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Apple Sets Oct. 24th Release For Mac OS X 10.3
dricci writes "Yahoo! has posted a press release from Apple, regarding the release date of the next major Mac OS X update, 10.3 ('Panther'). The update will be available 8:00 p.m. on October 24th at Apple Retail Stores and Authorized Resellers for $129.00 US (Family Pack for up to 5 users will be $199). Pretty much the same pricing structure they had for Jaguar. It looks like 'old world' Beige G3 support has been discontinued -- the update requires a Mac with built in USB."
That said, 10.3 is the release of Panther you have been waiting for. Dramatic increases in speed and launch times - and I just have an older prelease from WWDC.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Apple is running a very cool countdown clock on their main page here.
Flash aside, this is one important update for Mac users and shows how much code optimization can get you in terms of performance. This release runs impressively fast on current hardware, but more importantly for the installed user base, it gives new life to older machines with good performance on machines going back several years.
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What are you talking about? If I recall:
10.2.1
10.2.3
10.2.4
10.2.6
10.2.8
Were all free, not to mention all the app and security fixes. Most of those updates weren't REQUIRED like the "free Windows updates" AND each time you updated you had to validate your Windows system under XP.
This is the release of X that everyone should want. faster, more stable on every machine I've tested it on.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Yeah, except, as I understand it, the difference is that 10.3 will actually run faster than 10.2 on the same system. As opposed to Win2k and WinXP on the same machine, where the converse is most definitely true.
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
They got more info on the Developer Tools too right here It uses GCC 3.3 now, and from the looks of it, Xcode is gonna rock! Oh, and if you'll look at the Darwin link, you'll notice that the Terminal in the image uses bash instead of tcsh. Darn, and I was just getting used to the C Shell too.=) Oh well then...
WTF?
Apple also announced releasing new versions of iCal and iSync today: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/oct/08ical_is ync.html
"iSync 1.2.1 adds complete calendar synchronization support for Symbian-based smartphones such as the Nokia 3650 and 7650, and the Sony Ericsson P800."
Panther is only $69 if you qualify!
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
I got my dual G5 on the 7th of september. I have partitioned it and have installed both Jaguar (10.2.7 G5) and Panther 7B74 on it (for those asking, I was at the developer conference, hence my seedings of Panther).
Using Code Warrior to build 730 megs worth of sources (no, really), the complete build cycle (after a total cleanup of objects) took 9 minutes on Panther, and 13 minutes in Jaguar.
And that's with a tool that's not multi-threaded. Kudos Apple.
(Oh, and BTW, this same source code set takes roughly 45 minutes on a dual G4 450!!)
Seriously... Take a look!
The rendezvous enabled distributed building and predictive compiling look to be winners.
I am writing this on my(mostly stock) Beige G3/300. I have 256 megs of ram, and the only other upgrade is a ATI Rage 128. With those two upgrades this machine is nearly as responsive as a lot of the newer machines and it costs a lot less. I have used a Dual 1Ghz G4(the mirrored door model) and it feels about the same speed wise. Sure, Safari takes a very small amount of time less to launch. But that is so small, maybe a couple of seconds. I don't use this machine for iMovie or anything like that, and it suits my developing needs just fine. Apple has done a great job to make the new OSes work on old machines like mine. I may even try Panther once the XPostFacto people figure out the needed support....
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
This is why my 6400/200 was the last new Apple machine I bought.
I'm sorry to hear that... the PPC 603 in the 6400 **sucked** compared to the 604 in most of their other desktops.
The Beige G3s were the last Apple machines that I would have considered buying. Since they are no longer supported I guess I won't be buying Apple
Huh?? Were you fond of the 66 MHz bus and onboard 10 MB/sec SCSI? Or was it the EIDE that you liked?
The Blue&White G3 had just as much expansion as the Beige G3 (3 PCI & 1 66 MHz PCI for gfx versus 3 PCI & 1 "personality slot" in the beige). One less drive bay, though, but the machine came with onboard USB and Firewire. Even had a legacy ADB port to help you transition over and keep your favorite keys/mouse. The stock Rage128 blew the beige's graphics out of the water with about 8x the fillrate.
The G4s were even better. And... there are gobs of aftermarket CPU upgrades for the B&W G3, just as there are for the beige.
I would agree that Apple is lacking a good entry-level desktop machine right now ($3K for a monster dual that can support 8-16 GB RAM is a good price, as are most of the PowerBooks... but there is no ideal $1K single processor desktop [the single proc G5s are really expensive in terms of bang for the buck]).
USB is not required.
Apple started shipping ALL of their computers with USB around the same time. Those are the oldest computers that Apple is supporting Panther on. Thus it is easiest to say that they require the Apples with USB built-in, instead of naming all of the oldest computers that they support.
So it's not USB that is required - but the "spec" of the Apple computers that come with USB built in that is required.
Make any sense?
Huh? If you have $1K to spend you can get:
- 1GHz PowerPC G4
- 128MB SDRAM
- 60GB Ultra ATA drive
- DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive
- Keyboard/Mouse
- VGA out
- S-Video Out
- Firewire
- USB
- Audio In/Out
- 10/100 Ethernet
- 56K modem
- Mac OS X
- Speakers
- 17" monitor
- and a bunch of useful software
That's a pretty good entry-level system. It's not the fastest thing you can buy, but it's plenty of machine for most people. If you need more of a machine than that, besides some RAM, you're not in the market for an entry-level machine.My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"USB-required" is just a mnemonic. What it really means is they're only supporting machines released after some date, which happens to coincide with when they made USB a standard feature. Saying "only computers with built-in USB" makes it really easy to check if your machine will support Panther.
I suspect it's because Panther drops support for certain older Apple motherboards, namely the ones from just before Apple added USB as a standard feature.
The OPs analogy was perfect. the 10.2.x updates you describe are hotfixes, and the 10.x are service packs
No. This analogy is false. Apple's version numbering is 10.X where X is the new release number based on the baseline Mac OS 10 architecture. 10.X.Y releases are service packs.
This is no different from Microsoft's release engineering versioning. Windows 2000 was based on NT and was versioned 5.0 and Windows XP based on windows 2000 is version 5.1. Just open a cmd window and look at the verison of XP it should say 5.1.0.xxxx.
Linux does the same thing with 2.X where X is even numbers for stable new releases and 2.X.Y is the number for fixes and minor updates.
There is a difference between marketing and release engineering verisoning.
The accessibility features are not being promoted as prominently as they were with Jaguar (in fact, I could not find a direct link to this page), but they are improved. Specifically, Zoom now has adjustable contrast, which makes it work very much like a CCTV magnifier for paper. Full keyboard access has also been tweaked. Both very nice, but someone who is totally blind still can't use OS X.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
If the results degrade as you go on down the Google list, and only 1 in 100 are systems for sale, that's still nearly a hundred different SATA 8g PCs for you to choose from, and you can certainly build them yourself as well.
The G5 is interesting for many reasons, but this isn't one of them.
If you purchased any new Mac after Oct. 8 you are entitled to a $20 upgrade. If you purchased any new G5 (any date) the same applies. Visit the Mac OS X Up-To-Date page for the application an further details.
The $20 covers shipping and handling of the retail box.
Let's see, that would put us back in '73. Not many PCs then. The Apple II (released 26 years ago) was capable of generating text on its hi-res graphics display (if blitting a pre-stored bitmap directly to the screen can really be called "rendering"), but was painfully slow. The operating system relied upon hardware character generation, and did not even attempt to render. Other PCs of the time lacked graphics display with sufficient resolution for text rendering. The Macintosh (19 years ago) was the first PC to use "rendering" of text routinely (if you don't count the Lisa), but it was still just blitting prestored bitmaps. Actual real-time rendering of outline fonts came in 13 years ago, with Adobe release of Adobe Type Manager, but it was still pretty crude and ugly, with no antialiasing. Apple introduced antialiased text in OS 8.5, about 5 years ago (Microsoft offered it in an upgrade to Windows 95). The idea of antialiasing is an old one, but it wasn't until the mid 90's that computers had enough power to do it to text in real-time at a respectable (albeit slow by modern standards) rate.
No, it's just because all of the machines with built-in USB are NewWorld, and all the macs without built-in USB are OldWorld (including the beige G3s). Saying that it won't support macs without built-in USB is marketspeak for "we've dropped support for all OldWorld systems".
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Cancel your orders, and re-order. Then: "call 1-800-767-2775 and have the phone tree direct you to the Operator and ask for Customer Relations. Make it very clear that you would like your complaint to be Officially Logged and heard by Upper Management." That is from an Apple rep in a discussion forum. I called and they logged my complaint, with a followup request.
Well, rendering text has been "realtime" for 30 years, because the sophistication of what rendering text means has grown in complexity to take advantage of faster CPU's. Sure, on a 1.77 MHz TRS-80 I could edit text (16 lines of 64 characters!), but all text was white on black, monospaced pre-defined characters (not a graphics display, no fonts much less bolding or italics), and word wrapping was a special command that you issued when you were done writing because the computer took several seconds per page to format. On my current Mac (733 MHz G4, fairly slow by today's standards) I'm driving a huge 24-bit deep bitmapped display, where everything displayed is rendered anti-aliased, then mapped onto a display where it's alpha blended. It doesn't allow me to write much faster (OK, saving to a hard drive is a lot faster than saving to cassette tape) but it's doing 400,000 times as much work in order to do realtime spell checking, text wrapping, line layout, proportional spacing, etc.
And to bring it back to the question of whether applications spend any time executing OS calls, _all_ of that work is being done automagically by the operating system. In fact, I can build my own (simple) word processor using Cocoa in minutes, by snapping together prebuilt framework components that understand fonts, layout, etc., so there's almost no application level code at all.
Well, I guess the question of whether the HTML rendering engine is "in the OS" is a philosophical one -- one could argue that only the lowest levels (kernel, filesystem, VM, drivers, etc.) are really the OS. Or you could say that all of the Cocoa and Carbon frameworks and below (including QuickTime, the HTML rendering engine, etc.) is in the OS, which I think is what any Mac developer would say, since that's all stuff provided by Apple that applications can use. Or you could say that "everything in the MacOS X box" is in the OS, which would include applications.
That being said, when people say "MacOS X 10.3 is faster than 10.2" they're talking about the performance of the total system, not attempting to differentiate between the performance of the filesystem, drivers, GUI, frameworks, applications, etc., so the distinction you're trying to draw is not terribly relevant.
So while I guess you might be right in saying that applications spend fairly little time executing time in the OS if you define the OS as only the kernel, I think I'll stick with my definition of OS: the total software system as provided by Apple. And pretty consistently for nearly 20 years now (I've been developing Mac app's a long time -- I used to use the Lisa Pascal cross-compiler) well written Mac app's typically spend over 90% of their time in OS calls. So when Apple tunes their code, it really does have a strong impact on overall application performance.
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