Jackass of the Week: Leander Kahney

Leander “Cult of Mac” Kahney, complaining that he was bored by the WWDC keynote address:

Granted, the system as a whole looks slick, and Jobs said he was keeping some new features “top secret” to stop Microsoft from copying them. But the sneak peek just confirmed what we already know: OS X is so mature and polished, major system upgrades are more about tweaks than big new functions. (Yeah, I know there’s a lot of technical wizardry under the hood, but that’s for the geeks).

[…]

This week’s developer’s conference is a big show for Mac nerds. More than 4,000 of them paid a pretty penny to be here this week, and Jobs’ talk is the highlight of the show. For many of them, this is the only chance they get to see their hero in the flesh.

Kahney seems to have completely missed that this was Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, not the World Wide Jackass Non-Technical I-Treat-the-Mac-as-a-Cult-Rather-Than-a-Computing-Platform Hack Conference.

WWDC attendees didn’t spend “a pretty penny” to see the fucking keynote; they spent their money so they could get the technical low-down on what’s new in 10.5, and so they could get face time with Apple engineers. Apple announced a lot of cool new stuff: garbage collection for Objective-C, Xcode 3.0, Core Animation, 64-bit support for the entire OS, the first new interface for Interface Builder since way back in the Next era — the list of “cool new shit” that was announced is really pretty long.

Complaining that the announcements at WWDC only appealed to “the geeks” is like going to a rock concert and complaining that all they did was play loud music.

★ Friday, 11 August 2006