Massive WWDC Rumor Roundup

An anonymous reader writes "MacRumors.com posted a massive rumor roundup of all the major rumors surrounding Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference which starts next week. There's been talk of 970 PowerMacs, PowerBooks and Panther... seems like the biggest uncertainty is whether or not 970 PowerMacs will ship or not."

Comments

WWDC?

[Azghoul]

Man, tough morning, first I'm thinking something about WMDs, then I'm thinking some kind of zany religious shit (What Would... DC? Huh?).

Then I realize it's Mac-related, and so it is kind of zany religious shit (as if us linux-ites are drinking any less kool-aid).

Re:to be or not to be

[Alan Partridge]

they HAVE threatened legal action on quite a few rumour sites recently - Think Secret's still got 2 pulled stories on it's front page.

PowerMacs wont ship

[interdigitate]

i think the biggest doubt is weather the 15inch powerbooks will ship and not the powermacs. The rumors on the 15inch powerbook are pointing in different directions with some people saying they are boxed and ready to be shipped while other people are saying they just went into production...

Re:PowerMacs wont ship

[andrewski]

There isn't any difference between the desktop G4 and the mobile G4. At all. They are the same chip.

Try that with your Pentium 4. Oh wait, they did, and then called it 'SpeedStep.' In other words, the Pentium Steps your Speed DOWN when on battery, making it mHz to mHz slower than a G4 laptop.

Current G4 Supplies Depleted

[blakespot]

Another point to add to backup Arn's MacRumors post is that current suppliers are reporting deminished supplies of PowerMac G4's with resupply dates ranging from late June to early July. Inventories sitting empty. This would not happen unless _something_ were about to take place - even if it were to be just a simple G4 speedbump.

But I believe "G4" is not the name of the processor that will be in the replacement machines...

blakespot

Re:Current G4 Supplies Depleted

[tbone1]

... current suppliers are reporting deminished supplies of PowerMac G4's with resupply dates ranging from late June to early July.

Ding! Veteran Mac watcher know that this is a sure-fire indication that tower replacements are on the way. Since Jobs returned and forced Apple to get tighter inventory controls, this sort of thing has always preceded a new model announcement.

Of course, there are no guarantees that the new models have 970s in them, but I'd be dashed surprised if they didn't.

970 PowerMacs?

[jagilbertvt]

I'd think that'd be a rather low estimate on the number of PowerMacs they'll be able to ship.

Re:Is this Apple's business model?

[tbone1]

1. Spread rumors.
2. Get mentioned at Slashdot.
3. Everyone jeers and boos.
4. ???
5. Loss :-(

Loss? Apple has been posting underwhelming but definite profits (almost) without fail for every quarter in the last three years. Name five other companies that have done that. On second thought, given the economic landscape, those profits are not really underwhelming. Still, it was a useful post. Thank you for attempting to add to the Apple Death Knell Counter. Given the likes of John Dvorak as your potential company on that list, your parents must be very proud.

The simple truth is that Apple matters. There are things they innovate (like Quicktime, the Newton, and Firewire, etc etc etc) that are ahead of their time. They also can take existing markets and make something far and away better than what is there (iPod being the most recent example). What's more, they can take someone else's technology and make it acceptable (USB, anyone?) And they also can produce things that change the way you think about 'X'. In this latter category I'd put the GUI, Quicktime, and most recently the Music Store. I have completely changed the way I look at music, thanks to the iTMS and my iPod.

As long as they keep this up, and I don't see why they can't, they will matter and will draw people who want to speculate about the latest and greatest.

Mac OS X Panther still a mystery

[iJed]

Its amazing how little information has got out on Mac OS X Panther (10.3). This is what Apple is claiming WWDC is about and next to no information on this new OS version has been leaked. Last year, with Jaguar (OS 10.2), there were screens on ThinkSecret and a rundown on many of the new features but with Panther there is next to nothing. All there really is is speculation on piles and even this information is highly doubtful. It seems Apple has finally blocked the rumor channels. :-(

Re:Mac OS X Panther still a mystery

[Zoop]

Damn, never have mod points when you need them.

While I'm open to improvements in the OS, especially in the interface consistency and configuration tools area, the biggest thing I'm looking for is essentially a host of bugfixes in OS X's networking.

The Samba support is buggy -- it can't browse as well as a Windows box, and when talking to a Unix box it doesn't understand the concept of group priviliges most of the time, requiring you to re-save documents 5 to 10 times before it will decide you have write permissions.

Networking in general has big issues--PPCP VPN support improved with 10.2 but if you have a mounted drive over Samba over a VPN and the connection drops--you're pretty much in a race to see if you can shell into your machine to issue `reboot` before some runaway process hogs the entire machine and takes down every other service. I've heard from others that this is also true of regular (non-VPN) NFS mounts as well.

So truly robust networking support for those of us in mixed environments would make my life So Much Easier You Wouldn't Believe It.

Re:Mac OS X Panther still a mystery

[jellomizer]

"I've heard from others that this is also true of regular (non-VPN) NFS mounts as well."

Happens to me all the time. This is what I normally do.

On my powerbook.

Mount a NFS drive at work.

At the end of the day. I close the lid (Putting the laptop to sleep)

When I get home I open the lid (auto detects I am on a new network gives me a new IP adress)

Opps my NFS drive is still mounted but their is no routing to it.

Now when any application tries to read it you get the spinny sprial ball. And it will never end. If you are lucky you may get to the terminal and do a reboot but never try to unmount the drive or even go to you /Volume/NFS directory if you do then your terminal will hang (Thus wishing you can run the same application twice). Now it is time to admit defeat so you reboot the system. But all the applications close except for the finder. Thus it will not reboot. Last step it to hold down the powerbutton until forced power off. Wait 30 seconds power it back on and run FSCK and wait. That is my only Major Issue with OS X

Re:Mac OS X Panther still a mystery

[Jon Abbott]

I've had the same problem myself. One recommendation I can provide is to try mounting the NFS share using the "NFS Manager" program... When using this program, you can tinker with lots of parameters that are normally more difficult to experiment with at the command line. For example, you can adjust some of the timeout parameters that should give you a little more leeway in the event of getting the spinny beach ball of near-death. It's not a complete solution by any means, but it does seem to help some. All of us with this problem should write Apple to have them fix it.

About the only other advice I can provide is to remember that you have a mount active, and then unmount before leaving work (easier said than done, of course).

Re:Mac OS X Panther still a mystery

[squiggleslash]

The default mounting options for NFS filesystems are, in most operating systems, dumb, in my not-so-humble opinion. I'm not sure if they're set like that as a way of filtering out clueless sysadmins or what exactly.

My advice is check the mount options for NFS shares on your OS. These you pass to the mount command or put in your fstab. The key ones to look for, under Linux, are:

• bg - if you don't put this in your fstab, and your machine can't find a server when it boots, you'll find actually getting into your machine close to impossible under certain circumstances.
• soft - What happens if a server goes offline and your programs try to access a file? They'll get an error? right? Nah, unless you set "soft" as an option, your machine will sit there trying to access the server and never quit. Too bad if you have a file open on a no-longer-available NFS server, you're going to have to reboot and do it the long, slow, way where you manually dismount your other filesystems, making root "read only". If you can. Check out soft, it saves a lot of trouble.
• intr - now, the fact this one's not default makes you want to meet the person who set the defaults for NFS access and mete out strong violence upon their most precious bits. If a program's trying to do something in NFS, and it can't reach the server, you'll want to kill the process, right? I mean, that's fricking obvious. That's SO fricking obvious that a child of one, who's never used Unix, and whose first words were "Com. Mand. Dot Com" will be able to tell you that. But noooooooooooooooo you have to TELL the effing kernel SPECIFICALLY that you're going to actually want to KILL HUNG PROCESSES otherwise it will NOT BLOODY WELL LET YOU. Linus, if it was YOU that set the BRAINDEAD default to NOT "intr", then here, now, ahtside! Otherwise give the bastard who did this a slap for me, cheers. But anyway, to cut a long story short, "intr" will allow you to kill hung processes that were waiting on NFS traffic that'll never arrive. You definitely want to set this in your fstabs and mount -o options. Even if you ignore bg and soft, please, set this one.

"man nfs" in Linux will list these options and many more. At the very least use -o bg,intr unless you've got a very good reason to do otherwise.

OS X users are SOL, unfortunately, as I can't see anywhere in the OS where you can set these options except, presumably, if you want to do low-level by-pass-the-Finder stuff which creates a whole new kettle of worms. Kettle of fish. Can of worms. Something like that.

Funny thing is that with these options set, and with either common passwd files across your machines or a well set up kerberos, NFS becomes an absolute joy to use. Yes, NFS. You heard me right...

Re:to be or not to be

[JonathanBoyd]

I can't believe you were modded up for that. Apple can quite happily continue for several years taking losses, given the amount of money they have. In fact, they're a profitable company, so that isn't an issue. Their consumer and portable lines are doing well, as is the music related stuff. Talk of Apple disappearing is ridiculous. People will be disappointed, yes, but they're going to ship the 970s some time this year and most people who wantone will wait a few more months if necessary.

Another rumor

[Anonymous Coward]

Jobs will do his imitation of Ballmer's monkeyboy dance.

Re:Apple's rumors are rotten...

[Nexum]

"Apple rumors aren't tasty"

Don't you want to know what your Windows box is going to look like in 2009?

-Nex

So am I!

[squibix]

They promise to... just as soon as Slashdot posters startproofreading their posts!

Serial ATA

[xyote]

It better have serial ATA. If not, then by the time people start upgrading their hard drives, not only will they find the parallel ATA drives selling at a premium since they're being phased out, but they will find the drives not being made in the larger sizes they need.

Same goes for some other technologies being introduced now. Nothing worse than a system design that is obsolete before it hits the shelves.

Re:Serial ATA

[JonathanBoyd]

There is a massive existing market for parallel ATA. All the computers with parallel aren't going to disappear overnight when someone starts shipping serial. It'l be a few years before the market for parallel decreases sufficiently for your worries to be relevant.

Re:Rumours...

[JonathanBoyd]

1) - 1.5*1.5 = 2.25, not 2.5

2) - Dual rpocessors give a 70% speed increase at best. Few programs are optimised for them so the biggest benefit you get is when running multiple programs, so going with a 30% increase would be a tad more realistc.

3) - If you really wanted to be conservative, you should be taking the 1.4, rather than the 1.8.

4) - This gives a 'conservative' estimate of 1.4*2.25*1.3 = 4 Ghz roughly (before anyone objets that this is too high, read my next paragraph).

5) - If you think that even your 'conservative' numbers hold for every situation and that speed is limited purely by the CPU speed, then you can't make any sense of what is important about the 970. The extra speed is nice. It should put us on a par with P4s again. It's new bus architecture and better ability to further scale the speed that are going to make the real difference however. It's when you realise that we can start using faster memory, aren't starving the chips of data and can speed the chip up more than once (or twice if we're really lucky) a year that you'll see why this is important. anyone remember the fiuasco with the 500 MHz G4s? How long were we stuck with them as the top end? That, in my mind, is the turning point where we gave the speed crown to Intel and Motorola gave up.

Re:to be or not to be

[squiggleslash]

Those stories were about the iChat videoconferencing thing though weren't they? (Think Secret didn't change the URL names or s - one of the URLs was http://www.thinksecret.com/news/videoconf.html)

Now, that leads to a scary possibility. There are no new 970s. Panther's just an incremental update. The new 15" PowerBook replacement is a 15.4" PowerBook with the same-old G4 as always. But Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that a webcam is the "next big thing" and are convinced that Jobs demonstrating a $400 webcam with an in-built 10G HD will suitably wow the entire world.

It might happen. And, given the success of the iPod, which is "only an MP3 player", they may even be right about the "iCam"... ;-) It'll suck to be a Mac user though after that...

Anything on Safari 1.0?

[mccalli]

It's Safari 1.0 I'm most interested in. Any news on whether they'll include a 'block image from server' function, allow your homepage to be a group of tabs and also add proper keyboard navigation of controls (eg. drop-downs)?

I like Safari because it is quite pretty. Nevertheless, there's no ignoring the fact it currently does less than the Gecko-derived browsers so it hasn't quite done enough to become my default browser yet.

Cheers,
Ian

One word: beleaguered!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple will close down its operations before June 23rd of this month. This is not a rumor. WWDC is going to be a huge going away party, where Steve Jobs will reveal to everyone that he is the Architect.

Now, you might be asking yourself where I got this information from? Simple. Oracle told me. Larry Ellison led me to her, and we had a conversation on a park bench. She said I must spread the truth.

Cupertino _IS_ the Zion and Microsoft centinels are moving closer to destroying it. We must fight their evil forces with devices powered by embedded linux kernels.

- The One

It's a Developer Conference

[buckhead_buddy]

In a past slashdot thread, I predicted that people would be sorely disappointed because Apple would wait to demo new iApps, unveil new prices and cases for new hardware, and keep GUI changes under wraps until they can make a bigger splash to a more consumer audience. Things may be different this year because of their falling out with the MacWorld Expo organizers and so much consumer attention has been focused on WWDC by the Mac fan sites. I won't try to predict what consumer focused changes will appear at wwdc. In the past the biggest announcements were those designed to affect developers in the biggest way, if that holds true, this is what I'd like to hear about:

I'd be happy if we saw official Apple support for Cocoa bridges other developers have created such as Camel Bones (Cocoa/Perl) and PyObjC (Cocoa/Python) as officially supported as the Java/Objective-C bridge.

It might be interesting to see the addition of an optional garbage collector added to Objective-C for newbies to use but engineered in such a way to make it optional for those Objective-C veterans who want to make their work execute more efficiently. Memory management headaches are the biggest difference between the simplicity of Cocoa and other more "popular" languages like Visual Basic (and heck, even Apple's old Hypercard).

Apple went a long way in Jaguar toward re-engineering the bowels of the user interface architecture (HIToolbox) to unify Cocoa and Carbon. I'm sure Panther will see this effort finished, but it'd be great to see a global user interface macro recording feature added now that there's one robust, well-thought and well implemented API underneath.

What would be bigger news to me than any sort of user interface bauble (like the fabled "piles") would be an announcement by Apple that it was completely updating the Mac OS X online help system. They've done a great job of trying to make it easy to get to, but it's very slow and very awkward to use. Any improvements in this area would be very welcome for users and developers.

While new Macs, new iApps, and new user interface trinkets could debut here or at any other Apple event, this is the only time of year Apple really focuses on making geeky, developer relevant announcements. I hope this WWDC doesn't disappoint in that regard.

Re:It's a Developer Conference

[hype7]

While new Macs, new iApps, and new user interface trinkets could debut here or at any other Apple event, this is the only time of year Apple really focuses on making geeky, developer relevant announcements. I hope this WWDC doesn't disappoint in that regard.

Also relevant; it seems that the Apple VP in charge of hardware is going to be headlining at the new MacWorld Expo in July.

Now, that could mean one of three things:
1. He's going to be doing an extended demo of hardware that was released at WWDC
2. He's going to announce the hardware at MW; unlikely if this is the 970s everyone's been predicting (Job's would do that), or
3. He's going to announce that the 970s demo'd at WWDC are to be released.

I choose 1.

-- james

WWDC "to be announced" slots

[nozpamming]

There seem to be quite a lot of slots "to be announced" at the WWDC, especially for tuesday...

Is this normal? Could these be demonstrations of new products? Ideas, anyone?

what Apple WON'T ship

[bbc22405]

There has been much made of the 15" powerbook, which is still Titanium, not Aluminum. Speculation has been that it will be updated dramatically, including outrageous predictions of the new 15" Aluminum powerbook getting a 970 processor. I guess people think it was held back from update so that it could get the 970 when it is finally updated.

People, pay attention. The 15" powerbook was held back because Jobs promised to support MacOS 9 until ... this summer. With that constraint off, it can get the new technologies that are not supported in MacOS 9 (bluetooth, airport extreme). That doesn't mean it's getting the 970.

Since it's a developer's conference...

[chia_monkey]

I'd like to see a few issues addressed. Yet oddly enough, they all seem to involve Microsoft:

1) The whole Virtual PC thing. Is Apple going to talk to developers to find ways to continue to run Windows on the Mac should MS decide to kill VPC?
2) Safari/IE. MS is killing IE for the Mac. Many sites currently don't look so hot, or don't even work, on non-IE browsers. How will this be addressed? Safari "giving in" to IE-style rendering?

I do also expect some yummy hardware announcement, I just have no idea what it is. It's beyond speculation, but whatever it is, I'll be happy.

Re:Since it's a developer's conference...

[mstockman]

2) Safari/IE. MS is killing IE for the Mac. Many sites currently don't look so hot, or don't even work, on non-IE browsers. How will this be addressed? Safari "giving in" to IE-style rendering?

That's really a non-issue, because IE for Mac was never compatible with the sites you're talking about... those sites are IE for Windows specific. IE for Mac was a surprisingly standards-compliant browser, one of the first to support really good CSS1 and a good chunk of CSS2, and it never supported most of the non-standard IE for Windows stuff.

On the VirtualPC front, I do think it would be nice if Apple were to throw its open-source development weight into enhancing Bochs to make it the best emulation out there, and then integrate it into OS X so you could have double-clickable Windows apps in an emulation layer such as Classic mode, but I haven't heard anything about that one way or another.

OpenOffice?

[ek_adam]

While there were a few rumors of an Apple browser before Safari came out, few people expected it to be based on open source Konqueror.

I'm wondering how big a surprise a behind the scenes port of Open Office to the Mac would be.

Piles!

[Draoi]

I certainly hope that Apple comes up with a better name for "Piles"!

Has your OS got piles?

Re:Piles!

[andreMA]

Now where did I leave my Preparation X?

Re:Current G4 Supplies Depleted - what's NeXT ?

[WillAdams]

I know what you mean---my 25MHz '040 NeXT Cube is still my main machine for doing TeX and PostScript work.

The really painful thing is the comments from Mac developers when they first tried out OpenStep 4.2 on decent white boxes in preparation for what was then called Rhapsody...

``windows vanish (instantly) (after clicking the close box)''

``feels rock solid''

``man I hope the real thing performs this snappily''

There was recently a post to comp.sys.next.advocacy from a guy who got OpenStep running on a something.something GHz box w/ 1GB or DDR or somesuch RAM.... may have to think 'bout setting up something like that myself, thoough I'd really miss the cool old-style NeXT keyboard....

William
i

about the 970

[Enrico Pulatzo]

If for some reason Apple doesn't have a 970 machine ready or to be announced at WWDC, all hell is gonna break loose. The underground hype is ridiculous at this point. Every 4th day I see a new story posted somewhere about how Apple must be using the 970 chip. It's all vaporware until they show us a box. People are so paranoid to purchase new machines from Apple for fear of being left out in the cold. Not that Apple actively discourages this though, but at this stage in the game, what can they possibly do to stop the 970 expectation short of actually producing a box?

A link

[ProfessionalCookie]

Steve Balmers hot dance video Everytime I see that I think "wow that guy is a real psycho"

GIVE IT UP FOR MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! I Love This Compayeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

When he prances (ok maybe that's too delicate a word) across the stage he looks like a (really fat) upset beaver...and who chose the music.

At least if Jobs does it he'll have some better music (and won't make himslf look like a fat upset beaver).

Most hardware stocks NOT depeleted at Apple Store

[King Babar]

For what it's worth, I just checked online at the Apple Store, and pretty much *everything* was listed as shipping on the same day. It is possible that the Apple has emptied the distributors' channels and is holding the remaining inventory, but I would not be very sure about this.

Interestingly, what *wasn't* shipping the same day were two versions of the XServe (not the low-end model or the cluster unit, but the other two). Those were listed as 3-5 days. I haven't done this drill recently, so I don't know how unusual this is for the XServe.

In any case, it might be worthwhile "pinging" the Apple Store this week for the appearance of PowerMac shortages. right now, I don 't see any.