Mac OS 10.6
The announcement that wasn’t on Monday was that 10.6 is going to be coming out sometime next year. The reason they didn’t make a major announcement about it was that it isn’t going to actually have any new features. Apple is planning on going back over what they currently have and consolidating and pruning and improving. (The name is very clever, since it will basically have the same customer facing feature set as Leopard (aka 10.5) they are calling it Snow Leopard.)
For the non programmers who read my meow posts, cleaning up old code is absolutely critical. There are so many instances where the second time you write something it is about a million times better than the first. So doing an entire release cycle with no new user facing features is just about the best thing you can do with an OS.
My guess is that 10.6 will be by far and away the best OS Apple has ever made if they are able to stick to their plan. Of course, there will be some new features. Some API internals that will make the life of developers better, but hopefully they will be able to keep those to the minimum needed to really give the developers time to work on improving the existing code base. It is simply a focus on quality that you normally don’t see in software, where the constant drumbeat is for new and flashier features.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if they are able to not shove a bunch of extra features in it, and how much they will charge for something that, while wildly improved over the previous version, doesn’t show any new features to the end user.