The Steve Jobs Patented Reality Distortion Field must have received some sort of upgrade, because from where I'm sitting, the big sparkly demo of Leopard at the WWDC Keynote was a big steaming pile of mediocrity. But first, let's engage the Wayback Machine to last August, at WWDC 2006, where His Steveness unveiled 10 Fantastical Super-glorious features of the new Leopard. And there were some nice ones in there. Time Machine was unveiled, and a pretty neat concept it was. Kudos. Then came Spaces, which is killing off the wonderful Virtue Desktops. Okay, fine -- it's nice and a good feature. They unveiled Core Animation, which doesn't thrill me, but is undoubtedly more relevant to developers. Mail was shown to be getting "improvements", like bloated HTML stationery (though Notes and To-Dos are nice). They talked about changes in Dashboard (yawn), and finally unveiled the glorious iChat, where you can now put an animated backdrop behind you when you're chatting. Amazing. I was unimpressed then, and I'm unimpressed now. Why? Because this year's keynote was pretty much the same thing. Sure, they unveiled a couple of new things, which I'll go into presently, but apparently, despite the hundreds of new features supposedly in the new OS, they chose to focus on the same things at this year's keynote. And the audience lapped it up! This is amazing to me! Is this keynote aimed at developers or soccer moms? Why on earth is it of some earth shattering importance that I can put a movie of a rollercoaster on a backdrop behind me in a chat window? How can you stand up on a stage and seriously plug the fact that your brand-spanking-new 64 bit OS lets you send spammy colorful HTML mail? The biggest issues I have with this are threefold:

1. Many of the tweaks are not part of the operating system. They're part of the set of applications that happen to come with it. Many of these applications could be entirely standalone. There's no reason to not simply release an update to Mail, or Safari. Maybe the iChat tweaks rely on Core Animation, which I can understand being tied to the OS. But, really, why on earth is stationery on Mail considered to be part of Leopard? What possible bearing does it have on the OS? None. It's an attempt to dress up a few minor tweaks as something major, and by counting every change in every bundled application, they can claim over 300 "innovations". It's dishonest, and irrelevant.
2. They are highlighting the minutest tweak as if it's a big deal. The fact that the menu bar is now transparent falls into the "oh, by the way, look at this little thing we did". It's something you let the user notice on their own the first time they boot up as a neat tweak, not something you proclaim standing in front of thousands of people at your biggest developer conference. The Dock is now 3D! Who cares?! Why is that in any way worth talking about? He should have been standing up there talking about ZFS*, DTrace... you know, important stuff. Actually, he should have been apologizing profusely for letting Leopard slip to October, so that Apple can embark on what is sure to be the biggest disappointment since the G4 Cube -- the iPhone. Which brings me to my next point.
3. They're solving problems that don't exist. There are manufacturers out there who have the phone business down. Why is Apple wasting its time and money in this space? And Safari?! Was the world really looking for another web browser? Especially one that doesn't run on linux (which has a better market share than Apple, if I'm not mistaken). It's not even a revenue stream for them -- they're giving it away. Are they trying to win converts over to OS X? Safari isn't going to do it. Trust me.

Apple has lost its way. It's peaked, and it's going to come crashing down. I'm not some world renowned analyst, I'm just a guy with some common sense who thinks OS X is the best personal computing operating system out there (I'd never run it as a server, mind you). I'd love to see it get more market share. However, Apple seems to keep changing its mind about what it is. They claim to be a hardware company, but their highest profile devices these days are personal entertainment devices. They're trying to enter the highly competitive mobile phone market at a price point that's sure to kill that effort. They're releasing set-top boxes that are crippled and not even capable of the most basic function -- recording television shows. And at their most tech-savvy audience in the world, they show off that the little dock at the bottom of the screen can reflect (the irony here being that almost every hardcore Mac user I've come across doesn't even use the dock, relying the wonderful Quicksilver instead). If Apple really wants to do something amazing that will have a profound effect on the market, it's really simple. Sell OS X as a retail box to be installed on any computer. They've already got Microsoft beat in terms of features, usability and price. The switch to Intel CPUs makes this the most obvious thing in the world, yet they balk at it because they don't want their glorious OS running on some whitebox. Woops: It seems there's No ZFS in OS X. Sigh. Update 2: But wait, there is ZFS in Leopard. Read only. Sigh. Again. References:

• Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - Desktop
• WWDC 2006 Keynote liveblog
• Leopard fully enveiled