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."

Comments

Shame Wallstreet isn't supported Bcause this is it

[adzoox]

The only problem I find with the support is that the Wallstreet line PowerBooks, especially after adding a 500Mhz G4 upgrade was one of the best lines Apple ever made. I liked the Pismo line too, but the dual storage bay capability of the Wallstreet was a real plus. Floppy to floppy copy Expansion bay hard drive to floppy copy, or Zip and SuperDisk transfer was a real plus when I had to copy files for a client. I also upgraded my drive to DVD/CDRW combo drive.

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.

Countdown clock

[BWJones]

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.

Re:Countdown clock

[Jucius Maximus]

" Apple is running a very cool countdown clock on their main page here [apple.com]. Flash aside..."

Actually it appears to be a javascript type thing. I have flash disabled in mozilla (due to stupid flash ads) and I can still see it.

Re:Countdown clock

[hype7]

Flash aside, this is one important update for Mac users and shows how much code optimization can get you in terms of performance

Absolutely! I'm not the biggest fan of XBench, but these numbers do paint a very impressive picture.

Regardless, don't forget the cool stuff Apple's adding - Expose is cool, I got a chance to play with a pre-release version of Panther and it's one of those things that you'll begin to wonder how the hell you ever lived without it. The other thing that I'm looking forward to is the on-the-fly, user-friend 128-bit AES encryption. Your computer goes walkies? Least the pricks don't get all your stuff.

-- james

Re:Countdown clock

[dthable]

The other thing that I'm looking forward to is the on-the-fly, user-friend 128-bit AES encryption.

Yay, no more encryption by hand. I'm also looking forward to the secure delete function. I'd rather have all those proof of concept and rough design programs and documents destroyed if someone swipes my laptop in an airport.

Re:Countdown clock

[ch0ke]

program execution remains the same, it is the GUI that is much more responsive. dramatic difference on my iBook 600mhz and an old graphite toilet seat @ 366 mhz.

Re:Countdown clock

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Remember that the time taken by the OS, in most cases is below 1% of the total program execution time.

While programs indeed spend little time executing operating system calls, GUI programs spend a lot of time in libraries and waiting on the graphical server. So by improving the libraries or the graphical server, performance and responsiveness can be dramatically improved. This is exactly the kind of optimisation that where done in 10.2, in particular with Quartz Extreme.

You have do understand that most Mac application rely on the system's libraries to do many task: GUI are dones using Quartz, media handling is typically done using Quicktime, DSP like calculations using vecLib and so on. Now you can debate if those libraries are part of the OS or not, the fact is, Panther will probably bring improvements to those libraries.

Re:Countdown clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you used the Panther versions floating out there? My iMac gets about a 30% increase in Finder graphics operations by using one of the developer versions of Panther. Let1KWindowsBloom runs about 57 seconds in 10.2.6 and about 33 seconds in Panther (even considering Panther is run off a FW HD).

Everything else is also *seems* faster, but I don't have objective numbers to back it up.

I don't expect a revolutionary faster OS, I do expect a much more responsive system.

Re:Countdown clock

[Wyatt Earp]

You don't believe it?

Run an OS 10.0.4 box along side of a 10.1.0 box or a 10.0.4 along side a 10.2.0 box and then do a file copy or a browse to a network server and fart around with the machine at the sametime.

Or fire up IE and browse /. articles with more than 50 comments.

The OS does get *that* much faster.

Re:Countdown clock

[Ranger Rick]

I've been using the prereleases of panther and it *is* noticably faster, I'd say pretty close to the difference in speed between 10.1 and 10.2.

Under the covers they've done a lot of work to make prebinding work better, for one thing, and gcc3.3 provides vast improvements in powerpc code over gcc3.1 (even apple's modified version).

Re:Countdown clock

[Jeremy Erwin]

Now you can debate if those libraries are part of the OS or not....
It's been done. Witness the perennial Linux v. GNU/Linux debates.

Re:Countdown clock

[laird]

OK, well, I've been running various 10.3 beta's for a while now, and it _is_ that much faster. Modern applications (i.e. with a GUI, over a decent app framework) spend the vast majority of their time inside system calls (excluding compute-intensive stuff like Photoshop, of course). Think about it -- did it take more CPU to generate a string to display, or to render every character anti-aliased and alpha-blended onto the display? How much time does iMovie spend decoding and encoding video, or reading and writing files? Apple appears to have really tuned the display code...

Aside from that, there are huge chunks of code above the OS that Apple also tuned -- Mail.app, Safari, iTunes, iMovie, etc. So when Safari runs 3x faster than before (subjective number), I can't really tell without a lot of work whether it's the Safari application layer, the HTML engine ("in the OS"), the text layout engine, the display drivers, etc. But I can tell you that after using 10.3, I wouldn't voluntarily run 10.2 again.

Re:Countdown clock

[The Mainframe]

The encryption isn't as cool as it seems. Running 7B85 it insists on creating a duplicate home directory in an encrypted disk image, eating up twice as much space.

Re:Countdown clock

[Ranger Rick]

OK, not everything, I was generalizing, but the point remains. It would be difficult to find apps that don't use libSystem on Mac OS X. I'm not claiming all apps will get a massive speed boost, only saying that your original suggestion that there would be basically no difference is incorrect in my experience.

I've been running the panther seeds for months and it's noticably faster. Believe it or not. =)

Re:Countdown clock

[Anonymous Coward]

Each version of OS X gets faster because, among other things, Apple has been optimizing.

For example, in Panther, the Type 1 rasterizer had a lot of time spent on it, to the point where rasterization alone saw a huge improvement in performance (10.3's rasterization is almost twice as fast as 10.2).

Of course that doesn't mean text draws *twice* as fast as there are many other factors involved in getting text on the screen. But it does mean that text draws faster in 10.3 than 10.2.

Another example. Cocoa. Cocoa's invalidation model was really piss-poor. Often waaay more of a window would get repainted than was truly necessary. 10.3 greatly improves so any Cocoa-based app with many views will be much faster and more responsive.

Another example. Carbon and and its controls. Rather than have all the controls rasterized in QD which in turn had low-level transformations to CG, eveything is now done directly with CG primitives. For example, the animating progress bar in 10.3 uses 1/10th the cycles as compared to 10.2.

i could go on for hours. I have to wonder if the original poster is actually a developer or not? Clearly OS X is a young OS and the are literally thousands of opportunities for optimization. Apple obviously worked on a lot of them for 10.3

Bryan Pietrzak

Re:Countdown clock

[MoneyT]

Still cheaper than buying and upgrading windows:

http://simplest-shop.com/Macintosh--1-229660-sof tw are.html

Let's see
X.1 Sept 28, 2001
X.2 Aug 23, 2002

That puts 11 months between those two releases

And assuming the earliest release of X.3 in sept, that would be 13 months from the last release. And 16 months in december.

By contrast:

Windows 2000 , Feb 17 2000
Windows ME released Sept 14 2000

That would be 7 months

Windows XP Oct 25 2001

That would be 13 months

And lets compare prices:

Mac OS X $130 always (full version)

Windows 2000 $320

Windows ME $110 (upgrade) or $210 (full)

XP Home $100 (upgrade) $200 (full)

XP Pro $200 (upgrade) $300 (full)

So from OS X.0 to X.3

March 2001 to (assumed) Sept 2003 (31 Months)

You've spent $390

From Windows 2000 to Windows XP (19 Months)

Feb 2000 to Oct 2001

You spend at minimum $530 and at most $830

Re:rediculous

[LemonYellow]

Judging from the features that have been demoed so far, this is an upgrade of a similar size to that from Win2k to WinXP. So, paying for it isn't too unreasonable, is it?

Yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

does it run on Windows XP?

Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R

[adzoox]

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.

Worth it.

[blackmonday]

Jaguar's price was "worth it" because of the speed increases. This time around I'm satisfied that there's anough new functionality that I'll be putting down the cash.

Hooray!!

[jcostantino]

I for one am looking forward to Panther's release (as well as iTunes for PC) and I know that someone's going to cry about "The Apple Tax". Apple NEEDS your money, they can't just throw out free software forever, you know. I don't know if there is going to be a free upgrade voucher for units bought in the past month or two though. If I recall correctly, they did have a voucher for people who purchased a unit with 10.1 within a couple months of 10.2's release.

Jeff

Re:rediculous

[nat5an]

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.

Old World Support

[kurosawdust]

It looks like "old world" Beige G3 support has been discontinued -- the update requires a Mac with built in USB."

That's OK - the six guys to whom that would actually apply are still waiting for their copies of 10.2 to boot up.

Re:Old World Support

[Durin_Deathless]

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....

Re:Old World Support

[LookSharp]

This is yet another example of Apple trying to screw the user...

Yeah, man! Fight the power! I want to run the latest and greatest OS on my six year old computer! Even though I bought into the proprietary platform, knowing full well that Apple goes through hardware generations and OSes every 3-5 years! For the past 15+ years!

No more Apple screwing us over! I want OS 10.4 to support my Mac SE! I put 4 megs of RAM and an ethernet card in that thing... it cost me a bundle in 1989! I want some return on that investment! Damn Apple for screwing the user!

And now...!

[scaife]

This version has special built-in protections to keep it from biting you in the neck while you're taunting it in front of your friends. And since its ferocity has been turned down, I suppose I can also expect that I'll need to pet it every once in a while.

More info on the Dev Tools too

[HellsAngel]

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...

Re:More info on the Dev Tools too

[.com b4 .storm]

Darn, and I was just getting used to the C Shell too.=) Oh well then...

What's the big deal about bash being the default? As it is now, tcsh is the default, but you can easily switch to bash (which is included). I'm sure it'll be the same with Panther. A real quick way to switch your shell (chsh doesn't work on OS X):

sudo niutil -createprop . /users/YOURUSERNAME shell /bin/tcsh

Apple isn't making it impossible for you to use the C shell, they just decided it's not the right thing to use as the default shell. Whether or not that's a good move depends, of course, on your personal preferences. But most likely tcsh will just be one little command away after you install Panther.

Re:More info on the Dev Tools too

[Anitra]

sudo niutil -createprop . /users/YOURUSERNAME shell /bin/tcsh

Or you could just use Terminal.app's preferences. Choose whichever shell you prefer.

iSync adds some support for more phones

[bunnyshooz]

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."

Re:got it!

[rastachops]

After trying out B85... I must say I'm not all that impressed. For $129 it really should be something special. Don't get me wrong, it has a more responsive GUI and Expose is excellent and the new Finder is a *lot* quicker... it just somehow doesn't feel worth the pricetag that they're asking for it.

Maybe I was hoping for too much for a .1 update but the GUI speed is no where near the speed of Windows (admittedly... it doesnt crash though :) ).

Just my $0.02

Panther

[rampant mac]

I had the chance to preview Panther on a friend's PowerBook (1Ghz Ti /w SuperDrive) recently. I was very impressed to see the speed improvements Panther brings to "older" machines. Imagine that, and operating system that removes bloat and performs better after subsiquent releases! While 10.2 was what I finally considered a 1.0 release of Mac OS X, Panther is a huge leap in usability.

Expose is so amazing, expect Microsoft to "borrow" it in their next OS release.

Re:Panther

[hype7]

I had the chance to preview Panther on a friend's PowerBook (1Ghz Ti /w SuperDrive) recently. I was very impressed to see the speed improvements Panther brings to "older" machines. Imagine that, and operating system that removes bloat and performs better after subsiquent releases! While 10.2 was what I finally considered a 1.0 release of Mac OS X, Panther is a huge leap in usability.

Expose is so amazing, expect Microsoft to "borrow" it in their next OS release.

Well, they might try. It'll probably be a pale imitation, just like with everything else that Microsoft has copied of Apple's.

Regardless, there's a precedent that Apple has set, that MS hasn't been able to follow (and, IMO, won't ever be able to): that is, with every new OS release, your computer gets faster.

-- james

Re:Panther

[hey!]

Regardless, there's a precedent that Apple has set, that MS hasn't been able to follow (and, IMO, won't ever be able to): that is, with every new OS release, your computer gets faster.

This is usually a sign of good software engineering: make it right first, then make it fast. It's difficult to make bad software faster since it is a challenge to get it work acceptably and changes have too many consequences.

That said, MS probably doesn't care about older machines. Most people don't upgrade their MS operating systems, they buy new ones bundled with new machines. This allows the MS engineers to focus on features that will help MS in its business plans. So, when you get your new machine, with a few exceptions it feels pretty much the same speed as the old one, but has lots of spiffy new features. The folks still using 90MHz Pentiums are not the people who spend much money on IT, and therefore they can do without or suffer horrible performance. It doesn't make for a product one admires on a technical level, but it's hard to fault the business strategy.

Apple's approach makes sense too though, considering their niche position. People buy the latest Macs because they must have them, and roll down their old Macs to other folks. Improving the experience of folks with the hand-me-downs probably helps create the next generation of converts who will shell out money every year to year and a half out of pure technological lust.

Don't Forget the Educational Discount...

[Pirogoeth]

Panther is only $69 if you qualify!

Re:Don't Forget the Educational Discount...

[SlamMan]

And $64.50 for a Government discount (which applies to employees of Fed, state, and local governments).

Rumor sites right

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone loves to bash the rumor sites when they get something wrong... but here we are... rumor sites were spot on with this... so credit where credit is due:

Panther is GM
October 24th Release for Panther
Oct 8th official announcement
S+H Upgrade price for G5 owners

Panther / jaguar compared

[MouseR]

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!!)

Re:Panther / jaguar compared

[MouseR]

Does Panther make the G5 a truly 64-bit platform?

Yes: the OS is fundamentally 32-bits, but the kernel and key parts (math libs etc) are 64-bits under a G5, making it faster. This design decision allows running 32-bit apps seamlessly alongside 64-bit apps.

Ie, does it allow applications to address more than 32 bits (4GB) of RAM? What's sizeof(void *)?

Heres the rundown, from an Apple response in SCITECH:


Hi all,

There seems to be a bit of confusion on this topic. The short answer is
The PowerPC G5 processor is fully 64-bit Mac OS X supports many, but not all, services using 64-bit integers.
Currently, sizeof(void *) == 4

I realize that some people take a rigid position that 64-bit computing = 64-bit OS = sizeof(void *) == 8. Which may be understandable given their problem space, but reality - especially when dealing with mass-market personal computers, not speciality workstations - is a bit more complicated, and different people benefit from Mac OS X's level of 64-bit support in different ways.

A more official explanation is below. Please let me know if there's any confusion about this.
Sincerely,
Ernest Prabhakar
Product Manager, UNIX & Open Source
Apple

Mac OS X Jaguar (10.2.7 and later) features a redesigned kernel and updated system software math libraries specifically for the 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor. The updated kernel delivers the most substantial benefits of 64-bit computing by breaking through the 4GB physical memory barrier enabling the kernel to use all the RAM that can be added to the new Power Mac G5 (currently 8GB).

The key functions of the system math and vector libraries have been hand tuned to make maximum advantage of new and faster math functions that the 64-bit G5 is capable of. This is a great because unmodified applications that use the system math functions will get an automatic speed up when run on the G5. For example, the square root function is implemented as a software algorithm when run on a G3 or G4 but on a G5 when a square root calculation is requested the math library uses the super-fast hardware instruction that the G5 has.

This approach brings the maximum benefit of 64-bit processing to the desktop personal computer market and does so with full native-speed compatibility with existing 32-bit applications. Because the PowerPC instruction set was designed initially with 64-bit instructions in mind, this transition is a smooth and simple one for our developers and customers.

Apple has also supplied a new compiler, GCC version 3.3 which generates optimal code for the new G5 machine model. Importantly, this compiler produces code that executes efficiently on G5, G4 and G3 systems so a single Mac OS X application runs on each of our support processor architectures. This allows developers to build and qualify a single version of their applications for the 32-bit and 64-bit Mac systems.

Mac OS X Panther takes the same approach to the G5 as Jaguar but will be able to optimized additional math functions based on feedback from the developer community.
References
Optimizing for the Power Mac G5
):
Technical Note TN2086: Tuning for the G5: A Practical Guide

Technical Note TN2087: PowerPC G5 Performance Primer

Technical Note TN2090: Driver Tuning on Panther or G5 (Of interest only if you have written a device driver)

Power Mac G5 Performance White Paper (PDF)
http://www.apple.com/powermac/pdf/PowerMacG 5_Perf_ WP_071503.pdf

Default Sizes
sizeof (char) == 1
sizeof (short) == 2
sizeof (int) == 4
sizeof (long) == 4
sizeof (long long) == 8
sizeof (void *) == 4
sizeof (void (*)(void)) == 4
sizeof (float) == 4
sizeof (double) == 8
sizeof (long double) == 8* [may change in the future]
sizeof (size_t) == 4
sizeof (off_t) == 8

G5-Related Flags for GCC
-mcpu=970
This allows the compiler to use instructions only available on the G5 (also known as

Re:no 'cheap' upgrade for purchases prior to Oct 8

[The Placid Casual]

The OS 'Up To Date' program applies to all Apple computer purchases post 8th October, allowing an upgrade to 10.3 for the reduced 'handling fee' of $19.99.

However, I can see there will be a lot of new 12", 15" and 17" 'Alu' Powerbook owners that will feel they have been shafted having bought the new revised machines at the start of October...

XCode alone looks worth the upgrade

[Talez]

Seriously... Take a look!

The rendezvous enabled distributed building and predictive compiling look to be winners.

Re:XCode alone looks worth the upgrade

[watzinaneihm]

They finally seem to have a solution to the "too many windows open" (not apple specific, I have not even used one) problem. I hate to have to hold down Alt-Tab (i like to use the keyboard) and then look around to find which window I want to switch to. Because of this, I tend to have a max of two or three windows open at a time. No OS really helps here, though in Linux I use multiple desktops to group tasks of similar kind (Desktop one for work, two playing music, three for a root login in case I want to mount NFS etc. ) and I can easily switch when the windows hierrarchy looks like a tree.
Take a look at the Apple solution called Expose . They use F9 to cascade all windows (like opera), another key to grey out all windows of other apps than the one you are using. Press F10 and all photoshop apps are highlighted while all other apps fade into grey. In linux Gimp could benefit from such a feature.

Sucks if you just bought a new powerbook

[morcheeba]

That sucks. I shelled out $3k for their latest revision of the 17" powerbook on the second day it was released (Sept 17), only to find that the features they have been touting for so long (X windows, native & fast PDF support, X code) are going to cost. Why only the top of the line desktops - why not my more expensive top of the line laptop? My machine is newer than many G5s (although maybe they were trying to satisfy customers with long preorder times).

Re:Sucks if you just bought a new powerbook

[alecto]

Don't you mean "Just install Gentoo and you'll be upgrading the OS for the rest of your life?" :)

Re:Sucks if you just bought a new powerbook

[Pius II.]

But X window and native and (relatively) fast PDF support are already available for Jaguar. XCode is definitely available for Jaguar, too, although probably not for non-developers. So, the features you are asking for are there.
Plus, it was widely known that Panther would come, and probable that there would be no cheap updates for folks who bought Jaguar prior to the release announcement (because it was like that with the last updates, too).

Re:Sucks if you just bought a new powerbook

[morcheeba]

When I bought my last laptop, Office 2000 was on the horizon, and I was upgraded three months later when it was released. Maybe my case - 5 weeks - is pushing it, but did they really have to screw everyone who bought a laptop yesterday?

Three years ago I switched completely to Linux. I wanted a unix machine that was well integrated because I was tired to trying to get Red Hat to do simple stuff (example: native MP3 support was discontinued because of license issues, DVD playback). RH is great - I've bought 2 copies retail and my desktop runs RH8 for work, but I just didn't want to do admin chores while on my own time.

The pdf support is supposed to be "the fastest of any machine ever"... probably marketing hype, but I use a lot of large postscript files and render speed is important.

No G5

[dublisk]

Panther requires a minimum of 128MB of memory and is designed to run on the following Apple products with built-in USB support: iMac,(R) iBook(R), Power Macintosh(R) G3, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube.

Thank god I didn't get a G5.

Re:rediculous

[fermion]

You don't have to pay for it. You can live without it. Just like music or really cool sneakers, OS is not a life necessity, no matter what the propaganda wants you to believe.

And, if we use the MS argument against Linux, unless your time and bandwidth is worthless, you do pay or every incremental upgrade.

Re:MacOS 10.3

[CountBrass]

Two fallacies in one post - way to go.

Fallacy one. How many different word processing/spreadsheet/paint packages do you use ? how many does anyone need? There's a slection of the best from free to costly available on the Mac. Some of the best aren't available on Windows...

Fallacy two. OSX (and Linux and Unix) aren't just more secure because not so many people hack them - they're more secure because they're built that way. They don't by default execute attachments when you read email, they don't leave ports open all over the place etc etc. OSX has fewer security problems because its built that way and Windoh!s isn't. Edward

is it so hard to use the CLI FTP client?

[dmnic]

nope, I didnt think so.

No you dont.

[irn_bru]

A purchase of a G5 system AT ANY TIME qualifies for the $20 (postage and packing) Upgrade. It's just folks like me who have just spent 2 grand on a new powerbook that miss out... Details Here

Enough with the "point" release

[mariox19]

I will stipulate that Apple went ahead and violated a convention in computing for the sake of marketing; but people criticizing the $129 price in the context of the upgrade being a "point" release are way off the mark.

Panther is OS XII -- but I guess Apple wants to stick with the mindshare that the big "X" has created.

I stuck with 10.1 until only last month. Know what? When I finally installed Jaguar on my machine, I was kicking myself for waiting so long.

These are major upgrades.

Re:Enough with the "point" release

[memph1st0]

i agree with them being major upgrades, and can see your logic in saying that it is OS XII, but one thing we all have to notice is that our notion of OS true "upgrades" is warped by the likes of microsoft. they simply bloat their code, change the ui a bit, and add some more features on. but what apple has done has created a nearly perfect user interface [that steve worked on at NeXT for years and years], and now they are doing what they should be doing - optimizing the existing codebase, and then tacking on new revolutionary features. so they're sticking with name X, because it "looks" the same and microsoft has taught us that changing the UI means major upgrade.

Re:Enough with the "point" release

[midknight32]

Ya wouldn't happen to mean touting win2k.1 as a whole new operating system (XP)??

nahhh.. never.

Re:Enough with the "point" release

[b-baggins]

I'm surprised this still comes up.

The X in OS X is a word play. It has a double meaning. It means 10 in Roman numerals, thus signifying the next big release after OS 9, and a revolutionary release. It is also an X as in uniX and advertises that OS X is a uniX operating system. There's more to the name than just changing to a Roman numeral numbering scheme.

OS X is the name of the operating system. The number afterward is the version.

Could they have gone with OS X 1.0? Yeah, and I think that would have been better, but, I'm not paid by Apple to make the big decisions.

Upgrade price

[frozenray]

Ellen Feiss doesn't like it

8P

Powerbook users screwed

[Nutcase]

I bought a new powerbook on Friday. Less than 3 weeks from the date I bought, they will be releasing Panther. So far, this is cool. But the fact that the up-to-date program doesn't cover it is not cool. That sucks.

It wouldn't burn so bad if they hadn't made a specific exception for machines that were shipping back in August. That's like a slap in the face.

I wonder who to complain to (clearly complaining to /.ers is not the right approach). Squeaky wheel and all that....

Re:Powerbook users screwed

[valkraider]

I have the same problem! Mine arrived the 3rd, ordered it the day they announced them. What bothers me is that all the G5s get the upgrade FREE, but the NEW Powerbooks are NEWER than the G5s!!! And the laptops are not even considered...grrr.

No bother anyway though, cause my laptop will fit under the family pack that I have to buy for my older machines anyway, it's just the point of it all. They should say - anyone with a computer that SHIPPED with 10.2.7 should get a free (or $20) 10.3 upgrade.

This is what?

[BrokenHalo]

Shouldn't this be OS X.III ?

Re:This is what?

[Bi()hazard]

Your point is correct, but you mistyped the quote. I just ran it by highlighting part of your comment and using speech in 10.2.8, and it said:
"After all, why would they call the oh es Mac oh es ten ten point three if the ex really meant ten?"

Yeah, mac os ten ten point three. Aren't they cute?

You probably like record players, too

[SuperBanana]

The only problem I find with the support is that the Wallstreet line PowerBooks, especially after adding a 500Mhz G4 upgrade was one of the best lines Apple ever made.

Please. This is just my-record-player-is-better-than-your-CD-player BS. I had a Lombard, and it was a piece of shit. In your hands it looked, felt, and sounded like a plastic toy. The CD drive door broke. The rubber feet fell off within a month. The case scratched -incredibly- easily and the letters on the keyboard wore off within 2 years. One screen clutch broke, the hard drive died inside of 3 years, the battery within 3 went to half-capacity, and Apple stopped selling new Lombard batteries shortly thereafter. The screen was horrible- in any kind of sunlight, for example, all you saw was green plastic w/ a hint of something in the way of a screen. Half the keyboard doesn't work anymore, the screen has a white line down one side- and to top it all off, the video cable to the screen is toasted; the display went from occasionally flipping out to requiring 2 minutes of adjusting the screen angle, to just not working period.

I now have a revision-1 17" powerbook. It's awesome. Fit+finish is excellent, and everything in the design screams attention-to-detail. The case appears to be very durable(I do have a few small scratches on the bottom however). The screen is terrific in strong light, even direct sunlight hitting it. Gigabit ethernet is fast as hell, airport reception is fantastic, better than my Orinocco Gold card, which was widely considered the standard. In almost every way, my 17" PB kicks the living shit out of your Wallstreet, including battery life...the one exception being weight(so get a 12 or 15"). So do yourself an enormous favor and start using a computer built this decade.

My problem is that Apple broke Bluetooth in a MAJOR way with 10.2.8, and with Panther right around the corner, it looks like it'll never get fixed. That's practically illegal- "we broke it, so just buy the update." Um, no- and as a result, I think I'll be downloading Panther, not buying it.

Re:You probably like record players, too

[ivan256]

Dude, you must have beat the shit out of that thing. I carried my lombard around for 3 years, and it still looks like new. The little rubber feet did fall off after the third DVD I played, but other than that it was a quality machine. It's not a TiBook, but it was an excelent machine compared to the others on the market at the time. I still use mine every day, but I find it's too heavy to carry around without serious justification.

Re:Liberate your software.

[wo1verin3]

>>Frankly, I'm tired of Steve Jobs claiming he
>>has a "revolutionary" new upgrade for my
>>Macintosh every year. I don't think that this
>>is worth $129.00.

Well I've put a team of monkeys to work on trying to figure out how to ensure you don't lose your $129 dollars, and will still allow Steve Jobs to market his product in a way that he sees fit.

After 3.4 seconds, the monkeys typed the following:

DON'T BUY IT

Re:Looks like the Apple 'lies' (marketing) continu

[green pizza]

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]).

Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R

[MarsCtrl]

The OPs analogy was perfect. the 10.2.x updates you describe are hotfixes, and the 10.x are service packs.

No, I disagree.

Microsoft's updates can be catagorized into three things: 1) Service Packs, 2) Critical Updates (such as the latest IE bugfixes), 3) Non-critical updates (such as improved foreign language support, Media Player Upgrades, etc)

Apple's updates can be similarly catagorized: 1) Mac OS X Updates (i.e, 10.2.x), 2) Security Updates (such as the one I received on 8/14), and 3) Non-critical updates (such as the Java 1.4.1 update)

There is a direct correlation between the two in their catagorization. The only difference is in how they express their version numbering; Microsoft tends to be slightly more liberal in their updates of the major version. Just because Microsoft didn't refer to Windows XP as "Windows 5.1", are they more justified in charging for a periodic upgrade than Apple progressing from 10.2 to 10.3?

The difference being that even the big bad evil MS doesn't charge for service packs; and if they did, they'd be tarred and feathered here. But it's OK for Apple to charge for them.

If there's one thing to be learned from the 10.2.8 update, it's that Slashdot won't hesitate to gang up on Apple for doing something stupid. Unlike other companies, however, Apple doesn't make a business out of it.

Re:not a complaint, believe it or not

[island_earth]

Did I mention I'm getting married Saturday? "Honey, I know we just got back from the honeymoon, but this is PANTHER!!!"

Sorry, but a real Mac fan would have said "Honey, I know we're still on our honeymoon, but this is PANTHER!!!"

Of course, your average /. reader would more likely only be able to say "Honey, it's sweet and comes from bees."

Re:Why is USB required?

[valkraider]

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?

Re:That's too bad

[rworne]

They sure don't. I received Jaguar the day before the official release. Damn them, I wanted to wait.

Illegal?

[mccalli]

My problem is that Apple broke Bluetooth in a MAJOR way with 10.2.8,

err....really? Works fine here on a 12" Powerbook/Nokia 3650 combination. In fact, with the iCal/iSync updates out today my machine just become a lot more useful as it now sync calendars with any Series 60 device (which includes the 3650).

That's practically illegal- "we broke it, so just buy the update."

Or go back to pre-10.2.8 for free. Assuming it's broken of course, as stated above I haven't seen any evidence for that. Happy to be proved wrong if you can point me anywhere.

...as a result, I think I'll be downloading Panther, not buying it.

Now, if you're looking for something that really is illegal...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Looks like the Apple 'lies' (marketing) continu

[bill_mcgonigle]

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]).

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.

Re:Why is USB required?

[ChrisDolan]

"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.

Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R

[raptor21]

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.

Actually, there's 10...

[siskbc]

That's OK - the six guys to whom that would actually apply are still waiting for their copies of 10.2 to boot up.

...and you just found them all!

Re:Hey, that's my birthday!

[b-baggins]

Apple doesn't sell upgrades, they sell full versions. After you buy Panther, you can sell Jaguar, toss the disk, whatever, and still be able to reinstall Panther should you need to.

Another nice thing: No product activation.

Re:Bastards!

[Luckboy]

You should look again. ALL G5 owners get it. This is from http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/

Customers who purchase a qualifying new Power Mac G5 (M9020LL/A, M9031LL/A, M9032LL/A) regardless of purchase date that does not have Mac OS X Panther v10.3 included can upgrade to Mac OS X Panther.

Check your facts before complaining.

Funny - I'm experiencing something similar.

[speechpoet]

I never thought about it before, but my new dual G5 is measurably faster than my WallStreet, which has, yes, shown certain signs of age since it was released in 1998. In retribution, I will not only download Panther, but shoplift a 17-inch PowerBook and steal Steve Jobs' turtleneck collection.

X11

[CGP314]

I'm suprised no one has mentioned the native X11 support in 10.3. That's what's going to make me switch from a win/linux dual boot dell to an ibook or powerbook.

Re:X11

[tobyblake]

Does anyone know if the X server coming with Jaguar will offer full-screen support? This is what has prevented me from using the x11 public beta.

Re:Sounds like a letdown?

[Lysol]

Hmm, I don't remember Panther being touted as a 64-bit OS at all. In fact, that's all on the G5 side of things.

Regardless, 10.2.8, as mentioned earlier, is free. And there are some significant things that make this worth the upgrade.

A lot of things have been sped up/optimized. PDF viewing, file searches, graphics in general.

The file system is fully journaled.

File Vault provides full 128-bit encryption of user files - with no or little speed degradation. A very handy feature for people with laptops that might possibly get stolen.

All the Samba stuff works much better.

iChat AV. I video call my relatives on the west coast and this is a billion times better than the phone; I don't care if people think it's cheesy or not.

X11 is a lot tighter than in previous versions.

etc.., etc.., etc..

As far as the G5 goes, what other PC, PC mind you, can you have 8-gigs of ram on or that comes stock wither SATA drives?! None yet. Apple is doing it right. They're introducing things that work well and will then provide incremental upgrades that bring in tested features, such as 64-bit. I think a lot of people are just too used to the Windoze way of release crap asap and then fix. Charging along the way as well.

Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R

[tgibbs]

Generally, Apple's "pay" upgrades include major new software and or features, as well as OS performance enhancements. Having seen Expose in action, I'd certainly pay $69 for it (which is the academic OSX upgrade price) if it were offered alone as a shareware product.

Tribute?

[wtmoose]

I'm sure this has been noted before, but I hadn't come across it...

OS X Panther

Malcolm X

Black Panther Party

Universal Access in Panther

[beetle496]

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.

Steve Jobs secret marketing meeting

[teamhasnoi]

Somewhere in California, in a seamless ivory tower that slowly glows, then fades.

Steve: "Well, we'll just give all the G5 people the free upgrade, the powerbooks are shit out of luck."

Lackey: "What if the angry powerbook owners storm the building, and take it?"

Steve: "How much damage can they do? Those powerbooks wouldn't even dent my skull. Now, if the G5 owners got pissed, wielding their G5s like clubs, then I might shit my pants. Those things are big. Let's keep them happy."

Lackey: "Good thinking, master. I will alert your minions."

Steve (to self): "Yes... Angry G5 owners...damn....Shit my pants..."

Re:Sounds like a letdown?

[Mr. Darl McBride]

As far as the G5 goes, what other PC, PC mind you, can you have 8-gigs of ram on or that comes stock wither SATA drives?! None yet.

Hit Google, search for "sata xeon workstation" for 6,330 hits. The first few links I visisted were PCs with SATA and capable of more than 8 gigs of RAM for less than the price of a G5. Most Xeon chipsets, and many Pentium IV chipsets allow 36-bit addressing, if you didn't know. (The 32-bit barrier was a non-issue as early as 2000.)

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.

Free ($20) Qualifying Update

[Josuah]

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.

Rendered text

[tgibbs]

Come on, rendering text has been real time for 30 years. If you actually do wait for text to appear, then why do you pay more than $3000 for a computer.

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.

Re:Why is USB required?

[Kazymyr]

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".

Re:How do you prove you qualify?

[babbage]

I'm curious about that too. My brother is a teacher, and I'm curious what he would have to do to take advantage of the discount. Possibly, nothing.

It used to be that companies would offer steep discounts on software for educational customers, but you would have to verify your credentials in order to get that discount (e.g. buy from a campus bookstore, and have to present your student ID at purchase time, etc).

Now though, at least some companies seem to be a bit more lax about this. For example, I regularly see the student edition of Microsoft Office XP advertised in the local newspaper & area stores for around $100 to $150, while the full version -- which I almost never see advertised -- can be more than double that. The student version only has part of the suite, but it's the part that most Office users would want anyway -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. My fiancee bought a copy of this edition when she got her computer a year ago, and the clerk at the register didn't do anything at all to verify if she's actually a student. I assume that most of the people buying this edition of Office aren't actually students, but the fact that it apparently sells much better than the full edition has encouraged Microsoft to avoid slaying this particular golden goose.

Maybe the same is going on with Apple. As far as I can tell, they don't do much or anything to enforce the restrictions on the educational discount program. Maybe they see it as a small leak that allows for a bit higher sales than they would have gotten had such a program not been available; that is to say, if they started enforcing the "are you really a student or educator" rule more closely, they might lose too many sales to be worthwhile.

*shrug* In any case, I'm going to have to talk to my brother, and find out if he's interested in buying an operating system that won't run on any computer in his house... :-)

It's Mac OS X 3.0

[TheInternet]

but paying the same for an upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3 as someone might pay to upgrade from Mac OS 9 to 10.3 is not

For technical reasons, Apple chose to go with a more conservative numbering scheme. The problem seems to be that buyers put way too much emphasis on the version number. For example, 10.2 brought Quartz Extreme, which was a massive leap for the graphics engine. This isn't something you'd typically find in a point release. These are major new features that require serious engineering.

Mac OS X 10.3 is actually Mac OS X 3.0. In fact, I have an early Mac OS X packing list that reads "Mac OS X 1.0", but they've since changed it to Mac OS X 10.0. Apple tried to address the point release stigma using "Jaguar" and "Panther", but there's still some confusion.

The bizarre dilemma Apple finds themselves in is that they've created this incredibly flexible architecture that allows them to make sweeping improvements very quickly, but it happens so fast that people don't think it's real. You can't win.

As for needing Panther to run future applications, yes, of course. Apple buffs up the frameworks, so better applications will result from the framework enhancements. The alternative is to just sit around and let other OS architectures catch up while not selling a new product. I don't think the advantages of this outweight the disadvantages at this point.

- Scott

MacOS X 10.3 really is that much faster

[laird]

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.