Inside View on Apple WWDC Rumors

AppleLurker writes "In a recent interview with DVD newsroom an Apple employee talks WWDC rumors including the iPhone, Blu-ray, MacPro and the Apple Tablet. More realistic about what not to expect next week when Steve Jobs hits the stage." Apple's next move is always a hotbed of debate leading up to a product release and with all the rumors flying this year all bets are off until we see the checkered flag, so take with the requisite grain of salt.

Comments

Lots of new system software?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an attendee and have noticed that the online schedule of sessions still has about 40% of the slots with "To Be Announced" as their descriptions. In the past Apple has done this when new technologies are to be announced; the session titles are filled in after the keynote is over.

So perhaps there's going to be quite a bit of new software this time.

Re:Lots of new system software?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are an attendee, you should organize your schedule at http://www.apple.com/wwdc. After entering your ADC user and password you will see all the available sessions. The page you mention has probably not been updated since WWDC was announced earlier this year. Oh, and before you rush to the site, let me tell you that you wont find any clues as to what will be announced on Monday by taking a look at the name of the sessions :-)

Re:Lots of new system software?

[buckhead_buddy]

Gary W. Longsine wrote:

Leopoard has had the longest development cycle of any Mac OS X release since 1.0.

That's not quite true: Tiger was longer (so far). Here's a list of Mac OS X releases following 10.0 (released March 24, 2001):

1. Puma -- Sep 29, 2001 ~6.3 months gestation
2. Jaguar -- Aug 24, 2002 ~10.9 months gestation
3. Panther -- Oct 24, 2003 ~14.2 months gestation
4. Tiger -- Apr 29, 2005 ~ 18.4 months gestation

Leopard has been incubating for a bit over 15 months from Tiger's release. If it takes the same amount of time as Tiger to release we'll see it go live at the start of November. If it follows the other trend of "prior release + 4 months" we'll see it go live at the start of March 2007. Both of these would fit in with the prediction that Steve made at the last WWDC that we'll see it at the end of 2006 or the start of 2007 "about the time Longhorn is released".

No matter what technology is in the pipeline, the release date is more likely to be determined by when Apple wants to go head to head with the Microsoft PR machine. Apple hasn't made any public technology promises (other than a final version of Boot Camp) so it can delay any project that isn't quite ready until 10.6. If Apple wants to look like an "innovator" and come in "first" with what everyone will think of as the next generation successor to Windows 98, then it may aim for November. If it wants to ride the Microsoft PR wave (rather than appear overwhelmed by it) then it may wait until the same time or just after Windows Vista is declared by some as a steaming pile of poo.

Setting any release date is risky, but I think Leopard's will have less to do with technology and everything to do with what date Apple thinks is the best day to take on Goliath.

Worst rumor site ever

[The One and Only]

If you haven't bothered reading TFA, don't. It's sub-Mac-rumor-site rumors, complete with a (probably fictitious) phone conversation and cheesy backstory.

Re:Working from current news and events

[shawnce]

Conroe will be featured in the iMac and the new PowerMac; Quad capability may or may not be present...

Woodcrest could show up in the PowerMac replacement if Apple wants to make it a true workstation class system... and it would allow them to maintain a Quad core system. It comes down to price point and components costs. In the case of the iMac it would require no work for Apple to drop in a Merom, they may go with that in the short term (also Merom runs at nearly half the power consumption and heat output of Conroe).

Woodcrest MAY be present in the next revision of the XServe and XServe RAID

The Xserve RAID is a storage device, it has no need for a Woodcrest (Xeon 51xx) processor.

Point releases are traditionally announced at WWDC.

Apple already announced well over a month ago that at WWDC 2006 they would be talking about and showing off Mac OS X 10.5.

Re:Hoping for the iPod video update

[Reaperducer]

I'd like to transfer them to the video iPod

Try plugging your iPod into your USB port. It happens automagically.

watch it during a rail-commute

Place your iPod in your hand. Get on trin. Sit. Turn on iPod. Select show. Watch.

or plug it into a friends tv for playback.

Attach small end of video cable to headphone jack. Attach other end to friend's TV. Set iPod TV output option to "on." Select video. Press play.

Either you're the dumbest electronics customer in history, or you don't have an iPod and you're just trolling.

Thread farming?

[PapayaSF]

Back in April, the semi-reliable (rumor-wise and server-wise) Mac OS Rumors claimed that Leopard would have some pretty cool "thread farming" technology. I'll quote the whole page because their server is often down:

A critical component of not only Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," but also the Cocoa/Carbon for Windows package (more details in linked article above) will be new code co-developed with Intel that helps break up tasks into multiple threads -- therefore achieving considerably better efficiency on the next generation of multi-core Intel processors. The results we've seen on systems with up to 16 cores of Intel's next-generation "Conroe" desktop CPU architecture were amazing....with 10.4.6 as-is, the first core bears the vast majority of the workload particularly when only one or two resource-intensive apps are running.

Even when lots of different applications, many of them efficiently multi-threaded, are run on 10.4.5 or 10.4.6 only the first two CPUs are used efficiently while the third and fourth are getting plenty of work....but aren't quite living up to their full potential. Each added core after four seems to drop off in efficiency....not because OS X doesn't handle lots of processors properly, it does. In fact it's an industry leader in terms of being ready for the next generation of multicore, multiprocessor technology. It has been since day one and Apple has consistently kept it at the leading edge since then.

The problem is, simply, getting all of those core to have the maximum possible positive effect on the performance of each application. When simulating the realistic workloads of almost every kind of user, more than four cores rapidly lost any effect because there just weren't enough threads, efficiently enough balanced, to make good use of more CPU's.

Leopard changes this in every way that Apple and Intel have been able to devise. The techniques employed include tricks that both companies have been holding at ready for years, and some new things that have been developed in the past year or so to specifically address the way the "Core" (Yonah, Merom and Napa-Merom) and Codename 'Conroe' architectures work. Most of it goes beyond our technical competency; we're sure that the folks at Ars Technica will have a lot to say about this in the next few months as more details leak about the hardware and software involved in these enhancements.

Some, but certainly not all, of these techniques will eventually make their way into Intel's optimized in-house compilers. Some will even become part of the GCC compilers that are critical to building OS X and indeed most Xcode applications, eventually. But right now they are by and large highly experimental, being part of an operating system codebase that is not even quite "alpha" in terms of usability.

That said, it's a thing of beauty to see 16 cores used with bizarrely perfect symmetry even when performing relatively simple tasks that have nearly no application-level threading in their collective codebases. 32 cores work nearly as well, and somehow manage to make tasks that would normally only max out one or two cores and be unable to go beyond that point, spread out across nearly all the CPU's with a beautiful cascade effect created for just such a demonstration in the Leopard version of Activity Monitor (just wait until you see all the 3D OpenGL visualizations that have been whippped up....but that's another article entirely and bordering on embargoed territory to boot!).

Re:Working from current news and events

[FuturePastNow]

Sorry, but you're wrong about that. It's in a socket, and there's nothing to prevent user upgrades except the general difficulty level involved in taking the thing apart. Saving on manufacturing and development costs is exactly the reason why.

Re:Webcast

[blzabub]

I believe Apple no longer has a live webcast of the WWDC. You can see a text-only live webcast here at MacRumors.