Gadgetory

hi everyone welcome to reporters roundtable I am Rafe Needleman and San Francisco's our weekly show where we talk about a single tech topic each time and today we are talking about the Mac operating system OS 10 or oh 6 as everybody calls it is that right everybody calls it x yeah it's not no it's OS 10 and the next one's going to be called mountain lion it's time for our yearly look at the Macintosh desktop laptop operating system a evolution now the operating system battle is evolving in really interesting way so I thought it'd be time for us to get back in and look at this smartphone operating system design is really influencing the desktop laptop operating system the cloud is becoming an integral part of a localized operating system strategy and to talk about that I can think of no two better people on the guests I have today first of all our own intrepid apple reporter josh lowensohn who is joining us here Josh thanks coming in yeah good and uh Brian Chen from the New York Times formerly of wired and author of always on how the iphone unlocked the anything anytime anywhere future and locked us in hey thanks for having me here thanks for joining us Brian it's good to see you again Brian was on the show back in 2010 we were talking about the app store when that was a newer thing and he's got some great stories on the times of course you guys should all check out uh now before I get started on the show Oh mountain lion was announced just a week in a day ago officially and people knew it was coming but we just had the shareholders meeting and I don't want to get too much into that but because we have a whole newsroom out there and Brian I think you are aware of what was going on there Josh you were actually there anything important come out of the Apple shareholders meeting I mean the most interesting part of those meetings obviously is the Q&A session and that's when shareholders just basically get to get up and ask tim cook and whoever else is there any sort of questions they want and so this year you know some of the big questions or are you doing a TV which of course they didn't talk about you know when's when's the next device coming out can't talk about that but they did say some interest stuff about Facebook you know there have been questions lately about why Twitter over something like Facebook which is you know monumentally larger and used by more people and and Tim Cook's answer that was you know what we like Facebook and we do kind of plan on doing more things with them hmm so it's kind of cryptic interesting brian anything you take away from it the shareholders meetings are usually just the shareholders saying oh you guys have so much money what are you gonna do all this money an apple says well we can't tell you what we're gonna do with the money but it's gonna blow your mind this year that's what they said blow your mind and so that that's pretty much how I would summarize how shareholders meeting GG are for Apple at least for the past few years does apples pay dividends no they don't and that was one of the big things that people were wondering about because now they have you know a hundred billion dollars in cash right well it's not I mean they have a big chunk of cash it in terms of like long term securities that makes up you know kind of a big chunk of that but yeah it's a lot of money it's enough money the point where you can buy you know a lot of big companies and make a lot of acquisitions and in fact after the shareholder shareholders meeting last night there was news that broke out that they had actually acquired chomp which is like a App Store search tool for Android and iOS yeah oh that's right that chomp I covered them a really really interesting app recommendation engine a while ago called crosswalk yeah I have to call them and one they must be like dang shouldn't yeah all right let's get into the operating system news which we're here to talk about today it's called mountain lion it's like a lioness it's like leopard and snow leopard was leopard s I mean that's a good way to think about it's basically just kind of a few you know new things tapped on to something that you already kind of know it's not the major ground making changes now first of all when is mountain lion going to arrive for real people not to be in summer they haven't said how much it cost yet but it's gonna be coming out in summer which is just one year after lion came out now line was a pretty major upgrade and that was how much was that for end-users 39 bucks just thirty dollars and that was like when they started distributing it through the app store instead of a set of disks and it sold really well I mean thirty dollars is is a pretty remarkable price for an operating system motive imagine they're going to continue selling it for that price if they continue using the app store to distribute it I want to talk about the economics of this briefly thirty dollars for a major operating system if you're at all used to the Microsoft way of doing business where Microsoft makes all its money from software thirty dollars is nothing compared to go ahead Brian hey I think this goes along with apples business model right so they use software so that they can sell hardware for the most part they don't even need to make a lot of money on the software so long as you're buying a whole bunch of iphones or macs and so on it benefits them to keep the price of the software low because they want to sell whole bunch of hardware now lion the current operating system the current version of OS 10 is quite good why does Apple need to do I mean they've accelerated the pace of their updates it used to be I think a leopard and snow leopard or on two year cycle on two year cycle then you got lion and now Mountain language on a one year cycle Josh why have they accelerated the pace of the major operating system updates I think it's it needs to keep pace with iOS and devices like the iPhone the iPad people are kind of really accustomed to it yearly annual update that makes major changes in the case of iOS 5 which they released in october they kind of a lot of these things that were a part of that the main kind of apps and features those who come over to Mac os10 now with mountain lion and it's kind of it's an understanding that people do things people expect to be able to use some of the same things they have on their phone on their Mac because they're corollaries they're such as reminders and notes those are some of the big features that have come over you know one would think that you know it's difficult enough to make a major update to an operating system no matter the platform whether it's a smartphone tablet or a real computer one would think that trying to get these two operating systems in sync in some kind of feature or operational sink if not code sync would actually slow things down because they're separate projects how is Apple able to start accelerating the pace of updates when actually it seems like the work they're doing is getting much more complex I think yeah go forward bring it they have so much money and they can just keep investing in the engineers to do this stuff they don't need to pull back any punches anymore and you can see with the yearly annual release of mountain lion or I mean OS 10 upgrades they're going to keep going forward with that mm-hmm you also have a big difference from companies like Microsoft or they're just a ton of divisions kind of working on these things and then try and pull little bits from each division try and work together it takes longer to do that whereas with Apple you have kind of a core team of people who are working in this and then there also I mean in the case of iOS they actually pulled some people over Mac so those two teams are kind of very closely related when it comes to the engineering backgrounds and and the overall goal of going in one direction yeah one of the things we learned from the Steve Jobs book was that you know the that Steve Jobs was a fairly despotic ruler of Apple and he hated the idea of divisions which is a corporate concept of you gotta kind of part of the company suing this part of companies doing that were there were no divisions he hated the words like it's the device of us that's exactly the wrong idea is Apple still as unified under new leadership as it was under jobs i mean the products we're seeing now are still still have you know jobs on them right it can't go on the way it was then i mean it's hard to tell since they're so secretive but considering that mountain lion is it's getting more and more like iOS i would say that yes I mean it seems like they're getting pretty unified mountain lions getting a lot of the features that we already saw on the iPad in the iphone mm-hmm I think at least you know if you've if you read a animal in skis book inside apple recently I mean I think he makes the case that that they just kind of they march in a unifying order from the top and a lot of that direction comes from just a very core group and then kind of trickles down but the people actually working in the products don't have as much of an idea of what's happening so it's a foxconn and it's lightly but I mean you kind of get this this overall sense that they all work in these big projects but you know the strategy behind them is is very kind of connected together it's less like you know this company is working on zune this one's working on windows right how can we get those two to work it's like these two are being developed at the same time so speaking of working together and speaking of the unification of all these products and we started talking I think two years ago about we have this crazy idea a lot of people did at the same time OS 10 and iOS will merge and eventually and iOS will win that was the idea because it's such a successful operating system and the user interface was so nice and so revolutionary that eventually our macbooks and our imax will start to look like giant ipads are they going to merge what do we predict about the the link between OS 10 and iOS Brian well you know I was thinking about this i thought you know would it be kind of cool if i could take my ipad i could dock it to a keyboard and it turned into OS 10 i can start using a mouse and just use it like a regular pc but then i thought about it more and i thought that why would they need to make max anymore and still max i think it's beneficial for them to keep the two products separate and tweak the operating system based on like the context of what you do with the device like with with OS 10 you still have a mouse pointer you still have a keyboard and with iOS you just have this big screen of different apps that you watch so i think it's hard to tell of course what they're going to be doing in five to ten years I mean they very well might unify the products at some point but it would seem from a business standpoint it would be better if they kept them separate I also think there's something really interested me said it to add to the points about the input if you've ever used a simulator with Xcode which is Apple's kind of developer tool and they have simulators for iphone and ipad we can test out your apps if you've ever actually used a touch application with one of these simulators where you get to use your mouse and keyboard it just feels weird and there's there's this huge divide of actually if you were to bring some of those apps that you used to on your iPhone or your iPad over your computer what that would actually feel like in a lot of cases I don't think it would work out it's interesting because I think Microsoft is fighting that exact battle right now with windows 8 and windows phone whatever it is that they're they're really beginning to bring the experiences together people are already complaining about Windows 8 saying it's great with touch but it just kind of feels weird with the mouse and keyboard and I find it curious unlike you guys comments on this that Apple the great company of unification of a single vision actually has two operating systems and it seems to be maintaining two completely separate code bases and user interaction models even though there are some things that make them look and feel related but they're clearly siblings not clones while Microsoft seems to be moving in the opposite direction of bringing everything together I mean it seems like a kind of evolutionary paradox that we're witnessing right yeah and what do you think about that do you think that's going to be a good idea because I think we already saw some products where they tried to put two into one we've seen convertible tablets where you rotate the screen and then you can you can touch it and then you rotate it back and it's it's a keyboard again but the operating system for a convertible tablet is still a desktop operating system that you traditionally want to control the keyboard and mouse so when you try those things they'll they always feel kind of funky John and I forgot who said it but there was this great kind of comment about when you're using Windows 8 and you're in the Metro interface which is their kind of big touch thing with icons and tiles and its really lively you know based off the phones and then suddenly you get popped up to the Windows desktop and it's like you're you're drunk grant drunk uncle come lick stumbles in the room why is this here I still think there's like a huge shift there and the problem for developers in that case is they really have to kind of design apps for these two kind of different interfaces mmm with the same binary is I mean it's crazy its ambitious but it's crazy I don't know so we'll do you think Josh we're going to see these OSS emerge I mean at some level the at the core on the app and the Apple side there there is some code similarity between iOS and OS 10 but I mean one app won't run on both platforms so they diverge pretty quickly off the floor of the code right yeah I mean I think it still all comes down to input they if it ever were to kind of have this this life where you could have an iOS app on your computer yeah you really need to get past the interface hurdle first and right now the trackpad is great but it's not it's still missing that touching penis it's interesting that you're right i mean you just said something i think that's really key it all comes down to input it doesn't come down to processing power which i think is very interesting i mean the mobile devices are becoming a powerful enough to run real OS is the problem is the input and especially and this is what i want to get into next with the cloud processing power is becoming less and less of an issue for OS design because so much of the key stuff like siri for example is being done at in cupertino or at apple server somewhere else and brian how important is the cloud to mountain line into the apple desktop OS it seems like it's becoming increasingly important for Apple to focus on the cloud and you can see that there they just said that they were planning to open a new data center was it in Kansas I forgot anyway organ Oregon right and the thing that the cloud does for Apple is it allows Apple to tie all the products together but you're sharing the data between all these connected screens these connected devices and it makes more sense for you as a customer to keep buying apple products because the cloud ties everything so seamlessly together like you know i can i can edit a document on my mac and that same edit shows up on the iphone version of the document editor it makes a lot more sense to buy a mac if you have an iphone vs say a windows computer Josh no I think the clouds a huge part the the one thing that doesn't kind of trickle down to those devices there was talk a while ago of Apple possibly doing a storage free iPhone where everything's based off of iCloud this is before anyone knew what I cloud even was another way but the whole idea was that everything would be stored in the cloud into a degree they've already kind of done parts of that for instance if you have iTunes Match you don't really need to keep any music on your phone anymore you just kind of download what you need when you need it that's kind of cool and they've kind of taken that same stance of documents it's actually I google has actually done that successfully with Android I mean when you pull up an android phone you plug it into your Google account and everything if you're if you live in the Google ecosystem everything you've done is there the set is is really miniscule which which is another approach by the way to the whole operating system battle which is I mean if Microsoft was in a Cell in operating syst windows 8 upgrade is going to be a hundred thirty-nine bucks or 59 bucks or it's going to be a lot it's going to be a pain because when you upgrade your operating system every four years yeah that's a big upgrade yeah I OS 10 is now moving to yearly it appears google is just kind of updated all the time as free that's a different model entirely how does that work and can that becoming an important operating system I'm not talking about smartphones now I'm talking about desktops in Chromebook and and that operating system concept you see a lot of Chromebooks around now ideally I'd are we going with that yeah yeah I see when I fly virgin that's right when they hand them out all right moving on what's missing from I don't want to ask that question yeah I'm sorry there's one other important topic with OS 10 that I think is real interesting and we began to see this a version or two ago the the app store with apple making their desktop operating system work the same way or at least optionally work the same way as iOS did where you have an app store and you can now get your apps directly from within the interface and not have to leave it and not have to deal with installers and the apps go with you no matter which installation of the product you're of your desktop or laptop that you're on how important is the App Store to OS 10 to mountain loin and are we going to see an app store only version of OS 10 I think on the surface the App Store is pretty important for OS 10 in terms of security there's that option so you can switch it so you can only download apps for the App Store versus like the internet and or through a web browser I mean and it sounds kind of draconian but you can always turn that option off and the whole option is there just for people who are a little bit less sophisticated with computers so they don't need to worry about viruses hey every time I see Apple do something where there's an option to turn off some brand new feature i know that it's only a version or two away from taking that option away from us seriously do you think it's going to happen um I think they've already gone too far with keeping the Mac a relatively open system in terms of being able to to download applications from different avenues I don't think they could just do a complete 180 I think that would be pretty unattractive for a lot of customers what do you think yeah i'm wondering i think from a legal level I'd I think they have to well I'm not sure cuz on mobile they've offered it like that but that's because they're been all these deals with carriers where it's been at a security issue with this it's there's this basic paradigm of computers where you want to install what you want to install and you need to install what you want to install but they proven with devices like the iPad the iphone people are kind of okay with convenience they'll pay for that right the problem is when you get apps it can't conform to the App Store rules and therefore they can't be on the App Store what happens in that future you don't have apps like you know VLC before it got pulled which is this hugely useful mac app and that wasn't on there because that licensing issues that's what I'm getting at is is I I mean I think people like the app store when I look at a new app that I'm thinking about buying and it's not in the app store it's like oh god I got to deal with the installer and if it's a paid app I've gotta pay through some other way the App Store is super convenient and super great because your apps are archived for you no matter where you what machine you're on you want to move to I'm wondering how far Apple can go there and also how this whole concept of the of the the App Store and the frequent updates works in one of the major buyers of technology which is the corporation is OS 10 is mountain-lion more or less corporate friendly than previous versions have been and how important is that well I think with gatekeeper it is corporate friendly especially if you have companies that are kind of putting out versions of apps or deploying them through the app store through things like codes and through imaging I think the issue more so is actually lagging companies that will wait for certain time periods to upgrade OS is suddenly if it's a one year cycle and you actually have some critical kind of apps that need that and you want to use that for your business that kind of runs into a problem I don't think that's going to happen with mountain lion do you think that corporate corporations will upgrade line to mountain lion or will we have a legion of corporate Mac users running a version or so behind because their IT department are like we just upgraded yeah I think that's a problem but at the same time you also like we were talking about earlier it's all about selling Hardware and for a lot of these these folks who just bought it it's I don't think thirty dollars if that's what it's gonna be is a huge deal Brian yeah as for a lot I mean if even if you just look at lion right now I mean I've talked to a bunch of IT people who just don't want to support lion because they're it's still really buggy I think there are problems with the mail app breaks for instance and I would hope that Apple fixes these problems before they switched to mountain lion or I mean before mountain lion comes out so I'm a little bit pessimistic about the corporate support for mountain lion miss my gut says that I don't know I I think you're probably right I also imagine a bunch of IT guys and I could be wrong on this who are looking at all these updates and saying job security for us a lot of stuff we have to deal with because you know that individuals are going to be bringing their mountain lion equipped max into the office and using them there no matter what their supplied with so I don't know anyway uh we talked about this briefly at the top of the show about Apple's integration of other services now there are existing Macintosh apps I think GarageBand the movie app what i called imovie and iphoto that are integrated to an extent with facebook and one of the things that they were showing with mountain lion was deep integration in parts of it with Twitter so which is it going to be and can it be both well I think if you look at where Facebook is on OS 10 right now it's it's basically everywhere you want to be most people are going to do almost everything the browser so it's not I don't see that as being like a huge big pole the two areas where it really is that it needs to be is with media and so if you just cut a video in iMovie or a quicktime player you can send it to facebook if you just took a bunch of photos and edited them and you want to put them up on facebook there's integration there the bigger thing now is Twitter with mountain lion because then you can just take any pager on any sort of photos on your desktop whatever it is and share it hmm so imagine sorry go ahead no please I would imagine that Apple's just cozying up with Twitter because it had tried to form a relationship with Facebook in the past like with iTunes ping and Facebook had wanted some pretty onerous terms or so to speak that's what they told kara swisher at some point or that's what Steve Jobs told Kara Swisher and I I would imagine that they might be more willing to work with Facebook if they kind of loosen those terms I'm we don't know what those terms are but I'm sure they wanted a lot of customer information I can just see Zuckerberg and jobs or Zuckerberg and cook getting into it's like but these two juggernauts of Technology arguing terms that would just that would be epic an apple is the most secret corporation on the planet so I think it's it's hard for them to understand what social networking companies need in terms of customer information interesting so what's missing from mountain lion as far as we know that we sirree there's no sirree not really not that that should be may be too surprising because they gotta sell some phones and right now that's the big feature well come on people can we walk around with their computers using them as phones I mean it wouldn't a theory wouldn't I'm serious all cloud-based so it's not like the technology won't work them on that oh esta I mean part of that is hey it fits and it doesn't there's these new apps it came from iOS 5 and you can use Siri with them and in on your phone and it's great like reminders and notes all that stuff is that's a great use for voice technology and I think the actual core need for series that sometimes just a pain in the butt to get around your phone like you want unlock it you don't wanna find the app you don't enter the data it can do that for you on the Mac or if you have a bunch of apps running you just kind of you go an exposé pick the app you want and do your thing with a keyboard mouse it doesn't take very long um that said there would be some cool applications for Syria on your computer and you know people can dream of those all day but maybe Apple is who knows right um I can't really think of too much that that's really missing but you Siri Siri is one feature i mean the mac operating system i think they can just keep rolling out incremental additions because we already do so much on our desktops in a browser and just the App Store is you know the avenue for you to get additional applications to enhance is what you do on a computer but yeah I think we can expect to see some pretty incremental updates for the Mac operating system the next few years well watch the next one not Siamese when then when do we expect if you think we're on a yearly cycle now and and are we going to be eventually just paying Apple 30 bucks a year just saying update me whenever you think that's coming I think her to be buy a new computer every two years I'm not worrying about it and then paying them thirty dollars in between yes yeah Brian what do you think are we have another one coming a year after mountain lion I think they have explicitly said that they were on an annual cycle I always said that's what they told John Gruber I think during that briefing yeah so assuming they keep on making boatloads of money which I'm sure they will over the next few years they probably will keep on continuing that cycle and asking for thirty dollars a year sure not that much to pay actually and I think another big part of that is it you do need something to make the mac more exciting because it's still a computer and they were selling a lot more of them than they used to but it's nothing close to what they're selling an iOS and a big part of that is that you get these new features every year mm-hm and if they can somehow add that on top of things like more RAM and faster processing speeds I mean that's that's cool too that's a good business model it's worked really well for them on the portable side what can they do next I mean the air and OS 10 you know a couple of additional features the mountain lion I mean how do you make a that's a I don't want to sound like a fanboy so forgive me but this is a pretty damn sexy product where do you go from here flexible displays that's a good one okay keep going just roll up the screen and put it in your your jeans and take your computer with you everywhere you go I think that'd be kind of cool like going beyond the tablet I've always thought of the tablets or the stop gap between you know computers and flexible displays but you know I'm just imagining things right now I'm just trying to think about cleaning that thing how to even do it like a spaghetti maker yeah no yeah tubular displays exact the fettuccine display alright guys hey listen thanks for an interesting discussion on mountain lion uh thanks Mitchell for producing standing for Steven Brian's excellent work can be found on the New York Times is Brian Chan in also his book is on Amazon with links in the show notes to all the stories that are relevant which is like every other story we write about on news com Josh Lowensohn thanks Josh Lowensohn thanks for joining us we'll be back next week we're going to do a show next week on the second screen on watching TV with an ipad or android tablet in your lap don't miss it all right we'll be back next week thanks for everyone