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Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the new-kitty dept.

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."

14 of 519 comments (clear)

  1. More Speculation by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There's not a lot of meat to this article other than "here comes Leopard!" This tech blog seems to state the obvious and then say perhaps five times ... so I'll throw down some speculation as this article points out.

    Way back in the day, Apple code named their boxes by color. From the aforementioned article:
    Red Box (for those that don't remember), was said to be a compatibility environment where Windows apps ran on the Macintosh but did so within a separate Windows installation. Apple doesn't have to reverse engineer the Windows API (like WINE) to get this functionality and theoretically upset Microsoft. Rather, it could simply be based on a standard copy of Windows. Red Box would override Windows native interface when run on OS X and would incorporate OS X's Aqua user Interface in the place of the Windows UI. The software would then make the two environments (Mac and Windows) functionally seamless with one another. Unlike a virtual environment, the end result would be full compatibility while retaining both visual as well as functional usability for the Mac user.
    So we can speculate that Leopard might not only be fast but also encourage a partitioned Windows installation using boot camp so that it can reference everything within Windows and run Windows apps flawlessly without having to reboot or (more importantly) reverse engineer Windows.

    Again, this is just speculation, I've been expecting them to put 'red box' functionality in a release of OS X soon.
    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:More Speculation by jcr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      Actually, I'd say that implementing Win32 on Mac OS X would be a way that Apple could screw Microsoft, but good. A second implementation would freeze it: "Why aren't you using the normal win32? I want to use your app on my Mac!"

      It would create considerable pressure on developers to ensure that their apps needed nothing more than whatever snapshot of the Win32 API Apple had decided to implement. WINE is trying to track MS's changes, but if Apple turns Win32 into another penalty-box environment like Classic or X11.

      That being said, I don't see it happening.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    2. Re:More Speculation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "It certainly makes a lot more sense for them to just use a Windows installation."

      I have to post anonymously on this one...

      But speaking to a well known Oh-Ess Ecks programmer, I asked him about the possibility of Wine noting that he would be the one to ask. He is very collegial with Microsoft and I've hung with him and one of M$'s top programmers as they have both bitched and moaned about the other's OSs (and the Microsoft guy actually made a few points I never thought about before that were on the money...I program Windows for a living but own a niche Mac support company that grew out of a mailing list I use to moderate...I can almost give up the Windows programming these days as my organization is starting to look like it needs centralized day to day leadership, but beyond that, I could care less what OS anyone else uses. I know how to use both and my Vaio is as much a part of me as my new Intelbook).

      Getting to the point, talking to the guy and asking him about the possibility of using my Windows skills to port applications using WINE but with a translated front end on the Mac side. Pretty much, simply run the APIs of the apps I have created or have access to, and create new native front ends. Best of both worlds I thought (sorta like when I would create C++ backends and use VB to build the front end on the PC and Hypercard for the Mac -- I got pretty proficient at making certain DLLs could be recompiled as a XCMD simply by dropping it in the right compiler and letting the headers decide what to do with it).

      His response was one of the most direct responses I've ever gotten about future plans without him saying anything. Claimed to have looked into WINE, had it running internally (this was a year back, when I was still planning on having to use an X86 emulator to do most of the work as I didn't think the Intel switchover was going to happen so quickly) and he said that while it was a good product, they weren't going to use 'compromised' APIs to do this. When asked if they had any plans to license or develop any of their own non-compromised APIs, he responded that there was no plans to license anything. It was a pretty strongly worded statement, especially when looking into the point by point claims and what was missing from my original query. And considering the last statement I received in this manner was positively prophetic looking back upon the email.

      With Bootcamp and the new emphasis on Parallels and my knowledge of their staff, my best bet is that Apple is planning on leveraging Windows to their own needs, making it usable but a pain. Sort of like how their Bluetooth products refuse to work with the Windows side of the Intelbook and simple features that could have been added were ignored to ensure that you only got exactly what you needed to run Windows solidly in Bootcamp, but not with the trademark Apple Ease of Use.

    3. Re:More Speculation by NixLuver · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Heh... Entourage uses OWA in the event your Exchange admins block IMAP. So even MICROSOFT won't reverse engineer MAPI for the Mac. Perhaps that's because the Mac versions of office already 'feel' much nicer than their Windows counterparts; Entourage would be a 'hands-down' Outlook killer if it wasn't for the connection issues that it imposes on one. Gotta wonder what kinda politics go on between the Mac development crew at MS and the Windows crew.

      --
      Thinking outside my Head
    4. Re:More Speculation by squiggleslash · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's a massive exaggeration.

      IBM didn't emulate anything. It created some hooks and patches to allow the Windows kernel to run under OS/2. Microsoft's sole attempt to break this was to make Windows 3.11 incompatible with IBM's stub. IBM quickly fixed that.

      OS/2's Windows compatibility did become less useful with Windows 95, partially because, for obviously necessary reasons (which have nothing do with Microsoft being spiteful) architecturally there were substantial differences between 95 and 3.1, and because Windows 95 came with DOS and so was a full operating system in itself, rather than a halfway house between a bolt-on and a "DOS as boot loader" system like Windows 1.x-3.x. It's hard to complain that Microsoft was breaking IBM's emulation when what they did was release an entirely new operating system, something they had to do (Windows 3.x was crap.)

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    5. Re:More Speculation by ElliotLee · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That beeing said, I have no idea why anyone would subscribe. I just block ads and get the stories ad-free anyways. And as for seeing them early...who to discuss with..yourself?

      I've seriously considered subscribing because I want to support Slashdot. It might not be a purely practical reason in terms of cost and immediate personal gain, but I enjoy the site enough that I want to help them. If you've ever had to buy a server, you know it doesn't come cheap (don't forget electricity, rack space, bandwidth, cooling, management and maintenance). If you, and everyone else, just block the ads, how is Slashdot going to survive? In that case, you won't be able to discuss at all anymore!

  2. who said vista was slow? by buddyglass · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yes, it requires a (somewhat) beefy 3d graphics card to make full use of Aero Glass. But that's just the UI. Rarely is the UI a system's bottleneck. I imagine that with the revamped TCP/IP stack and memory manager, Vista should yield performance improvements over XP/2003 for a wide range of apps.

  3. Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? by BasilBrush · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Last I checked Windows Vista is in Beta. So just how does anyone know how it's performance is at this time.

    Well one could go with history and note the fact that EVERY new version of Windows has been a lot slower than the predecessor. Meanwhile every version of OS X has been faster than the predecessor.

    we not told by the Apple folks that the marketshare was going to boom with the release of 10.0? Then again with 10.2 and so on? And then again when they went to Intel...

    If you look at the unit sales of Macs from Apple quarterly reports, you'll see that they is usually significantly larger growth YoY that in the overall PC market. That means growing market share.

    Of confirm it by looking at sites browser stats. This one shows Mac userbase doubling in 3 years.
    http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

    in fact the market share has decreased since the release of 10.0...

    I can see why you selected your username. But you'd do better if you didn't overreach yourself with your FUD.
  4. Pretty Funny by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Now I've heard everything. A Windows supporter on the defensive, having to deny that MS's days are numbered. My how times have changed.

  5. Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard by wackymacs · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Once again, the Slashdot editors did a great job, not. This news was released by Apple last month, and the writing quality of this news segment is terrible. Leopard's expected features are built-in virtualization, related with Boot Camp, a new file system (possibly, unsure on this one myself), new finder (hopefully finally not carbon anymore), improved spotlight, dashboard widget editor, improved mail.app, ichat 4.0 with tabbed chatting, safari 3.0, and of course a ton of security fixes, bug fixes, etc. I dont know what exactly will be "new" of course. Will it be cool and fast? We'll have to wait and see...It will obviously crawl around on older Macs (G3s) if they are even supported, but speed along on the new Intel Macs. Market share... With Apple's new Intel Macs, market share is already increasing, but not by much - probably in the range of 0.50 - 1.50% this year. However, through 2007 I expect Apple to gain a few more percent market share, and they might compete more aggressively against Dell and others. Apple will never gain more market share with their software, only with their hardware (unless of course, they license OS X to the PC cloners). Just my take on all this, and my attempt to sort of complete this news post as it should have been done.

    1. Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard by GrahamCox · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      Carbon's fine, until you actually bother to learn Cocoa. The fact is, religion about this aside, Cocoa is just better. As in 10,000% more productive better. The fact that apps also tend to look better is not a reflection of Carbon per se, but it is a reflection of just how much work you have to do in Carbon to makes things come out right. I'd rather spend time on making the app functional rather than endlessly tweaking the widgets. I came from the Toolbox, then Carbon, and now Cocoa, so I know of what I speak.

      However, I disagree that PowerPlant is the cause of a lot of problems, because in many ways PP was the Cocoa of its day, Mac-wise (ignoring the fact that Cocoa has existed in some form since 1987, just not on the Mac). Using a framework on top of Carbon is the only sensible way to program with Carbon - anything other than a small app is unmanageable in Carbon if you don't have a framework there. What may be a source of this perception is that between System 8.0 and 10.0, Apple changed a lot about the organisation of the Toolbox/Carbon and PP may have struggled to keep up with that. It was a tough period all round.

      I'd like to see the Finder written in Cocoa, because it would likely be a lot more functional since getting functionality together in a Cocoa app just takes much less effort than the same functionality in Carbon. Given that Apple seems to want to throw a Finder together I'm sure it would be a lot more polished in the same timeframe if constructed in Cocoa.

    2. Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard by saddino · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I completely agree, in fact I'm a developer that's made the Toolbox to Carbon to Cocoa transition myself, and I'll never go back to writing a Carbon app. The point of my original post was to point out Carbon is not the factor that determines whether an application runs well on OS X or not.

      Furthermore, I did not mean to malign Powerplant (it clearly replaced MacApp as the only framework to use, and hell, only way to really write an application pre OS X), but in IMHO it is indeed the source of all these Carbon perception problems because even Greg Dow himself realized that he could not retrofit a lot of OS X features (e.g. Services support, support for NIB views) into his framework. The result being that all those Carbonized PP apps (maybe 99% of all commercial apps at the time of the OS9 to OS X transition) lacking those features gave the illusion that Carbon was to blame. And this deficiency in Powerplant is why Greg started developing Powerplant X before Metrowerks fully imploded.

  6. Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? by kjart · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You'd do well to follow your own advice. I've already posted this, but what the heck:

    Q1 2001 (roughly 5.4% worldwide) and Q1 2006 (roughly 2.0% worldwide)

  7. I Suspect... by eno2001 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...that Apple moved to Intel to take advantage of Intel's new virtualization support in hardware. In nearly every case when using a hypervisor on top of such hardware (where there is a ring -1 for the hypervisor) the performance has beat native performance. Or put another way; using a hypervisor for virtualization provides you with virtualization with NO performance hit at all. If anything you get a performance boost. Apple, typically being quite a few steps ahead of the reast of the industry, is very likely going to use this so that you can run Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista, and any Linux distro simultaneously with the full performance of running natively. This is the first time in history when you really CAN get something for nothing!!! Not to mention they will likely make it so that you can set up ways to exchange data in a live fashion between VMs. No more incompatibility between OSes ever again. Leave it to Apple to come up with something like this.

    --
    -"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o