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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.'"
Any company that not only gets Unix[like] onto the desktop of NORMAL people, but also makes it look cool matters.
-1 not first post
It's the same "fiasco" that the Tiger release was, according to people on the Internet. For every major Mac OS release, some people have problems, some of them quite serious, and these dominate Mac discussion forums for months. Nobody ever collects any statistics from the general user population that would allow us to determine whether one release was better or worse than another, and the general user population is not well-represented in Mac discussion forums.
On a side note, I have personally found it very interesting to watch the way people on Mac forums approach problems versus Windows or Linux users. Often there is an implicit assumption that any problem encountered is an OS bug (sometimes even if nobody else can be found who is experiencing the same problem) and you see demands that it be fixed in the next release. Possibly this is because a high proportion of the problems experienced by Mac users are indeed OS bugs.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Not yet, but it will. The Cocoa/Linux Integration Framework (CLIF) is a project (currently in alpha) based on GNUStep, but with a goal of source *and* binary compatability with OS X/Cocoa. There's a lot of work and some kernel modules may be needed, but we're optimistic at the current progress.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
OK, maybe Apple is coming out with a preview of a 10.6 next week, but I can't imagine them dropping PowerPC support. Why? They just bought a company that specializes in PPC chips for several hundred million dollars. So why in the world would they put the OS X ecosystem on a course to only support Intel? I doubt this is the plan. 1. Buy PowerPC design company. 2. Stop making your software compatible with PPC 3. Profit!
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
Why do people insist on referring to their Mac OS with a code name instead of a number? I have no clue what version of the Mac OS Tiger was versus Puma but I can easily figure out if 10.4 is newer than 10.2.
I was a windows and IE loving Web Developer when I first saw a Beta of OS X. I finally gave into my employers insistence that I use a Mac cause I liked the idea of improving my Unix skills which were barely adequate for deploying code releases. Within 2 years I had strong Unix/Linux skills and had quadrupled my salary. I have continued to expand my knowledge and reap the benefits of it. Does that make me pretentious?
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
Data points are rumors are....
:)
- Drop the Mac branding, eg "OS X Leopard"
- Drop or minimise Carbon favor of Cocoa
- PC version of Leopard, or 10.6
- Apple Software Update can push/strongly advise major new apple software features to Windows users
In my mind, these add up to the old YELLOW BOX - i.e., the ability to run Mac (Cocoa) Apps on Windows. Yellow box is a compatibility layer. This feature was advertised initially with Rhapsody, but wisely withdrawn. We are now in a very different place. There are many desirable Mac Apps, and OS X is a desirable place for developers. Businesses begin to want Mac Apps and maybe eventually the full MacOS but need a transition path.
There is now every reason to release the Yellow Box and no reason not to.
- It provides the transition path
- It provides for stealth killer apps to seep onto Windows users' radar
- It will no longer dilute Mac Sales - because Microsoft's lustre and safety have gone
You'll all see that I'm right
There is one option that didn't exist before, virtualisation.
Develop drivers for a VM like Virtualbox and you automatically support a wide range of diverse hardware, without the development costs of running native, the Mac experience within a VM machine would be consistent.
However It wouldn't be as good as a real mac and the natuaral upgrade path would be to a real Mac. The problem with the clones was superior performance at a better price. Of course people would buy a clone over the apple product when it was faster and cheaper than apple were offering.
The VM route doesn't compete against Apple hardware, real Apple hardware will result in a better eXperience than the VM resulting in improved Apple hardware sales.
It would be so easy to sell
Taste the Apple eXperience, one bite will have you wanting more.
The VM experience would be a tool for apple to sell more mac's a completely different proposition to selling clones.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Backup your data and do a clean install. This sounds like what happens to people that have made (even minor) changes to the Unix side of things and then tried to upgrade [first dot] versions. I'm a total hacker so I know better than to allow the upgrades to try and figure out what all I've done.
Another thing I would suggest is to never plug/unplug anything (other than power) with the lid shut. That behavior had a convert friend of mine complaining, "this thing crashes 80% of the time when I try to wake it or shut it down." Once I told him to stop that, he said it hasn't crashed once.
I will say that the Intel portables are no where near as stable as the PPC portables. I could swap peripherals anytime. I could shut the lid, remove the battery, replace it, and open it back up and keep working. I would have windows users in airports and on planes absolutely freak out at the sight of that. The PowerBooks were awsome!
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
Possibly, I guess, but probably not. An awful lot of the code that makes up OSX is the same code in FreeBSD/NetBSD and Linux. Where it differs-- well, I've never heard anyone claim that the Mach kernel is particularly buggy. All you have left is Aqua and the APIs, which are the parts that everyone seems to want to be open sourced and/or sold for their platform of choice.
So from all that (and personal experience with a Windows/Linux/OSX) I wouldn't be inclined to think the problem is that OSX has more OS bugs than other platforms. But I guess we could take your hypothesis another way-- that programs written for OSX are more bug-free than other platforms. That doesn't seem too terribly unlikely, but my personal guess would be that it's actually a combination of a few things:
I highly doubt that Apple is going to push through a "quick" update and call it v10.6. Much more likely is that Apple does indeed plan on going Intel-only for v10.6, and is planning on making sure developers know it far enough in advance. I expect v10.6 will be released no sooner than mid 2009, and likely not until early 2010. This would put v10.6 on about a two-year release cycle, which is consistent with Apple's increasingly long development cycles (though it actually took 2.5 years for v10.4 - v10.5), and would give, in what seems to be a normal sort of move for Apple, their developers at least an entire year to wrap their minds around the concept of ditching PPC entirely.
Bear in mind that v10.5 requires at least an 867 MHz G4 to install. By the time v10.6 rolls out, the minimum requirements will probably be in the area of a 2.0 GHz G5, which will leave comparatively few PPC machines extant that can even run the beast, so Apple may think, "Why bother?". That would mean no PPC laptops, as no G5 laptops were ever released, leaving only iMacs, Power Macs, and XServes able to run it. After all, my own Dual 2.0 GHz G5 Power Mac is already over three years old, and will be four-and-a-half by next summer. There's no reason to expect that Apple will support these machines indefinitely. A still more likely explanation is that only faster G5's (as described above) will run v10.6 PPC, and PPC support will be removed in v10.7, as this will avoid pissing off the punters too much. Not that Apple is any stranger to pissing off their customers, but they seem to know we'll eventually forgive them if they deliver the goods with the new candy.
The biggest clue is that the banners rolling out at the Moscone Center all read "OS X Leopard", rather than "Mac OS X Leopard". While this may indicate Apple finally moving on from the old Macintosh OS code, it is also possible that it means nothing more than that Apple is rebranding "OS X" in conjunction with the release of the 3G iPhone (or 2G, if you prefer iPod terms instead of cell network terms), something which has been intimated with every discussion of the iPhone's current OS as "running OS X", rather than running "Mac OS X". It may also have something to do with these "electric computers" that are streaming into the country at an astounding rate (which are likely the new iPhones, but who knows? Apple is very, very sneaky.).