Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August

Max Fomitchev writes "Looks like Apple is going to reveal its new cool and fast Mac OS code-named 'Leopard' in the upcoming World Developer's Conference in August. Good news for Apple! And terrible news for Microsoft. If 'Leopard' is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."

Comments

This has been news on June 26

[aralin]

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/jun/26wwdc.ht ml

Re:More Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

It certainly makes a lot more sense for them to just use a Windows installation. If they do that, Microsoft is likely to be okay with it since it means they'll sell more copies of Windows. If Apple reverse engineered the Windows API, Microsoft would probably make "improvements" to it out of spite, to cause things to break when run on the Mac's reverse-engineered API.

That's probably also why Apple didn't reverse engineer MAPI so Mail.app could talk to Exchange, choosing instead to screen-scrape Outlook Web Access.

Re:Who writes this junk?

[kjart]

Agreed. It's not even like you'd need to edit a whole article - you're editing the summary of an article.

we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year

(emphasis mine)

I found that pretty amusing. Since when is a 10% (plus or minus; feel free to correct me with solid info) marketshare remarkable?

Also, from the actual article itself:

The upcoming "Leopard" OS is expected to be even slicker and faster than its predecessor OS X.

Is this actually a new OS like the article suggests, or just a new revision of OSX (10.5 or what have you)? If it's not supposed to be completely brand new, I find this article somewhat questionable.

Re:No, We Won't.

[drewmg]

I too hate to point out the obvious but...

Thousands of casual computer users are switching. I switched. I know at least 10 people in my age group (20-30) who have swtiched. 10 more who are thinking about it. People looking to buy a new comptuer when they go off to college are looking at Macs more seriously than ever. They do the same things that any casual user is looking for in a Windows computer (email, web, chat, word processing), they look better doing it, and they work flawlessly (and better) with that iPod they got for Christmas.

You're right when it comes to Gamers not switching to Macs, but how many gamers don't have a PS2 or Xbox? You're right when it comes to businesses not switching to Macs, but the home computer market is certainly not worth overlooking.

Mac's marketshare may not be stellar yet, but compare it to their marketshare 5 years ago.

Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard

[saddino]

new finder (hopefully finally not carbon anymore)

One should note that it's not Carbon that makes the Finder suck. Any decent, full-featured OS X application can be written in Carbon if the developer takes care to implement things correctly. And even more importantly, some things in OS X can still only be done in Carbon, hence the Framework's inclusion in many Cocoa applications as well. Unfortunately, most users associate Carbon with all those ported ("carbonized") OS 9 C++ applications written on top of Metrowerks' PowerPlant, so it makes sense Carbon has a bad rap, but the fact is: Carbon is not the issue here. Carbon's fine.

Re:More Speculation

[Detritus]

Obviously written by someone who never used OS/2. Microsoft went out of their way to sabotage OS/2 by "enhancing" Windows in ways that would be difficult or impossible for IBM to emulate.

Re:Apple doesn't have to reverse-engineer Windows

[Orrin Bloquy]

There is a hurdle to be crossed if Apple implements Win32, and that's that it's a huge PITA to implement. The Wine people have been trying to get this running for decades.

Without access to internal APIs, doing it entirely through blackboxes.

They'll get close, and then Windows will move forward again.

XP is done. There may be tweaks, but the API is frozen.

Some features, (DirectX, hard to implement as you point out, is one of them), have never been properly implemented.

I mentioned DX because of firmware differences between Mac/PC video cards from the same vendor.

Even once implemented, a Windows application will need to be installed (not the case for a Mac app), it will require some massaging of the APIs to get something that even vaguely fits into the same desktop as traditional Macintosh applications,

You're assuming it has to live in the same partition/filesystem as OS X. Bootcamp shows it doesn't. Moreover, Classic and X11 have given their dev team upwards of five years' experience dealing with sandboxes.

it will, in short, be half-arsed. Imagine what the WINE people have had to go through.

With considerably fewer years to do it. If we assume Red Box dates back to 1997, that means XP in 2001 was an incremental change for them, not a sea change. Codeweavers, in contrast, did everything through reverse engineering.

Now apply Steve Job's perfectionism,

Have you SEEN the Finder?

and Apple's lack of time and resources,

Cite references to either imaginary factor?

and ask how Apple can possibly come up with code by themselves that will work.

Assuming Red Box exists in a workable form, it's been in the works since 1997. Rhapsody was all about getting Classic/Win apps to run natively inside it on the processor-relevant platform, as well as creating a framework to run natively inside Windows itself. Do some homework.