Apple Drops Mac OS 9

Eugenia Loli writes "MacCentral has the up-to-the-minute updates on the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference. The first big news is that Apple drops Mac OS 9. 'It's time to drop OS 9,' Steve Jobs said. 'We can do things in X that we just can't do in 9... a hundred percent of what we're doing is X only. [...] Mac OS 9 isn't dead for our customers, but it is for developers. Today we say goodbye to Mac OS 9 for all future development,' said Jobs." We all expected this to happen sooner or later, more sooner than later. There's been no new Apple development for Mac OS 9 in some time; only maintenance updates. But I won't stop Mac OS 9 development. You can't stop me! Muahahahaha! Update: 05/06 18:31 GMT by P : More news from WWDC continues to roll in. Eugenia Loli writes "Probably the really big news is with Jaguar, the codename for Mac OS X 10.2. There is handwriting recognition technology that will be recognized by any application that uses text. Apple also introduced Quartz Extreme, which takes the compositing engine in Quartz, and accelerates it in graphics cards, and combines 2D, 3D and video in one hardware pipeline via OpenGL. 'Everything on the screen is being drawn in hardware by OpenGL.' It requires AGP 2x and 32MB of video RAM. It is not possible on older graphics cards like RAGE 128 cards, said Jobs -- that means it'll work on newer iMacs and eMacs, but not on older machines, he emphasized. Jobs said this puts Apple two years ahead of 'the other guys.'"

Update: 05/06 18:46 GMT by P : An anonymous user writes: "Apple is releasing Mac OS X Rackmount Servers. Also releasing AIM-compatible messaging called iChat; you can create buddy lists of anyone on the local network, and you can use your mac.com username to log in to it."

Comments

Rendezvous sounds interesting... open standard too

[arson1]

Rendezvous. Dynamic IP discovery. Lets computers "dynamically discover each other and share them." Proposing as a new industry standard. Jobs cited example of multiple Macs working at home sharing MP3 files with iTunes between multiple computers. Demonstrated example of MP3 files streaming over AirPort. Works with any IP-ready device; built into Jaguar and will also be offered as an open industry standard that can be built into specific devices.

Makes sense

[gwernol]

This makes huge sense for Apple: their future is Mac OS X and the company has been saying this for some time. I'm glad they are making the cut now, still relatively early in the new OS's life cycle. This will help push developers onto the new platform; in turn this is good for end users because the applications they need to run are more likely to appear on Mac OS X.

And again it shows that Apple are able to make gutsey decisions and lead the market rather than follow it. Whatever you think of the relative merits of X vs. 9, this is the kind of bleeding-edge decision making that Apple needs if it is to differentiate itself from the Windows platform.

Re:Makes sense

[nougatmachine]

What's your point?

How in the hell are .NET and OS X similar? One is a new Unix-based operating system leveraging Apple technologies, and one is a completely new "applications as internet services" paradigm. Hell, I'll go even further to prove my point that switching words proves nothing:

"This makes huge sense for The Legions of Satan: their future is .Mussolini and the company has been saying this for some time. I'm glad they are making the cut now, still relatively early in .Mussolini's life cycle. This will help push developers onto the new platform; in turn this is good for end users because the applications they need to run are more likely to appear on .Mussolini. And again it shows that The Legions of Satan are able to make gutsey decisions and lead the market rather than follow it. Whatever you think of the relative merits of .Mussolini vs. traditional COM applications, this is the kind of bleeding-edge decision making that The Legions of Satan need if they are to differentiate itself from the other platforms."

Of course changing the words to something inherently changes their meanings. That's how language works, dummy.

Finally!

[Animats]

At last, we can say goodbye to what Mac developers knew as the Mess Inside. It's one of those great moments in programming, like when you could finally stop worrying about supporting the 16-bit x86 version of your code.

Down inside, the original MacOS was a lot like DOS - single-application, single thread, and no memory protection. Over the years, multiple applications were retrofitted to the thing, resulting in a horrible mess. CPU dispatching was the worst part. "Cooperative multitasking" wasn't enough. But instead of putting a real scheduler, all sorts of "tasks" (timer tasks, vertical blanking interval tasks, system tasks, deferred tasks, multiprocessor tasks, Open Transport tasks, etc.) were added over time. Each of these had a different set of restrictions on what it could do. It would have been far simpler to put in a real CPU dispatcher early on.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Why the icon?

[SuperguyA1]

O.K. Moderators have your fun with me, but I can't help but comment on the new OS 9 icon where the only story under the topic is the end of OS9. Wouldn't this be better placed under Apple:)

One rather ballsy note from Jobs

[eXtro]

Jobs spoke about including peer-to-peer networking in the next full release of MacOS X and even included sharing MP3 as an example of how it could be used. Speaking technically thats a minor thing, there are many applications that are capable of doing this, such as LimeWire. Not many companies are willing to include this as a feature though, its too risky with both the MPAA and RIAA convinced peer-to-peer is evil.

Apple seems to be taunting them on purpose, consider their "Rip. Mix. Burn." ads. Gateway payed Apple the sincerest form of flattery with their later ad campaign, but still Apple was the first to stick their neck out.

Re:Does this really impact developers?

[MouseR]

Dropping OS 9 has big implications on developers.

For our Mac version of the product, we had just decided (last week!) to drop support for Mac OS 8.6. Carbon on 8.6 was a major pain.

By going 9-up only, it'll spare us about 4 weeks testing.

Now that Apple itself is dropping support for Mac OS 9, it'll be easier on us to talk about dropping 8.6 support.

We'll continue supporting Mac OS 9 for this release, but for the next release, we'll have ample munitions to entirely drop classic Mac OSes. That ought to trim the application code by about 10%, and accelerate the runtime because of all the IF X switches in the code.

Might not sound like that big of a deal, but when your networking stack checks, at runtime, which layer you're using (Mac TCP for 8.6, OpenTransport for 8.6 up to X, and BSD for X), this really adds up. Let alone all the Classic vs AQUA UI tweaks.

Out of curiosity, I just grepped our sources for this specific runtime switch. There are 87 occurences of it!

Re:Gutsy move

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wonder if anyone is masochistic enough to attempt run an old 68xxx application in emulation mode in OS9 while running that under classic mode in OSX :"

I just couldn't let this one pass by unchallenged. My first Mac was a Quadra 700 and the software I used then was WriteNow (68K Assembly ), FoxBase+ (68K) and I added
Cyberdog as a browser with OS 8 on my PM6500. All run flawlessly under OS X 10.1 on my G3 400 PowerBook. In fact they a much more stable and I don't notice any
difference in speed. My hat off to Apple Enginerring. An incredible feat of backwards compatability.

Re:Dammit!

[melatonin]

I had one, it was so slow that I sold it.

Heh, you're a slow learner, aren't you?

Notebooks are crap. They have the worst possible ROI. You pay the extra money for a cute portable system, that's a bitch to upgrade and a fixed video system.

Back in '95, our family bought a 7200/90. The next year I bought a PB 1400/117 (first rev). They were at par with each other (601 vs 603e). Then we put an L2 cache in the 7200. Holy shit. And now it's hosting several GB of HD space. My PowerBook is still stuck with it's 740 MB HD and 32 MB of RAM; and I'm not spending a dime to upgrade those. The battery's dead, and that bugger itself is too expensive. Who wants to work on a 117 Mhz PPC with no L2 cache? The 7200 still runs Office and we use it daily.

Two years later, my bro bought a PB G3/233 (Wallstreet). Damn nice. Same price as my PowerBook, whose performance was going in the gutter. We also bought a Beige G3/233 MT that year.

The MT is still running; 256 MB of RAM, Rage 128 and a 400 MHz G3. It's got USB too now. My bro's PowerBook is pretty much stuck with its initial config (more ram, better HD- but still a slow notebook HD). It's not a fraction of the machine that the MT is.

Notebooks cost more, they use non-standard, fragile, expensive parts, and they last two years if you're lucky. This is standard fair.

Macs last longer than PCs, huh?

That 7 year old 7200/90 is chugging along just fine. My Powerbook makes a very pretty doorstop (it's got one of them BookCover things; I put a Craig Mullin's Oni painting-printout in there).

Notebooks are great if your company pays for one. Hell, it's a win-win for companies, take your work home with you! Do it on the train! In the airport! Otherwise they suck.

yet i'm still tempted to buy an ibook.

Inkwell: The real news

[KFury]

What really got me excited today was the news about Inkwell, the handwriting recognition engine for 10.2.

I'm excited because it's so useless. There is no way that Jobs would put his people through the effort of bringing handwriting recognition to OS X unless it was a precursor to the iPad. My guess is October, January at the latest.

Soooooo happy.

Re:Two years ahead of the "other guys"

[d0n quix0te]

Open GL does not directly support 2d manipulations. but there is a way of doing it, pioneered by the guys at Raycer Graphics Corp. Look up their patents on large matrix and 2d manipulations.

Here is a quiz for you:
1. which company bought. Raycer Graphics?
2 Who was the Head of 3d engineering at Apple

(Answers: Apple, ex-CTO of Raycer)