_dev

Interesting - Mine is preinstalled too, have you had a look around the App bundle to determine where the majority of the space lies? For me, ./Contents/Frameworks/ & ./Contents/Resources/ are equally about ~330 MB (about half of the total bundle size)

Myself being somewhat of a minimalist, I don't really like the idea of the application shipping with its own set of music and other graphic assets i'll never make use of. But I do recognise it's hard to strike a balance between leaving enough of this content in and removing it simply for the sake of storage reductions.

There's a reason I included the idea of a package manager in 'Crazy Pipe Dreams' - I'm not at all thinking this would happen, and you raise a valid point about Apple being the one to co-ordinate releasing the programs.

Have you had any experience with Mac development? UIKit is far more pleasurable and easier to work with than AppKit IMO - I was simply meaning trying to introduce more framework consistency between platforms, hopefully resulting in apps being far easier to be ported to and from each platform.

I didn't say ZFS should replace HFS+, simply noting that Apple promised inclusion of it in Snow Leopard. Although things like snapshots would be a welcome addition to some power users, but I am well aware that ZFS & OS X won't ever really happen.

Adding to this, shipping with modern UNIX utilities. I understand they might face issues with GPL3 but it's annoying that the OS is shipping with UNIX software that's years out of date.

I'm not sure what causes the beachballs, I've been meaning to crack open lldb one of these days and try and find out.

As for Notes syncing - I've been making fairly heavy use of it recently and never had a single issue, hopefully that will simply come down to teething problems and be addressed in a 10.8.x update.

Your suggestion about merging Notes and TextEdit is really thought-provoking, probably not entirely possible now - but I can really see Apple doing that down the road.

I agree about apt-get, Homebrew's great and all, but it it's not fantastic. I can't ever see Apple doing this though.