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That was the exact word used by Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, who usually takes more of a glass-half-full approach when it comes to Apple matters. Shaw Wu preferred 'underwhelming'. The American Technology Research analyst was hoping that the Apple CEO would unveil new software for running Windows applications within he forthcoming Leopard release of OS X.

'Lack of built-in virtual machine (VM) may disappoint,' Wu wrote in a note to investors. 'Mac OS X Leopard will incorporate Boot Camp as a standard feature. While we believe this is positive in supporting Windows on a Mac, is it not a surprise and we believe the user community and investors were hoping that Apple would offer full VM capability, allowing one to run Mac and Windows simultaneously.' Instead Jobs highlighted third-party solutions, Parallels and VM Ware.

However Wu was impressed by what he described as the enhanced and unified user interface.

'Leopard will include a new Desktop and Finder that extends its ease-of-use advantage by incorporating its well-received iTunes Cover Flow interface among other features and further differentiates against Windows Vista, which unfortunately is a literal copycat of Mac OS X Tiger,' he wrote. 'We believe the reason Steve Jobs decided to keep these features "secret" until now was to ensure that Windows Vista and others would not copy these new and unique user interface (UI) elements.'

But the most significant development is the greater consistency across the Mac interface, he said.

'Our biggest take-away here is that Apple's user interface across its product lines is becoming more horizontally integrated, allowing users who are familiar with one AAPL product to learn another relatively quickly.'

Wu agreed with Apple that the release of Safari for Windows should help to sell more Macs, saying that the 'strategic and smart move' should ultimately attract more switchers. And he was less critical than others about the way in which Apple has provided software developers with limited access to the iPhone.

'This

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is short of a full SDK (software developers kit), and we view this as a compromise allowing easy development and deployment that lets Apple keep iPhone a relatively closed and proprietary architecture, similar to iPod,' he wrote.

Investment website Motley Fool was much less impressed, suggesting that Apple 'is betting the iPhone on a browser that, in its current form, is underpowered and over-appreciated'.

Tim Beyers says that as a concept the idea of sing Web 2.0 technologies to develop third-party applications for iPhone is 'elegant, practical, and inventive'.

But in reality everything hinges on Safari, 'which isn't even the best browser for the Mac', he said, citing user ratings on the VersionTracker download site where Apple's browser gets an mean of 3.6, while the open source Camino scores 4.4. You could argue that this says more about the sort of 'power user' who is likely to take the time to submit a rating than it does about Safari. But it also reveals a slight misunderstanding about how these applications will work on the iPhone. While Safari is the front end, the work will be done by the open source WebKit engine, an that is a much more powerful beast altogether.

But Beyers is also concerned that 'Web applications, while cool, are notoriously lightweight and in their infancy as usable platforms for work and play', though that has not stopped Google building a business with them.

Blackfriars Communications' Carl Howe put an entirely different twist on Jobs' utterings: what he didn't say is much more significant that than what he did.

He said that there was a very good reason why, new user interface apart, the Leopard part of the keynote largely focussed on features that had been announced 10 months ago.

'It wasn't because Jobs didn't have anything to announce or say about Leopard,' he wrote. 'And, in my opinion, it wasn't because there aren't new knock-your-socks-off features in Leopard that we still haven't heard about. Why would Jobs do such a thing?

'It was because Leopard isn't shipping for another four months,' he answered.

'Now, Apple is giving away feature complete copies of Leopard to all the developers at WWDC, so they are going to get the full story on the disks they receive under a very strict NDA. But the public won't see any Leopard bits until October. If Jobs had described everything that consumers were going to get in October, how exciting would the Leopard launch be? Answer: about as exciting as the Windows Vista launch. Ouch.'