Totally agree.
Since Apple has spent so much time on developing iOS and the infrastructure for the App Stores, they have totally left out fundamental new ideas in the area of base technologies. ~snip~
The people at Apple can't be rolling out some new but halfbaked fundamental technology (for people immediately to ROAST them for releasing it at all, yes?) during every gadget cycle.
That doesn't mean they're not working hard to innovate on basics, to experiment, to improve on what's out there. We might not see results of their efforts on improving fundamentals for three to five years, in the marketplace. We might never see some of them.
R&D on fundamentals is like that. One must take what shows promise for the future, leave what cannot be wrapped up in the apparent window of oppportunity, and move on.
One can't stop time and polish every design to prototype, nor profit very long from rushing unworthy products to market.
I would say that goes double or triple for fundamentals like battery technology, compilers, file system or OS architecture. It's one thing to bring the wrong shiny toy to market next October. It's a much bigger deal to put recycled cardboard i-beams under your next OS and then hear your marketing team promise that it will even work underwater.
The planet slows down long enough to admire this or that thing for awhile. That's the window. It takes prodigious amounts of talent, effort, discipline to roll out in timely fashion --- in that window-- a market-worthy new method of porting data, connecting devices, transferring energy from a source to a power-hungry device, etc. That's because one must also keep an eye on what end users are doing and looking for. That drives the bus, not only for the gadgets they crave but for the underpinnings that make those gadgets possible. It's some achievement to bring out new fundamentals that can serve the ever moving target of development designed for end users.
Thanks to people working away behind the scenes while most of us were still creatively cursing the voodoo of SCSI termination, we have meanwhile ended up with Firewire and USB and Thunderbolt. Who knows what technologies were explored and abandoned in the meantime? Some of those guys were trying to bring a better SCSI. Some of them keyed on fundamental limitations and said "To heck with that, let's try this." That's part of the process. It's thankless, often enough, and it doesn't get keynote recognition, but it is what gives us the foundations of our next great stuff.
So really, I don't see how we can assess what Apple's working on in the way of fundamentals based on what we see roll out for iOS or mobile devices or even updates on the larger gear.
Also, the level of juicy speculation around MacRumors on where technological underpinnings are going will never be as high as that for the next gadget. Most of us are not going to wade very far into the geek bayous to find out what wild thing Apple's next compiler is finally going to feature.
Finally, as is often said, the people who know aren't spending a lot of time talking. They're in a design review session trying to remember that the job is to rip the wheels off the design before it makes prototype stage, not attack each other personally. Or they're building the prototype. Or they're debugging something for the 87th time this weekend. It's happening. Whatever Apple is doing, it's not resting on the laurels of past OS, past filesystem, past anything. It's designing, building, extending, questioning, going again, shifting gears, being its own toughest critic. That's a big part of what makes what they bring to market worth considering.
