Leopard will obviously make some sort of appearance in the keynote next week. I have high hopes that some of the “Top Secret” features that were mentioned at WWDC will come to light. And I have higher hopes that these features are worth the wait.
Besides Time Machine, the features profiled on the Leopard Sneak Peek are exactly what one would expect from an operating system upgrade. While they might be a large stride for a new user, they offer little or no benefit to “power users,” who get most of this functionality anyway using third party apps.
My concern is that Apple is becoming too preoccupied with attracting and dazzling “switchers” and leaving the more experience users in the cold. I know that Leopard contains a cornucopia of features for programmers, but what about advanced end users? By over-catering to the simpler end of the market, Apple runs the risk of reinforcing the stereotype that Macs are just toys.
Right now, my main reasons for wanting to upgrade aren’t coming from Apple, but third party developers, such as TextMate. Making the key selling points of your operating system based on the software it runs instead of the software it is seems like a rip out of Microsoft’s playbook. Hopefully Steve will show us otherwise.
Your post is contradictory. "Power users" use third party apps. The developer technologies in Leopard are helping developers create better apps. Making you buy Leopard for the software it runs is a cheap ploy.
It's an operating system, its primary function is to run applications! Apple is acting as the developer of enabling technology. This is entirely appropriate. Apple could spend man-hours on user-level features (which almost always duplicate some other developer's functionality). Or it can develop the tools that allow all the developers in the world create better apps. You might not agree, but I am happy to see new developer tools in every Mac OS X release (especially Leopard).
P.S. Spaces is a "power user" feature. Maybe there are other solutions for this, but they aren't nearly so well integrated with OS feature such as expose. And don't forget about the resolution-independent UI.