Apple to Announce new Mac OS X version in June

swiert writes "Apple has announced that the WWDC conference has been rescheduled in order to present the new version of Mac OS X, codenamed "Panther". Unfortunately, Apple haven't given any details about what to expect from Panther, but after Jaguar this looks promising."

Comments

Re:Forced Upgrade?

[red5]

Well according to apple the new upgrade system will be one free, one paid. As OS 10, OS 10.1, and 10.2 were.

Re:While you're at it

[ocelotbob]

Actually, both are correct, depending on the part of the world you're in. The article submitter is probably British, where one refers to company actions in the plural, even when the company's name is in the singular form.

So you can pay for Windows Upgrades?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck kinda of logic is that? Windows upgrades cost money too, accutally more...

10.3 features (from loop rumors.com)

[Znonymous Coward]

System-wide metal interface

Support for 64-Bit architecture

QuickTime 6.5

iChat 2.0 with videoconferencing capabilities

Final Safari release 1.0 GM

Updated iApps (possible inclusion of iWorks?)

Enhanced Dock features

Overall system speed enhancements

Optimized for the new systems (AMD, Itanium or PPC970??)

Re:10.3 features (from loop rumors.com)

[Znonymous Coward]

It's called looprumors dot com

Slashcode splits apart domains for some reason

Re:10.3 features (from loop rumors.com)

[sheriff_p]

Still, H.323 support (or support for whatever its heir apparent is) within the OS is SORELY lacking, according to my videoconferencing friends, so I know they'll gleefully welcome this.

Yahoo Messenger for Mac OS X provides video-conferencing, and fairly well too - it works over NAT too, which is something I believe H.323 doesn't natively support.

So far, it's the only decent system I've found. It's free, it's cross-platform, and I like it a lot :-)

Re:XI

[Klugheitsucher]

For those of you still struggling with Roman Numerals... It even has a Roman Numeral Converter

Re:64 bit OS?

[dethl]

Funny thing about the PPC 970 is that it can handle 32-bit as well as 64-bit instructions. Panther would probably just add 64-bit support, rather than become a total 64-bit OS.

Re:XI

[Anonymous Coward]

_ _ _
L X V D X X X V I

[/guess from information provided in link]

Re:Forced Upgrade?

[red5]

From the BusinessWeek interview

Q: But people are conditioned to big Mac releases coming out every three years or so, no?

A: Actually, that's not true. If you follow the path over the last five years, there has been a major paid release approximately once a year, and a minor release that we didn't charge for on a half-year increment.

Of course just before that he said they would have charged for 10.1 but they wanted to encourage the adoption of OS X.

Re:Pather = Jaguar

[cosmo7]

Panthers are black (melanistic) leopards. the gene for melanism is recessive, so black leopards can have offspring with lighter coats. Jaguars are heavier than panthers. The panther has a narrower and smaller head. Genetically, leopards and jaguars are more closely related than lions or tigers. Snow leopards and Clouded leopards are even more distantly related, at one clade each.

Re:why

[sweetooth]

Topic selection is a pull down box. AMD and Apple are right next to eachother in the list and this is an simple off by one data entry error.

Bullshit

[Lethyos]

Microsoft did not give out copies of Windows XP to people who bought computers with Windows 98.

Not that I am in favor of proprietary software, but this is no way compares to the upgrade path for OS X.

Windows9x and NT are two completely different operating systems. I can see Microsoft marketing them as two different products and hence, owning one does not mean you get the other. However, paying to upgrade Windows95 to Windows98 is an absolutely asinine thing to do. That upgrade is essentially a set of system updates an a free web browser. In fact, one could upgrade Windows95 to Windows98 for free -- download the latest Internet Explorer and let it do shell integration. You got the kernel enhancements, a more threaded Explorer, and all that.

Going from Mac OS X 10.n to 10.n + 1 should cost nothing for someone who already owns 10.n. It is an incremental upgrade. Yes, 10.2 includes some very hot technologies (Quartz Extreme, for instance), but it is really only a marginal upgrade over the previous version. It is something the user should have received with previous versions, nothing radically new or improved.

Minor version upgrades have traditionally been something the user should have gotten with the previous release. They make a product you already own more complete. Charging for them is robery. Major releases, on the contrary, are typical radical advances in the software, such that it is largely dissimilar from previous major releases. MacOS 9 versus MacOS X is an example of this -- that's a worthwhile purchase.

Re:Bullshit

[ablair]

"Going from Mac OS X 10.n to 10.n + 1 should cost nothing for someone who already owns 10.n. It is an incremental upgrade."

Not necessarily. For example, the upgrade from MacOS 8.0 to 8.5 was a paid upgrade, though still 'incremental' in number. The same can be said about a number of similar incremental upgrades with various software packages and operating systems over the years, not just from Apple. Whether a company calls a significant upgrade a minor point release or major point release often depends more on convenience from a marketing standpoint rather than a technological standpoint. In Apple's case, they are a little tied into making even fairly major upgrades only point releases due to their chosen nomenclature system - can you imagine the confusion resulting from MacOS X 11? I think a very major new system (eg the first 64-bit native system after 10.3 or perhaps 10.4) should be MacOS XI, but they are more likely to keep the X moniker and call it MacOS X 11, unfortunately.

Not that choosing a roman numeral system wasn't good - it was, and highlighted the break with the old and incidentally spawned another wave of X-this and X-that everywhere in technology. It's just too bad they also decided to stick to their system naming guidelines used since system 6.x days, resulting in the X 10.x.x that they'll have to string out for as long as possible. So these point upgrades can often be as significant as the paid Photoshop 5.0 to 5.5 was, for example.

Re:Bullshit

[Dynedain]

Besides the active desktop stuff (which was the visible "free" update to W95) there were significant enhancements in Win98...there was siginificant work in filenaming (8.3) problems...and there was a lot of core development (Win98 eliminated all the legacy Win3X 16bit core components). And the active desktop stuff ran much faster and much more stable in 98 than on 95(or NT4)....and once IE4.5 came out, you could no longer download active desktop for any version of Windows. It was only available as part of the IE4.0 and 4.1 install.

Now, a better comparison is the Win98 to Win98SE upgrade (which was not downloadable but was free if you paid shipping and handling of $25 I believe)

Apple goes into some details here

[azav]

http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/descriptions.html

Apple goes into some details about what will be in the next major rev of the OS.

Cheers,

Re:Apple goes into some details here

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, that page is a list of descriptions of seninars at WWDC, not os features.

Re:100% Content-Free

[Anonymous Coward]

There aren't even any good rumors about Panther.

Heh... depends on where you look. (Scroll down to Thursday, November 7 and Thursday, October 31.)

This supposed "internal document" was all over the Internet for a while and contained lots of likely additions and improvements, but I'm not sure who has it available for download currently.

Re:Various rumors and speculations

[Okonomiaki]

iLife and iWorks (if there ever is such a thing) are separate products, they are not a part of the OS. At best we might see them annouced at the same time as 10.3 but they certainly won't come in the same box.

And exactly what benefits do you expect from a Cocoa Finder?

Re:64 bit OS?

[jsmith38]

Something else though, is that applications will have to be re-written (or at least recompiled) to take advantave of the larger ram and other features of a 64-bit machine.

Sure database structures can be larger, but what about all the apple die-hard graphic gurus, that have files larger than 2 Gigs. Then what about the biology folks that are mapping the the human gens (that file takes up an iPod)

At then what about my needs, and the ability to run every applications I have from ram so that I don't have to wait for my hard drive.

Re:why

[Anonymous Coward]

Finance centers that allow a country to pay for a war are considered a valid dual-use target. For example, the US shut down Iraq's remaning funds within seconds of the start of the war in any county it could.

Re:Forced Upgrade?

[aberkvam]

Well according to apple the new upgrade system will be one free, one paid. As OS 10, OS 10.1, and 10.2 were.

Actually, Apple has been alternating the paid/free versions of its OS for quite some time now.

7.5 - Paid
7.6 - Paid
8.0 - Paid
8.1 - Free
8.5 - Paid
8.6 - Free
9.0 - Paid
9.1 - Free
9.2 - Free
10.0 - Paid
10.1 - Free
10.2 - Paid

It hasn't always been an exact alternating of paid and free updates, but it's been pretty close for a long time. So if you want to go by history, the next update will be free.

On the other hand, I think the really telling bit of information would be Apple's financials after the Jaguar release. If the money gained from charging $129 for an OS update had a significant positive effect on Apple's bottom line, I would think that Apple would be looking long and hard at charging for Panther.

One thing that has always puzzled me. Why didn't they just call it OS X 10.5 instead of OS X 10.2. People complained because it was just a .1 update, which Apple has rarely charged for. I think simply calling it 10.5 would have placated a lot of people.

Re:Forced Upgrade?

[aberkvam]

Business Week interviewed Phil Schiller almost a year ago. His comments are rather interesting and point to Panther being a paid upgrade. Here's the relevant part of the interview:

Q: People are asking why you're charging so much for Jaguar, the new OS X update.
A: We came out with OS X 10.0 in May, 2001, at $129. That's our usual price for paid upgrades. Last fall, we came out with 10.1 Normally, we would decide to charge $129, but because we wanted to help the adoption of OS X, we made it free to our customers. Now, with 10.2, it's $129 again, same as it always has been. I think a year and a half before charging for an upgrade is very reasonable. And we included 150 new features in Jaguar. That's a lot for your money.

Q: But people are conditioned to big Mac releases coming out every three years or so, no?
A: Actually, that's not true. If you follow the path over the last five years, there has been a major paid release approximately once a year, and a minor release that we didn't charge for on a half-year increment.

Re:Various rumors and speculations

[Anonymous Coward]

AND GOD FORBID THEY MAKE EVERYTHING METALLICIZED!!!

I really doubt this, because the brushed metal is supposed to be reserved for apps that are modeled after or interact with real world devices. iTunes->Stereo, iCal->Calander, iPhoto->Camera, iSync->Palm. Check out apples Aqua Human Interface Guidelines for textured windows.

The only exception is Safari. I really hope they change the UI to the standard Aqua style in the final release. Right now it really clashes with Mail. Maybe apple should look at their AHIG.

Re:Forced Upgrade?

[MarcQuadra]

Apple generally charges for feature updates and not for bug fixes. Sometimes there's a little bit of both, but 9.2 was just 9.0 with some bug fixes and very minor revisions. 7.6 was just all the crap that had accumulated from 7.5 and back rolled into a more monolithic system, but they added a new networking core which was major enough to charge for it.

Re:Money

[pudge]

Umm... because I have to pay $100 every time they decide to release bug fixes which should be free!

Apple has released dozens of bugfixes for Mac OS X which were free, whether maintenance upgrades of the OS, or Security Updates, etc. It charges for the major releases: 10.0, 10.1, 10.2. Stop the FUD.

Re:Various rumors and speculations

[jonr]

For those don't know, Dominic Giampaulo was the brain behind BeOS BFS. If Apple has Dominic, expect to see some really great stuff.
J.

Re:one thing it will have

[Jon Abbott]

May I suggest this link? Or even better, just run "sudo perl -MCPAN -eshell" and then type "install Bundle::CPAN" -- that will not only update your copy of the CPAN module, it will download, compile, test and install perl 5.8 for you automatically. Three cheers for perl!

Re:What's with the Atari game system names?

[mbbac]

Steve Jobs worked for Atari before he started Apple. He did Breakout. Actually, he got Wozniak to do a lot of it for him.

Re:one thing it will have

[Drakonian]

It was already released via Software Update. See here. And I think it wasn't finished when they released it - it broke some applications HUGELY. Here is a wonderful description of my favorite known issue from the Release notes:

Radar #3160445

Apparent random crashes of Java applications.

Some applications that use Java2D can crash unexpectedly with a crash log that specifies a failure in Java_apple_awt_CRenderer. This is a known issue and is being investigated.

Workaround: None.

Re:What?? Apple SELLS software??

[ahknight]

Bzzt. Wrong. There's an update for 10.1.5 as well.

Security Update 2003-03-03 (10.1.5): Information and Download

Re:Forced Upgrade?

[aberkvam]

New network core? Not really. Actually, your description of "crap... rolled into a more monolithic system" and "a new networking core" is a good description of System 7.5.3.

System 7.5 had a ton of different enablers and patches through 7.5.2. (Supporting all the Mac clones coming out at that time only added to the confusion.) And PCI PowerMacs had recently come out, which the old networking core didn't support at all. So Apple rushed Open Transport (their new networking core) out for these new Macs. The System software they were distributing was an ugly mass of hacks and kludges.

Finally Apple rolled all the hacks into one solid System version, incorporated a version of Open Transport that worked on all Macs (except the original 68000 Macs), added a lot more PowerPC-specific code (which reduced crashes a lot), and threw in a ton of other bug fixes. This release was System 7.5 Update 2.0 (i.e. 7.5.3).

Mac OS 7.6 featured a much improved installer, the Apple Internet Connection Kit (the first time Apple shipped system software with web browsers), a new Extension Manager, and a lot of under-the-hood stability enhancements. It did also pull in some technologies that had previously only been available separately.

Re:Forced Upgrade?

[Hurricane_Bill]

I called Apple and asked them if I upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2 now, would I have to pay again when 10.3 is released. He said it would be a free upgrade. I spoke with them just last week.

Re:Forced Upgrade?

[Mikey-San]

Bzzzzzz. Wrong.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr& u=http://eibr.adfi.ucl.ac.be/apple/apple.misajour. anciens.os.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dpurchase%2Bsyst em%2B7%2Bmac%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26sa%3 DG

Apple charged for system software before 7.5. I used to have System 6 floppies somewhere.

However, versions prior to 7.6 (7.5.5 and before) can be downloaded freely from ftp.apple.com--but this is today, not back during the days of their releases.

-/-