In the span of ten years (2001 - 2010), they brought Unix computers to the mass market, revolutionized the smartphone, and introduced mainstream tablets. Saying that there's a lack of innovation there is ridiculous to me. I am extremely pleased that Apple only rarely embraces change for the sake of change[1].
I get the sense that people like us tend to want to see lots of changes, and are too quick to write things off just because they don't look that different from last year's model.
All that said, I certainly don't think iOS is perfect. I think Apple needs to add user accounts to the iPad, and allow for some IPC and replacement of system components on iOS, among other things.
[1] cf. this god-awful skeumorphic thing that is finally being put out to pasture. And the Flower Power and Dalmatian iMacs. And that whole "It's called iTools, not wait .Mac, no wait MobileMe, no wait iCloud!" thing has been a total disaster.
Not really. 90% of Mac users don't care or know what Unix is. They don't know that OS X's toolchain and userland are based on FreeBSD. All they care about is ease of use.
Developers like OS X because it is Unix, and if OS X wasn't, they would just be using GNU+Linux or BSD anyway.
> Not really. 90% of Mac users don't care or know what Unix is.
This is exactly why it is brilliant. The average user is NOT a unix user, but the average developer is. The reason OS X is doing so well the same reason Facebook Home bombed. Developers are actually using the systems they are writing code for.
In a sense, however, this is egregious. Since 10.6 OS X has been about abandoning developers and professionals and catering to consumers. The removal of 2-dimensional workspace management, inconsistency in NATIVE application look and feel (this is ridiculous, I can understand when there's inconsistency in third party applications, but to have in-house apps look and feel completely different is absurd) and the inability to easily remove unneeded or unwanted "features" in the OS has made OS X a pain in the ass for many, including me.
I've vacillated on switching back to Ubuntu for quite a while now. I always end up making a Linux partition, installing Ubuntu on it, but I come back to OS X, just because
1. Less worry about configuration
2. Greater OS-wide service communication and integration
3. Laziness
I've been considering creating a GNU+Linux distro with an OpenStep-compatible toolkit at its core (http://gnustep.org/) so that I can get the famous Cocoa look and feel, but with the modularity of Linux.
I don't understand this sentiment. Apple is releasing groundbreaking new products at the same rate they always have. They are certainly innovating no slower then they always have.
