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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.'"
Come on, how bout some actual news for nerds and stuff that matters?
Explain this "Fiasco". Every feature they said would be there has worked for me.
This isn't XP vs Vista, sounds more like "Waiter my soup was at 121F when I specifically asked for it at 120.4F. (49.4444444C and 49.1666667C to our international readers)
Basically the answer to all of the questions you posed is - Yes.
Mac sells computers. They want the OS to be a selling point for their hardware, not the other way round. They've also always had significant limits on what's ok to put in a Mac, in order to prevent issues with OS and driver compatibility, in addition to making sure cheap junk doesn't easily get put in the machine.
They don't care as much about OS market share as they care about how many computers they sell.
BeOS tried that. NeXT tried that. IBM (OS/2) tried that. It doesn't work.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Okay some people were affected by a handful of real nasties, but I bought it the day it came out, was working 18 hours a day at the time on a product release on both a G4 and and Intel machine, and only noticed very minor issues.
To compare it to 10.0 is hyperbole.
"They release MacOS X only for Macs. Is there a reason why they don't release it for regular PC's?"
1) It avoids treading on Microsoft's toes. Mac versions of MS Office help to sell lot of Apple machines, so pissing the Redmond Gorilla off by competing with them in the commodity OS market wouldn't be a particularly good idea.
2) Apple tried it in the past, and ended up losing far more from lost sales revenue to clone makers than they were earning by licensing the OS. This was therefore one of the first things Jobs killed off when he took over at Apple, so it's unlikely he'd want to risk the same thing happening again.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I don't need another paid release so soon. I don't care to spend $100 a year for my OS. If Microsoft tried that stunt people would be eating them for lunch
Well at least one person on Slashdot gets it. There is more than one business model in the world - not everything has to be done like Microsoft, nor like Linux. Apple does it their way, for good or bad, it makes a shit load of money for their shareholders.
It may (rumors, remember) leave PowerPCs unsupported. But that is an inevtiability, anyway.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Yes.
No really, the answer to all your questions are "yes". You seem to understand the situation so I'm not sure why you're asking.
Q:Is there a reason why they don't release it for regular PC's?
A:Yes, there are a couple reasons, at least. You give two of them later on.
Q:Is it because they'd like people to buy Mac hardware along with the OS?
A:Yes. Apple makes most of its money selling hardware. That's the business they're in. OSX and iLife are largely built to be enticements to buy their hardware, just as the iTMS was created to encourage people to buy iPods.
Q:But maybe there would be more Mac OS's sold if they also made a version for regular PC's?
A:Yes, there would most surely be more sales of OSX. The question is, would the increased profits from OSX be enough to make up for the lost hardware sales? The answer is "probably not".
Q: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?
A:Yes, that's another problem with supporting generic PCs-- you're going to have to support every little piece of crappy hardware anyone wants to buy. Worse yet, you're going to have to deal with the fact that a lot of that hardware comes with poorly-written drivers that will crash your system. The fact is that a *lot* of instability that people see on Windows is driver-related. By being both the OS developer and the systems integrator, Apple gets a level of stability that would otherwise be much more difficult to reach.
And instead, you can worry about drivers never being available for your cards, peripherals, etc.
This support is pretty consistent. Look at previous OS releases. Mac OS 9, released 1999, was not fully depreciated until Mac OS 10.4,in 2005. For computers, the cube, the TiPB, and the G4 Powermac, all released in 1999-2000, did not lose support until late last year.
So what does this mean in terms of expectations. The last editions of the powerbook, for example, was introduced around around 2003 and sold until 2006. Given the history of supporting 7 years old hardware, and Jobs statement that he would support 5 year old hardware, we should not see a Intel only Mac OS X until at least 2010. Given that OS X is now pretty stable, except for very new features like Time Mac machine, which does not need a new release, and Jobs statement that the release cycle wil be slower, we should not expect 10.6 until late 2009 or early 2010.
If OS 10.6 is release later this year, and does not support PPC, it will be another indication that Apple is moving away from the long term support of customers and falling into the trap of the average consumer electronics company, I have no problem with certain apps not runing on the PPC, like the newest iMovie and iPhone SDK, and expect that even if 10.6 support PPC, it won't be a full support(although they never had to do partial support in the previous transitions), but a drop of PPC prior to 2010 will be extremely damaging to their reputation of reliability.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Mainly for marketing purposes.
Virtually every modern OS does this. Even Debian.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Yes, this tends to be the case. However, it seems to be that these complains ARE read by Apple who proceeds to fix them (or at least try) in the next release.
Keep in mind that the same thing tends to be true of Windows releases; they're just much less frequent. However, MS really just seems to do security patches and blame third parties for any software bugs. I have no idea what is true and what's really at fault, but you can't blame Mac users for expecting the computer they paid a premium for to work better when they paid the premium to have it work better. I paid the extra to have things work better and overall they do, but when there's an issue I expect it to be resolved in a reasonable time-frame. Generally it is, and that's why they'll keep getting my money.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
But not very many. Net Applications reported that Intel Mac use surpassed PPC back in November.
So? How many people were still using OS 9 when they dumped the G4 tower. They had to bring Classic-booting Macs back *twice* because of the outcry from education. I'm still convinced that Apple could have introduced Intel Macs at any time and they waited until they could dump Classic booting... the third time was the charm... before they dumped Classic with the Intel introduction.
Apple has always considered the educational market a critical one because it's a gateway market.
Now, where do you suppose many of the PPC Macs out there are?