Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 24th Jun 2003 15:32 UTC
I was present at Apple's WWDC yesterday and witnessed one of the historical moments in Apple's history, the introduction of their 64-bit platform. Am I impressed? The answer is complicated. I was happy to see Apple moving on and deliver. But I would have expected nothing less from a 4 billion tech company who had the need to catch up with the "other" platform, the 32-bit PC. You all heard by now what's new in yesterday's press releases and news coverings. But here is a wrap up of the first day of the conference and a commentary on what Apple really announced yesterday, underneath its surrounding distortion field.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Eugenia, I think you need to hold yourself to your own standards... if you are going to criticize the poor journalist sitting next to you because he was impressed by the Expose demo, and whine about how people are so easily impressed by things that would be obvious if only they knew how everything worked internally... then you shouldn't criticize Quartz Extreme for doing resizing less smoothly than BeOS. You know well that it's a case of comparing Apples and oranges (heh) -- BeOS is able to be so fast because it has a very simple, straightforward, low level rendering engine. No vector-based graphic transformations, no alpha blending, no composition layer, no non-rectangular windows. OS/X's screen renderer is an order of magnitude more ambitious regarding the features it supports, so of course it's going to take more CPU power than BeOS. Not that being slow is good, but that was a design tradeoff that Apple consciously decided, and IMHO it was the right one, since in another year of optimizations and hardware speedups, OS/X will be as fast as BeOS *and* have the cool features too.