Slashdot Mirror
Looking Ahead to Tiger, Powerbook G5s
sebFlyte writes "ZDNet is running a preview of Apple's newest version of OSX, Tiger, after Jobs said it was still on track for a q2 2005 release (long before Longhorn...)." And an anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that Powerbook G5s will ship in Q2 2005."
The Register is reporting that Powerbook G5s will ship in Q2 2005.
Bullshit.
What's a shame is that Microsoft announced this as a feature of longhorn a couple years ago, but 10 bucks, no 100 bucks says when Longhorn comes out the slashdot crowd will scream copycat.
"Your point being what, that Apple knows how to plan ahead and design their architecture for longevity, extensibility and reuse, while Microsoft's stuff is so crappy that they have to throw it all out every few years and start over?"
Apple is the same company that took ten years and several totally abortive attempts to develop a replacement for their original MacOS [1]. Once they failed at that one too many times, they said to hell with it, bought their next generation OS and released it in the form of a product that couldn't run any existing MacOS software, except through emulation. While their technical staff was busy screwing this up, their business staff managed to handle the clone issue in the worst way possible: they waited umpteen years too long, licenced a couple vendors (including their primary parts supplier), and pulled the rug out from under them when they realized they were getting undercut. Thus leaving their licencees and anybody that invested in them holding the bag.
These guys are occasionally brilliant and Mac OS X is nice product (I know, because I own a Mac), but it's a miracle they're still in business at all. 1] It's worth pointing out that Microsoft's next generation OS (Windows NT) was released in 1993, 7 or 8 years before OSX 10.0. They developod this, despite the fact that they fell out with their partner (IBM and OS/2 NT) and had to maintain two kernels (NT and 9x). Both kernels ended up running both 16 and 32-bit software. Windows isn't without its share of problems, but Microsoft has classically done a far better job of delivering product than Apple has.
With respect to throwing stuff out, even Longhorn retains the existing USER/GDI graphics layer. Avalon is a replacement, but it's the first replacement of the USER.DLL/GDI.DLL API in 20 years (and it's based on DirectX stuff, so it's not totally a replacement even now).