Slashdot Mirror
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."
Way back in the day, Apple code named their boxes by color. From the aforementioned article: 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.
I mean c'mon. A day's worth of submissions, and you can't do any better than information that's been on the street for over a week, rewritten by a fifth-grader?
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."
Maybe the reason fewer people are taking Slashdot seriously is because Slashdot doesn't seem to take itself seriously.
Hire a f-ing editor to check out and rewrite the most egregious but still post-worthy submissions. No, a real editor, not one of your friends.
Even if it weren't for the fact that this was announced, what, a week ago, it doesn't take a genius to realise that Apple will talk about their next OS at the forthcoming WWDC. It's what they've always done. Duh, that's what it's FOR. And those who care will know about it, and those who don't will ignore it. Just like THEY'VE always done. Fuck me, Slashdot gets lamer every day with shit "stories" like this. And I speak as a nominal Mac fan.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/jun/26wwdc.ht ml
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Neither the submission nor the article actually says anything about the OS, yet we're told the Leopard is "cool and fast" without any evidence whatsoever. Yet somehow this magic OS, which we know nothing about, is going to cause "remarkable market share gain next year." Nope, never heard that before.
It seems as if journalists (or Apple proponents in general) have caught whatever afflicted the Linux fan-boys. Every release or change in Apple software/hardware is seen as something that could trigger a whole bunch of Windows users to switch.
Seems a bit out of character..
...they release OS X Liger.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
If I had a dollar for every new up and coming MP3 player that was supposed to be an iPod killer, I'd be able to buy an iPod.
"...we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year." Remarkable market share? Ok, I'm a Mac guy - have been for ... too long, but are you kidding? 3-5% is remarkable?
Well, maybe in so much as how small it is given how good it is, but I don't think that's what you meant when you used "remarkable market share..."
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.
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.
I can see why you selected your username. But you'd do better if you didn't overreach yourself with your FUD.
One of the reasons that MacOS can provide a relatively consistent stable experience is that there is a limited range of hardware on which it is expected to run. Sure, Macs don't always have the very fastest of graphics chipsets (although we'll see what comes with the new PowerMac replacements), but the Apple engineers working on drivers can know exactly what chipsets are out there.
If Microsoft could seriously limit and control the hardware on which Windows would run, they could probably do a lot better with drivers, too.
These days, now that Apple is using more standardized Intel chipsets, they are able to pick a few configurations that are identical to perfectly good PCs out there and develop for those machines. As technology advances, they'll still have a limited group of configurations to develop for. (And yes, they aren't putting out high powered gaming configurations right now, but they will have high powered graphics workstations when the high end desktops come out.) If they had to start supporting everything, they would be opening a Pandora's Box of compatability issues. Dealing with the required driver variants would eat up the same resources they're using to innovate.
Besides, the reason Apple sells OS updates for $99 is that they know that everyone buying a copy has already bought a machine they produced.
-JMP
Microsoft released their Leper OS years ago
The article had NO MEANING. It was one of those things you say to your buddies while hanging around. "You know, if Leopard is as fast as Apple says so, MS could be in deep [insert colorful adjective here]." Then you're promptly shot down by your friends, reminding you that the masses have a "Crapple" frame of mind because their last experience with Mac OS was with the pizza-box LC IIs running System 7 from back when they were in high school, and they don't care any more.
Not only does this bode poorly for Slashdot's credibility as having important and accurate information, but what does this say about journalism in general, when this passes for a good article. Oh, wait, it's not even an article! It's a blog posting! Do we even know who this Max Fomitchev is? I've never heard of him. This place is slowly becoming a rumor mill full of dupes.
Come back when you've got an article from a credible source, no less than 500 words, with some real analysis, facts to back it up, and maybe a cool graphic or charts or something. Until then, stop wasting my time.
Rawr
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.
...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
I felt the same way until my Windows PC broke and I was forced to borrow and live with a PowerBook for a couple weeks. At first, I hated it, until I got over my Windows habits and started to get used to the new UI. I absolutely hated Apple products, but now I'm more efficient and can't live without 'em. In any case, my advice to anyone thinking about switching is to spend more than just an hour with the thing. Force yourself to use it for a few days and actually be honest enough to give a go at learning how it's supposed to work. It may not fit your needs better, but then again, it might. You'll never know if you only try it long enough to get frustrated or you go into the experience planning on hating it.
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.
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!"
This was already tried with IBM OS/2 and it failed, and IBM was even requiring that users have a real copy of Windows. The future is vitualization and being able to run any version or patch of Windows. BootCamp is cool but it is temporary.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage