Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Apple Expected to Demo Leopard Successor Next Week

Posted by timothy on from the or-not dept.

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.'"

14 of 432 comments (clear)

  1. Not a surprise by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    1. Re:Not a surprise by mikael_j · · Score: 3, Informative

      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

      --
      Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
  2. Re:Apple may or may not do something next week by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Informative

    OS X 10.5 (intel) is certified Unix.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  3. Re:Slow down, Apple... by Rogue+Pat · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."
  4. 10.5.0 by Lilith's+Heart-shape · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    I write sci-fi for metalheads

    1. Re:10.5.0 by aftk2 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
  5. Re:Slow down, Apple... by nine-times · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:BOO, Apple! by teg · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  7. 10.5 issues - since you asked... by zerofoo · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  8. Re:BOO, Apple! by porcupine8 · · Score: 3, Informative
    ... 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.

    --
    Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
  9. Re:MacOS for PC's by repetty · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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

  10. Re:PA Semi? by parcel · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  11. Re:You have a bad install by daybot · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  12. Re:MacOS for PC's by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.