Obligatory Pre-Macworld Post

It’s that time of year again. As usual, I’m not going to try to predict. Lots of people are doing that, and either most of what we’ll see on Monday is either obvious if you’ve followed the Intel hardware roadmaps, or it falls into the category of “super-sekret, many chinese walls inside of Apple” projects, in which case predicting is ridiculously hard (and less fun than immersing yourself in the reality distortion field for a few hours).

I do however have a wish list of things that I’d like to see happen at Macworld. These aren’t so much predications as statements of pain points that I am having:

Mac OS 10.5.2
It’s amazing that I should be wishing for an operating system point upgrade for Macworld. Three months after release, I still haven’t upgraded to Leopard. Every time I work up the courage to do it (the DVD has been on my desk for 3 months) I see another report of some Leopard related disaster and turn back. Truth be told, even if 10.5.2 ships this week, I won’t be installing till enough other people have taken the arrows.

Universal Quicken
Two years into the Intel Mac transition, we still don’t have an Intel version of Quicken. This, and Microsoft Office (not that I use it much) are the only major PowerPC applications left on my machine. Firing either of them up is a huge pain in the neck, and the sluggishness is annoying. Office is ready to ship (not that I care much), so that leaves Quicken.

Cinema Display revamp
I’ve lost track of how many times this has been predicted. My 21″ CRT is running at 1920×1440, which is microscopic by anyones measuring. It’s time for a big LCD for me. Until I started taking pictures, I would have been happy with the current displays, but now the color gamuts just aren’t wide enough. This is leftover from last Macworld.

3G GPS iPhone
I am pretty sure this is coming sometime this year. But I would really like one now. But I bet not.

Aperture 2.0
I already wrote about this a few weeks ago. Aperture is long in the tooth. Unfortunately Macworld is the wrong show for this. This is a “pro” photography app. So it’s more likely that this shows up at PMA in a few more weeks. I hope so. The longer I use Lightroom, the more images go into it, and the harder it is for me to switch back.

Lightroom 2.0
See Aperture 2.0.

Java 6
Yes, I know. Wrong show, wrong audience. But wouldn’t Apple like to get over the embarrassment of this?

10 thoughts on “Obligatory Pre-Macworld Post

  1. John C. Welch

    Not having Java 6 is hardly an embarassment, unless you need to keep up with the joneses as a checkbox. Every single enterprise Java project i’m running is based all on java 1.4, with java 1.5 upgrades in a “if we need it” time frame, and that’s all IBM software on Windows talking to mainframes.

    Java 6 is really not that much of a requirement.

  2. Chris Adams

    FWIW, most of the Leopard-related reports are either urban legends or more accurately attributed to pre-existing damage and unsupported hacks (e.g. APE). We upgraded a bunch of systems when 10.5 came out to avoid some nasty NFS/automount problems in 10.4 and haven’t had any complaints about the upgrade other than the Java performance issues.

  3. Todd Blanchard

    I notice Mail.app crashes quite a bit more since the upgrade and seems to consume a lot of resources. I’ve rebuilt various mailboxes a couple times – still seems to have issues.

    I’d like it a lot if they fixed that.

  4. Ted Leung Post author

    Chris – I’ve personally witnessed a number of these problems, so in my case, I don’t consider them urban legends. People are having real problems, and many of the people that I know don’t have APE or other haxies installed.

  5. Ed

    Sorry, it is hard to look at a duck and think “chicken”… 🙂

    I would like to see laptops announced soon with low power chips and it would be great if Apple was first. I am at a point where I will trade some performance for longer battery life.

    On my fantasy wish list would be an iPod with a replaceable battery and here I use “replaceable” to mean “a battery that I can replace in a matter of seconds so I can carry a spare.”

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