As part of Apple's announcement about their new upcoming operating system, OS X 10.7 or Lion, scheduled to launch next summer, the company made an interesting announcement. That FaceTime feature that gives all the iPhone users video calling? It's now available for Mac. One little catch: it's a beta.
Since when did Apple do betas? They prerelease OS builds to developers under God-forsaken NDAs. They let a few developers see prerelease gadgets handcuffed to people. They might even let a few of their employees field-test new equipment in bars. But betas?
This is one of four things. Either Steve Jobs wasn't really on stage announcing a not-yet perfected, "magical", visionary, "revolutionary" new product, he has lost all sense of perfectionism, he had to offer some sort of additional incentive to customers to increase adoption of a flagship feature that's going unused, or the feature's actually doing so well that people were revolting in his inbox wanting to know when this would happen.
Somethings fishy here. Either Apple's having trouble selling a "ground-breaking" feature, or Jobs is compromising his standards to acquiesce a consumer population. As far as I can recall, neither of these things have ever happened. As far as I can recall, Apple's never released a beta, either.
Cultural shift or customer demand?