Oh, Gizmodo. Are you still mad about the whole stolen iPhone thing?
How else to explain Jesus Diaz’s “Mountain Lion Review: What Happened to Apple’s Innovation?”? (No link because you have got to be kidding the Macalope.)
Mac OSX Lion seemed unpolished, and, worse, not innovative. When Mountain Lion dropped a couple weeks ago, we were pumped: It was a relatively rapid update, and we hoped it would address our concerns. Hrmph.
Let us now sit back and marvel at the monumental, nay, catastrophic amount of dunderheadedness required to post a review of a developer release. If we didn’t know that the Gizmodo folks were merely continuing to grind the same axe they’ve been grinding against Apple for years, we might wonder how how they could even figure out their own content management system. We might even be inclined to call some sort of social services organization to see about getting them into a home before they burn themselves by answering the iron.
Fortunately, we know they’re just mad, so we don’t have to do any of that. We can just make fun of them.
Mountain Lion has the same Finder and the same app-centered approach as its king-of-the-jungle forbearer: more of the same gimmicky interfaces full of leather and ripped out pages; more outdated graphic metaphors and unnecessarily cute eye candy. And yes, it has a few good new features, which are useful and welcome, but nothing zowielala amazing or innovative.
Gosh, how long has it been since Apple released Lion? Oh, right, seven months. A reasonable person might understand that a yearly release schedule would mean that each release isn’t necessarily as packed with changes as more irregular, monolithic releases.
But a reasonable person would not work at Gizmodo, so forget about those Venn diagrams ever intersecting.
Apple’s not going to miss out on its 30-percent cut and control over the platform. And why should it? It’s Apple’s platform and service, after all. But it still feels like Don Corleone making an offer devs can’t refuse.
Ah, yes! The guy writing for the website that purchased a stolen iPhone has the temerity to accuse Apple of acting like a mobster.
Diaz goes on to nitpick the design problems with the developer preview, which is enough to make you want to scream obscenities at your monitor if you don’t realize—like the educated readers you are—that he’s writing for Gizmodo, where posts about Apple don’t have to make sense, they just have to be negative.
Think about that for a second: Mountain Lion is conservative and boring—even gaudy at times. Meanwhile Microsoft is pushing the envelope and being innovative and elegant in its approach to user interface.
Hell. It froze.
Ahhh, yeah, OK, two things about this conclusion.
First of all, you just spent more than 1700 words lambasting Apple for failing to innovate because it was just putting elements of its mobile OS into its desktop OS—then you laud Microsoft for doing the same. What innovations does Windows 8 bring to the desktop? Metro? Talk about a solution in search of a problem.
Second, “pushing the envelope”? The whole raison d’être behind Windows 8 is to try to get Microsoft into the tablet game, a game that started in earnest two years ago and left Redmond in the dust. While the company does deserve credit for taking a different approach than Apple (unlike every Android tablet vendor), it’s playing catch-up here, not leading the pack.
Gosh, it’s almost as if this conclusion calls into doubt your whole review of a developer preview of a product not coming for months.
Ha. Ha.
[Editors’ Note: Each week the Macalope skewers the worst of the week’s coverage of Apple and other technology companies. In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]