In my judgment , that title is both distraught and overstated .
Apple has at various times sold printers . And scanners . Anddigital camera . AndPDAs . And agame console . And more . Apart from a few year at the company ’s early childhood , Apple has never been only a computer company . And I ’m sure that many times over the past 20 years , OS development has been impress in some way of life by the development of other products . The major dispute with the Leopard annunciation is the fact that it was , well , announced .
More important , for a number of years now , Apple has been work on an interrelated but diverse range of products : desktops , laptops , waiter , rest home entertainment devices , iPods , telephone set . And we ’ll certainly see many other “ not a computer ” devices in the future . The key here is that most of these product run a version of Mac OS 10 — even the Apple TV and iPhone . So if , as Apple claims , development of Leopard was put on handle for a snatch so as to clean up Mac OS X on the iPhone , it ’s not as if OS X has been put on a shelf somewhere — the ship’s company isstill working on Mac OS X. Work on any of these devices is likely to profit the platform — theMacplatform — as a whole .
( And do n’t block all the fresh and update Mac example Apple has released in the past year or so : iMacs , Mac minis , Mac Pros , MacBooks , MacBook Pros , and Xserves — Apple still seems like a computer company to me — even if “ Computer ” is n’t formally part of its name anymore . )
eventually , it ’s also important to keep in judgement that what a “ computer ” is , and is used for , has change dramatically over the past five to 10 years , and will be interchange even faster in the years to come . Apple is one of the few companies that really gets this , and has been working to integrate its products — including its most valuable and strategic plus , Mac OS X — into hoi polloi ’s lives in manner that other “ computer ” vendor have n’t . It ’s no happenstance that Apple is recording platter profits while many other major computer vendors are seeing receipts fall .
Does it stink that Leopard ’s departure has been pushed back a few months ? Yep , especially to us oddball who want the latest and greatest — and require it yesterday . But Tiger is still the right OS out there ( sorry , Vista ) and will work on as well in July , August , and September as it does today . And I would n’t worry that Apple is “ no longer a computer company ” just because the iPhone has move around out to be a minor pep pill bump in Leopard ’s development . After all , the iPhone is really just the small Mac OS X computer ever , and its svelte profile should n’t slacken Leopard down all that much .
