Apple Expected to Demo Leopard Successor Next Week

4roddas writes "Reports circulated Wednesday that Apple may demo the next iteration of Mac OS X next week or even release code to developers in preparation for an early-2009 launch. According to an account on Mac enthusiast site TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), Apple may provide early copies of Mac OS X 10.6 at next week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which opens Monday and runs through next Friday in San Francisco. Mac OS X 10.6 will run on Intel-based hardware only, said TUAW, and so will mark the ditching of support for the older PowerPC processor-equipped Macs. Apple announced it would shift to Intel processors three years ago, and unveiled the first systems in January 2006; most analysts have said that move is largely behind the reason for Apple's renewed success selling personal computers. It has never disclosed how long it would support the PowerPC with OS upgrades, however. Ars Technica also weighed in Wednesday on Mac OS X 10.6; its sources pegged with OS with the code name 'Snow Leopard.'"

Comments

Not a surprise

[TheRaven64]

A few Apple people on the clang list have filed bug reports saying it doesn't build 'on 10.6' recently, so they're obviously running it internally. After the fiasco that 10.5 has been, I'd imagine that they'd want to move on as fast as possible - maybe 10.6 will be what 10.5 should have been.

Ditching PowerPC is an interesting choice though - it basically means that third-party developers won't be able to use any of the new features in 10.6 without abandoning a big chunk of their potential market.

Re:Not a surprise

[jrothwell97]

It was - it was almost as buggy as one of the betas, or perhaps 10.0.

I highly doubt it'll be called 'Snow Leopard' - Apple has registered the trademarks 'Cougar' and 'Lynx'. I have doubts about Lynx, because there is already LynxOS, and Lynx deodorant.

I also highly doubt they'll be abandoning PowerPC entirely yet. We'll probably see G4 support being dropped, but I highly doubt Apple would make such a rushed transition.

Re:Not a surprise

[mikael_j]

People seem to have quite varied experiences with Leopard, for me it has been much better than Tiger in the sense that with Tiger my iMac 24" managed to completely crash a couple of times under heavy load when using some not always stable apps but with Leopard the closest I've come to anything like that has been Finder crashing a couple of times.

In fact, the only real problem I've had with Leopard was with the incompatibility with Tiger FileVault images, I only had one user account (which was using FileVault) and after installing Leopard and then rebooting it was unable to mount the disk image which forced me to do some trickery in the console to convert it to a sparse disk image so I could rescue my files before doing an Archive and install installation.

/Mikael

Re:Not a surprise

[bhtooefr]

And I'll note that, except for the fact that Spotlight likes to eat 100% CPU for ages (so I disabled it,) and that sometimes some keymapping settings don't stick, Leopard runs fine on my iBook G4 (12", 1.2GHz.) The OS itself has never crashed for me.

Re:Apple may or may not do something next week

[larry bagina]

OS X 10.5 (intel) is certified Unix.

Re:MacOS for PC's

[kannibal_klown]

They release MacOS X only for Macs. Is there a reason why they don't release it for regular PC's? Is it because they'd like people to buy Mac hardware along with the OS? But maybe there would be more Mac OS's sold if they also made a version for regular PC's? Or maybe they do it because there are less possible compatibility problems if they only make it for their own Mac hardware, because PC's are too customizable? This question is nothing new, people are constantly asking it and just about any story on Slashot about OS X has multiple threads about it.

I don't think we've ever gotten an actual answer from Apple, the the usual answers from Apple fans are:

• They make money of their hardware solutions, the OS is just the cheese to get the consumers in the door. Remove the cheese and a decent percentage will go elsewhere for their hardware (at a cheaper price).
  
• Stability - Apple's moniker is "it just works," whether you agree with that is another discussion. By limiting the combinations of hardware + drivers they can make a decently stable solution. If they open it up to everything then they will lose their "stability" reputation for the short term until drivers are developed.
  

Some say it's only a matter of time before they release it for PCs, others say it will never happen. Personally I wouldn't be surprised either way.

Re:Slow down, Apple...

[Rogue Pat]

Either get Leopard solid, stable, and most importantly, *fast* before you move onto the next OS (unless Snow Leopard addresses a lot of these issues).

RTF arstechnica A : "it will not contain major OS changes. Instead, the release is heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability."

Re:Apple may or may not do something next week

[Reality Master 201]

Except that it's not a new release. It's speculation about the possible announcement of a new version of the OS.

I'll go read mac rumor sites when I want to see that kind of stuff.

10.5.0

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

I didn't have any real problems with 10.5.0. I got my copy on release day, backed up my data, wiped the partition on my MacBook, and installed from scratch instead of upgrading from Tiger. Ask the ones who had problems if they upgraded or did a fresh install.

Re:10.5.0

[aftk2]

Agreed. I wasn't paying attention when I installed Leopard at first, and it was installed as an upgrade, and I had a buggy, machine-freezing mess. Graphics glitches, everything. I imagine it also had to do with the fact that the update didn't disable Parallels (which was, judging by their track record, probably wholly incompatible with Leopard upon launch.)

Removed that, reinstalled as "Archive and Install," and the experience has been much better. And since 10.5.3 the appearance of the beachball has been much, much less frequent. Oh, and this is completely off topic: to anyone wondering whether to ditch Parallels in favor of VMWare Fusion. Yes. Go for it. Especially if you're using it with Boot Camp. Like night and day.

BOO, Apple!

[Progman3K]

So this leaves a great number of PowerPC hardware owners with a bunch of very nice bookends?

Run Linux, you will probably never have to worry about the next version being unavailable for your preferred hardware platform!

Re:BOO, Apple!

[teg]

No? The earlier versions of the software continue to run, they don't magically stop working when 10.6 is out.

Re:BOO, Apple!

[porcupine8]

... Yes, because my computer is going to just stop working when they release 10.6 and I can't install it.

Hell, I'm still running 10.3 on my home computer and 10.4 on my work laptop. Somehow a lack of 10.5 has not hurt me at all, I doubt a lack of 10.6 will have any more of an effect.

Re:Slow down, Apple...

[nine-times]

Either get Leopard solid, stable, and most importantly, *fast* before you move onto the next OS (unless Snow Leopard addresses a lot of these issues).

Actually, according to all rumors about "Snow Leopard", those are exactly the issues that it's supposed to address. That's the entire rumor about Snow Leopard, that it's going to be a quick release that won't add much in the way of features, but it will be cleaning out legacy code, squashing bugs, and making the whole thing run fast. Some people have also noted that the last time Apple did this (10.1) the upgrade was free.

Re:A dying breed:

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that tigers are endangered too, right?

10.5 issues - since you asked...

[zerofoo]

Here are just some of the issues I've had to deal with since the 10.5 release:

1. Open Directory replica failures.
2. Tiger clients either do not bind to 10.5 open directory or do not inherit preferences correctly.
3. Software Update Server did not work until 10.5.2
4. "Blue Screen of Death" issue on some workstations.
5. Renaming files on Samba shares would cause a kernel panic on some workstations.
6. iChat server still does not work in a mixed Active Directory/Open Directory environment
7. Finder Move data loss problem.

These are the only ones at the front of my memory right now - I'm sure there are other issues. Granted these issues are a mix of Server and Workstation problems, but the lack of stability remains. My users do not care whether the bug manifests itself on a server or a workstation. If it breaks somewhere it is a BUG.

-ted

Re:Lots of PPC in EDU...

[ColdWetDog]

I'd be not too happy explaining to my boss how in order to be current you have to buy all that Lexan all over again at $1K per unit. I'd be really miserable having to explain why we'd have to re-buy racks full of iron at $2-$3K each.

No, you can explain to your boss how you don't have to touch your paid-for, stable and presumably useful machines for a couple of years except for the odd security patch and hardware glitch.

Next: justifying your own existence!

Re:Apple may or may not do something next week

[pohl]

Not yet. That, too, is just a part of the pre-WWDC rumor-mill frenzy.

Re:No, I'm New Here

[je ne sais quoi]

It is funny, but he or she has been doing that for years and years and years. In fact, that's all he or she does with this account.

Re:MacOS for PC's

[repetty]

"They release MacOS X only for Macs. Is there a reason why they don't release it for regular PC's?"

The real reason is that Apple is a hardware company.

Everybody say this out loud over and over until you die:

APPLE IS A HARDWARE COMPANY.

Yes, they produce some great software but they make their money (which is the thing that really matters) on hardware.

--Richard

Re:PA Semi?

[parcel]

So why in the world would they put the OS X ecosystem on a course to only support Intel? According to Jobs, PA Semi is for embedded devices... from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

Steve Jobs has said that the acquisition is meant to add the talent of P.A. Semi's engineers to Apple's workforce, and help them build custom chips for the iPod and iPhone.[6] Citation references WSJ interview of Jobs.

Re:Why would you have to re-buy?

[plasmacutter]

Apple may maintain support for it, but my experience as a mac user since early 2k3 is that projects without a nationally recognized corporate logo----in other words, the third party and oss projects which offer the compatibility necessary to retain power users---- move very quickly away from support for old iterations of osX.

This makes me very uneasy, especially in the area of media players. Code gets frozen, denying you access to/compatibility with newer revisions of formats like matroska.

If they drop ppc support, i'm one power user who will feel slapped in the face. While leopard is not as zippy as tiger was, my twin 2.7 g5 has retained suitable responsiveness through X.5, and only fails at rendering 1080p h.264 streams, something I won't be needing for at least another couple years.

I'm becoming jaded though and believe they are capable of doing this. After all, i've been noticing marked declines in hardware quality since i bought this g5 rig. The macbook I bought recently is collecting dust, for instance, because the display is absolute (explative deleted) more suitable for the reject bins in the QA department at M$ or e-machines than for machines bearing a top of the market brand name.

It seems though that apple may be moving away from their "consumer friendly but professional grade equipment and operating system" niche into the "watch american idol on your iphone, and btw we slapped together a computer that makes an excellent accessory" niche.

If more signs point in that direction, I'm not sure what I will do, because nobody is stepping up to take apple's place in that market.

If their os retains or improves upon its current quality while their hardware quality slips, I suppose i'll go beige box + osx86.

If both slip... I guess i'm out of luck. Kde has noticeably rough edges for me, and gnome doesn't integrate true document-based navigation.

Re:You have a bad install

[daybot]

sleep != hibernate The machine is in sleep mode, or very low power. Hibernate mode is everything is written to disk. So yes, you can remove the battery in any laptop in hibernate mode. No matter the OS. This is not new. Just most people want instant on, not 5-20 seconds on. Actually Macs have a feature called Safe Sleep - a kind of hybrid suspend/hibernate - enabled by default. This dumps the RAM to disk on sleep. When you wake the system up, if the power wasn't interrupted during sleep then you get instant on, otherwise it comes back from the RAM dump, just like hibernate.

Re:MacOS for PC's

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I'd note you're missing a major reason. Currently Apple competes in the computer system market against Dell and Sony and HP, largely on the strength of OS X, a desktop OS. Selling OS X for generic hardware would put them in the desktop OS market directly, a market monopolized by MS. No businessman in their right mind wants to be competing against a monopoly in the market they have monopolized. It costs significantly more than a normal market with higher risk and less return. Quite likely, Apple would fail in that market, regardless of the relative quality of OS X and Windows.

It would be economic suicide to unbundle OS X and Apple computers until the market is at least somewhat competitive, maybe 70% dominated by Windows. That's still quite a ways off, so Apple is focused on slowly chipping away at Windows market share and hoping they can get there some day.

Re:Hmm

[edalytical]

The X indeed stands for 10 the predecessor being OS 9. That being said there's nothing stopping the marketing department from calling a version OS X 11.0 or even OS X 10.11, it makes no real difference anyway.

Re:Apple may or may not do something next week

[kithrup]

Not just pay for it, but actually pass the tests. Which are pretty intensive, from what I gather -- there's a pretty good chance the BSDs wouldn't pass. But mainly because they aren't compatible with every single header file, command line utility, and API since V7 and on :).

One can certainly debate that particular point, but I've not looked at the conformance test suite, so all I can do is speculate based on comments I've heard from others.

Re:OS Codename

[XnavxeMiyyep]

Cheetah and Puma were already used for OS X 10.0 and 10.1, although I agree that Snow Leopard would be a silly name.