just soooo much more stable, I never had any time where my system would slow to a crawl when browsing, like it does in Snow Leopard, and I never had big OS crashes.

 

[maflynn]

Leopard added enough features to make up for breaking my workflow. Snow Leopard breaks it but the majority of the feature set you never see and some of the changes are half hearted too.

To this date each new version of OS X past Tiger has reduced my productivity slightly. I'm still on Leopard for that and the extra 30 minutes of battery life.

What I noticed and don't like is that after Tiger, OSX added bloat, Leopard was a hefty OS. 10.6 managed to pair it down a bit, but only by trimming the PPC code from the libraries. Up to 10.4 each subsequent version was faster then the prior version. That changed with 10.5

 

[springyfox]

10.6*is MUCH faster than 10.5 here (which was admittedly a little slower than 10.4).

I don't seem to be having any of the 10.6 issues either, and am really glad I updated both my systems.

 

[r0k]

What I noticed and don't like is that after Tiger, OSX added bloat, Leopard was a hefty OS. 10.6 managed to pair it down a bit, but only by trimming the PPC code from the libraries. Up to 10.4 each subsequent version was faster then the prior version. That changed with 10.5

10.6 not only leaves out PPC code but it also uses compressed Intel binaries. I went back and enabled Rosetta so I could run some of my older apps, and it only ate about 2 meg more disk space. I loved being able to shell out a mere $49 (family pack) for a whopping 20+ gig of added free disk space on each of 5 machines! To me, this was the biggest win for "the consumer", a smaller, faster and more efficient OS.

This ad is a clear example of under promise and over deliver. I bought the SL family pack and it freed 20-30 gig on every machine I installed it on.

I also liked the idea that for a modest cost, I could get an OS restore media that brought any machine up to 10.6 rather than having to boot from an old 10.4 or older DVD and having to sit through a 700+meg software update to get current again.

Would I have paid even more for Snow Leopard? Possibly because it recovered so much disk space. But if I didn't know up front that I was going to reclaim so much space I might have decided to pass up SL and wait for something else with more conspicuous feature updates. Another claim Apple makes for SL is faster Time Machine backups. I've noticed this as well. I'm glad I popped for SL and I'm glad it was priced at a level I didn't have to think about it or I might have passed up a really good value.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

I would just like to point out that, no, you did not get 20+GB of free space with the install. OS X counts gigabytes differently now, so it's read in GB and not GiB (as with all other OS's)

 

[xUKHCx]

I would just like to point out that, no, you did not get 20+GB of free space with the install. OS X counts gigabytes differently now, so it's read in GB and not GiB (as with all other OS's)

Not quite, the Snow Leopard installer is not going to count in two different ways. When installing Snow Leopard and I believe even afterwards it is possible to view the installer logs, in there are the reported free size before and after.

Hell even if it was counted differently 20GB does not equal ~7GiB.

Found the numbers:

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=8380723#post8380723
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=8380835#post8380835

 

[definitive]

10.6 not only leaves out PPC code but it also uses compressed Intel binaries. I went back and enabled Rosetta so I could run some of my older apps, and it only ate about 2 meg more disk space. I loved being able to shell out a mere $49 (family pack) for a whopping 20+ gig of added free disk space on each of 5 machines! To me, this was the biggest win for "the consumer", a smaller, faster and more efficient OS.

This ad is a clear example of under promise and over deliver. I bought the SL family pack and it freed 20-30 gig on every machine I installed it on.

I also liked the idea that for a modest cost, I could get an OS restore media that brought any machine up to 10.6 rather than having to boot from an old 10.4 or older DVD and having to sit through a 700+meg software update to get current again.

Would I have paid even more for Snow Leopard? Possibly because it recovered so much disk space. But if I didn't know up front that I was going to reclaim so much space I might have decided to pass up SL and wait for something else with more conspicuous feature updates. Another claim Apple makes for SL is faster Time Machine backups. I've noticed this as well. I'm glad I popped for SL and I'm glad it was priced at a level I didn't have to think about it or I might have passed up a really good value.

it didn't really free that much space for you. it simply changed the way the amount of storage is displayed, therefore causing you to think that you got more free space than you actually did.

 

[macrem]

From Maflynn's Ars link:

Installation footprint
Rosetta aside, Snow Leopard simply puts fewer bits on your disk. Apple claims it "takes up less than half the disk space of the previous version," and that's no lie. A clean, default install (including fully-generated Spotlight indexes) is 16.8 GB for Leopard and 5.9 GB for Snow Leopard. (Incidentally, these numbers are both powers-of-two measurements; see sidebar.)

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

Hell even if it was counted differently 20GB does not equal ~7GiB.

While that may be true, the way OS X reports the hard disk size does indeed account for it. It's not like I gained 35GB going from GiB to GB on my 500GB disk, considering it was reported to have something like 465GB before I upgraded to Snow Leopard and 500GB after.

 

[iLog.Genius]

I think it's the same for anything. iPhone came out and basically introduced the smartphone at the consumer level. Three versions later it hasn't really brought anything to the table but small updates that could've been put in the first iPhone. I'm not going to argue about that but that's how I see it. The same goes for BlackBerry. Early BlackBerry quickly became the standard for corporate America. But now it's pretty much the same phone with a small add-on and tweaked things but nothing really groundbreaking. Right now, even though RIM still grows, it already feels like it's killing itself.

 

[alleycat]

What I noticed and don't like is that after Tiger, OSX added bloat, Leopard was a hefty OS. 10.6 managed to pair it down a bit, but only by trimming the PPC code from the libraries. Up to 10.4 each subsequent version was faster then the prior version. That changed with 10.5

Yup, that's why a lot of my hardware doesn't work correctly with 10.6!!

I even had to go back into OS 9 classic on my iBook to access an old app today. I can't do that in Snow Leopard. I think we're on the downhill now, that is unless you have the latest in hardware.

 

[ARF900]

I'll agree with you there. I'm hoping the updates/changes introduced in 10.6 means that 10.7 and up will see some exciting new features directed at the consumer and not the developer.

I'm happy with 10.6 but I'll not argue the point that there's very little in 10.6 for the consumer to use. In fact a user would be heard pressed to know which OS he's in 10.5 or 10.6 but given the price point and relative stability of 10.6, I'm content with it.

Not a lot of new features but dock expose put windows 7 (Superbar) behind my toilet paper roll.

 

[HyperX13]

I got into the Mac world 6 years ago or so, but I abandoned it because in my opinion OSX was much SLOWER than windows was (even on same machine). This all changed with Leopard. I am a total mac addict now. I think I personally switched 30+ people to the mac platform.

 

[mysterytramp]

While that may be true, the way OS X reports the hard disk size does indeed account for it. It's not like I gained 35GB going from GiB to GB on my 500GB disk, considering it was reported to have something like 465GB before I upgraded to Snow Leopard and 500GB after.

How many threads are going to fight this stupid battle.

When you "save" any number of gigabytes, it's not the size of your hard disk that's being measured but the number of bytes that were saved there in the first place. How much was on your hard disk before an SL install and how many after?

My experience:

Pre SL: 47484043264 bytes.

Post SL: 34822000000 bytes.

Base 10 difference: about 12.7 gigabytes.

Base 2 difference: about 11.8 gigabytes.

The "savings" has nothing to do with how SL reports a disk's size.

mt

 

[rekhyt]

I'll agree with you there. I'm hoping the updates/changes introduced in 10.6 means that 10.7 and up will see some exciting new features directed at the consumer and not the developer.

I'm happy with 10.6 but I'll not argue the point that there's very little in 10.6 for the consumer to use. In fact a user would be heard pressed to know which OS he's in 10.5 or 10.6 but given the price point and relative stability of 10.6, I'm content with it.

I kinda disagree. I liked Leopard over Tiger mainly because of the 3D dock D) but was slightly disappointed with Snow Leopard. :\

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

How many threads are going to fight this stupid battle.

When you "save" any number of gigabytes, it's not the size of your hard disk that's being measured but the number of bytes that were saved there in the first place. How much was on your hard disk before an SL install and how many after?

My experience:

Pre SL: 47484043264 bytes.

Post SL: 34822000000 bytes.

Base 10 difference: about 12.7 gigabytes.

Base 2 difference: about 11.8 gigabytes.

The "savings" has nothing to do with how SL reports a disk's size.

mt

The issue is people use this as their reference for how much they gained:

QED

 

[FSMBP]

Tiger was OS X at its prime. I was able to move to Leopard but Snow Leopard isn't usable for me. It's a $29 coaster for now.

That's 100% right.

Tiger was truly way way way ahead of its time and released stable version. It was fast, packed full with great end-user features, and is what drew me into OS X.

Sure Leopard had great features, but it seemed slow and filled with eye-candy that served no purpose (the 3-D Dock and its reflection that does NOTHING but use up CPU/RAM). Oh and Snow Leopard is what Leopard should have been (Leopard + Speed). I just wish Apple would increase manpower so that OS X and iPhone can grew as quickly as needed.

To the OP, I have a different perspective. I feel that OS X's success will be its demise because of the ego-curse. I feel Apple may not be so tuned to innovating as they become ahead in the game. It will be what Microsoft turned into to (granted, their innovations weren't huge ever). I just hope OS X usage grews slowly so that Apple is forced to constantly be innovative/clever.

 

[Winni]

When a highly innovative product like OS X first releases, early adopters lap it up. These are people who readily, but carefully, adopt new ideas and are willing to give up old habits.

Based on the evolving tone of posts here, I feel as though OS X is getting a lot of attention lately from skeptical late majority users, per the innovation adoption curve. These users are influenced by a need for familiarity & have their established habits mostly as Windows users. Some will go as far as arguing against logic in favor of familiar functionality.

Could this noise be effectively filtered or will it become a bad sign for the future of OS X in the eyes of innovators/early adopters? What if Apple's innovative leadership shifts to more passive management sympathetic to a swell of users seeking familiarity, drowning the voice of the innovators and early adopters who helped shape a very cool product?

I think that Apple is still a very innovative company & can point its own innovation inward to find ways to remain innovative, although it seems this can be quite a heavy challenge in the corporate world.

Thoughts/Ideas?

Early adopters always jump at the new features on ANY platform. But the majority of users simply hates it when their workflow is broken in any way - broken workflows are counter-productive and things that have worked shouldn't be changed just for the sake of change.

Microsoft's Vista and Office 2007 releases were a debacle most and foremost because Microsoft changed too much and their conservative user majority hated it. They just didn't want to learn anything new, and it didn't matter that many of the things that Microsoft innovated were actually better than what they had before.

Oh, and no user cares a lot for under-the-hood changes anyway. Only if it affects them negatively.

There were only a few real improvements on the user level in Leopard and Snow Leopard: QuickLook and better network integration come to my mind, but that's almost it. But both Leopard and Snow Leopard were royal pains in the butt as upgrades, because of their unbelievable amount of bugs and instabilities in the initial release and because both actually made everything SLOWER. Snow Leopard still has a completely broken wireless stack, for example - I was only able to "fix" it by NOT using Apple wireless hardware at all.

Then Snow Leopard's greatest "innovation" so far was the dropping of PowerPC hardware support. I strongly doubt that all those late Quad G4 buyers were in the least amused by having Apple tell them that their extremely expensive Pro equipment that they purchased two years ago is now officially dead. Just imagine the uproar if Microsoft would have dropped support for 32-Bit CPUs when they released Vista or Windows 7. Their corporate partners would have killed them. But as it is, Apple only operates in the consumer market and gets away with killing backwards compatibility.

But in the business world, backwords compatibility - and unbroken work flows - are MUST HAVE features. You don't want to send thousands of employees to expensive trainings just because somebody came up with a new way of doing the very same old thing. Now if you have a new way of doing something new, and if that new thing has a chance of improving one's productivity, then you might get away with it. But you better don't go and change the way of how old things are done without adding a switch to go back to the old options.

But as I've already said, Apple does not play in the corporate field, so they don't have to care about that. Their entire product portfolio is targeted at consumers and the attraction of Apple products to professionals is rather by accident than by design: It's the FreeBSD Unix foundation of their platform that enables OS X for more advanced uses. If they were still on the old Mac OS foundation, nobody in the tech world would talk about Apple anymore - or use their products.

However, once again, Apple is not really taking advantage of that technological foundation, they only focus on the parts that fit home user requirements.

 

[appleguy123]

That's 100% right.

Tiger was truly way way way ahead of its time and released stable version. It was fast, packed full with great end-user features, and is what drew me into OS X.

Sure Leopard had great features, but it seemed slow and filled with eye-candy that served no purpose (the 3-D Dock and its reflection that does NOTHING but use up CPU/RAM). Oh and Snow Leopard is what Leopard should have been (Leopard + Speed). I just wish Apple would increase manpower so that OS X and iPhone can grew as quickly as needed.

To the OP, I have a different perspective. I feel that OS X's success will be its demise because of the ego-curse. I feel Apple may not be so tuned to innovating as they become ahead in the game. It will be what Microsoft turned into to (granted, their innovations weren't huge ever). I just hope OS X usage grews slowly so that Apple is forced to constantly be innovative/clever.

I don't think Apple could ever stop innovating. They have to consistently make an OS that makes us want to buy there expensive hardware. If your favorite sit down restaurant stopped making good food, and McDonalds continued to make the same food at 1/3 the price, you would be stupid not to buy it.

 

[UnixNut]

But as I've already said, Apple does not play in the corporate field, so they don't have to care about that. Their entire product portfolio is targeted at consumers and the attraction of Apple products to professionals is rather by accident than by design: It's the FreeBSD Unix foundation of their platform that enables OS X for more advanced uses. If they were still on the old Mac OS foundation, nobody in the tech world would talk about Apple anymore - or use their products.

I agree. I started playing with Apple back in the days of Apple IIe's and have installed versions 4 to 9 on different plat forms, LCII's, etc. It wasn't until the use of BSD that I took a serious look at it. If Mac changes this part, then they will lose a lot of technical support they have built up because of it.

With that said. I hope Mac doesn't follow in MS's footsteps and go from selling an OS to renting it (Read their EULA), and all the stupid games they play with Home verses Pro.

And for the windows weenies that complain about change, they complained when windows went from 3.1 to 95, to 2k, to XP, and on to vista, etc.... I wouldn't let their whining bother you, its what they do best anyway.