Dear Steve,

It’s a shame when your premiere mid-year keynote presentation could be a rehash of what has gone before.  Your annual Worldwide Developer Conference keynote is supposed to be where you make developers feel good about coding for Apple, where you can rally your base of Mac developers and energize them into creating the quirky, innovative apps that will define your computers in the next year.  So what happened? Why does everyone feel so empty inside, as if nothing has changed between June 10 and today?

Let’s talk about Leopard.  Leopard is your baby, your big answer to Windows Vista.  After all, you’re Apple.  You’ve shipped 5 major operating system releases in six years, each of which had significant new features.  And yes, Leopard does have its share of new stuff.  But here’s the thing, Steve: most of your keynote demos weren’t new to us.

Sure, you announced some completely new stuff.  The new Stacks feature of the dock raised eyebrows, Spotlight searching over the network is nice to have, and 64-bit top-to-bottom was well-received by the content creation people.

But the new feature that was best-received was the new Finder.  I have to say, that worries me.  First, because it took this long to actually revamp it.  Second, because it looks like iTunes, which I dislike.  An interface made for music catalogs may not work for browsing all the different metadata one may want to see in a file list.  The new Quick Look feature definitely seems promising, but just how many people are going to use it?  And how many people are going to develop Quick Look hooks for their file formats?  I dunno, Steve, I hope this time next year you dont get up on stage and sound silly when you praise all the developers who support it.  Without wide Quick Look support, things like Cover Flow and iChat Theater will be fairly useless, don’t you think?  I guess time will tell.

And let’s be honest.  If you want to keep wowing keynote attendees, you can’t regurgitate last year’s topics.  Time Machine, Spaces, Dashcode, 64-bit, Core Animation and iChat were all discussed before.  It makes me wonder what you were doing for the past 12 months.

Oh, that’s right, you were working on the iPhone.  But I gotta be honest here, Steve, the iPhone isnt looking so hot right now.  It’s the price, Steve.  $500 is a significant chunk of scratch.  Just ask Sony how the PlayStation 3 is doing.  I mean, c’mon, Steve, you aren’t even letting us put our own applications on it.  That’s something any hundred-dollar Symbian or Windows Mobile smartphone will let us do. 

And no, AJAX apps are not true apps.  I wonder just how you thought you could pull off that particular piece of spin.  May I remind you that you were talking to developers, not some joe-schmoes in the press?  You can’t BS those folks, not even with your legendary RDF.  Even if you’d merely said you were working on a true iPhone SDK, that would have been enough.  We know you’re trying just to get the iPhone out on time, and we understand maybe there wasn’t time to build a true SDK for it.  But why you felt the need to try to BS us about AJAX, I’ll never know.  JavaScript isnt a robust application platform.  I shouldn’t have to tell you that.  But if you need proof, just try using the Yahoo Mail Beta on Safari.

Speaking of Safari, you really dropped the ball on Safari 3 for Windows.  Yes, I understand you’re calling it a Beta, but I think youre giving it too much credit. I don’t think it even deserves Alpha status.  I mean, you’ve got some serious issues to take care of, from rampant security vulnerabilities to glitchy UI and horrible stability problems on both Mac and Windows.  Anyone will tell you Safari 3 needs a lot more time in the oven before it’s ready.  Quite frankly, I’m surprised you allowed such a shoddy product to even see the light of day outside Apple.  I thought you insisted on perfection; what on earth happened, Steve?

If there was one highlight of your presentation, it was EA’s announcement that they would be bringing some of their more popular games to the Mac relatively soon after the PC release. But seriously, it’s EA.  They develop games for anything with a processor and a screen; it’s no surprise that they are developing for the Mac.  And how many times have you stood up on that stage and claimed that the Mac is a viable gaming platform?  You’ve brought out people from Bungie, nVidia, Aspyr, and you even brought out John Carmack to show off his new engines on more than one occasion.  But the Mac still isn’t a decent gaming platform.  Why?  Because the only viable gaming machine you sell starts at $2500 with no monitor. Seriously, Steve, if you really want to attract gamers to your platform, it’s time to suck it up and build a highly-expandable machine for a midrange price, around $1000.  Until then, you can parade all the game developers you want on stage, but the Mac will still be a terrible gaming platform.

At the end of the day, Steve, you didn’t do yourself or Apple any favors with that keynote. Nobody—not even your loyal supporters—thought you announced anything worthwhile. Back at last year’s WWDC, you hinted at “secret features” in Leopard, saying that you didn’t want Redmond to start its photocopiers any sooner than necessary. But I don’t think they need to after your lackluster performance. We love you Steve, but next time, you really need to bring your A-game to these keynotes.  The speech you gave this past Monday just isn’t going to cut it.

Love, UnnDunn