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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.'"
Apple are still only on X? They've got a long way to go before they catch up with X11!
which is totally what she said
Come on, how bout some actual news for nerds and stuff that matters?
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
The drummer only has one arm!
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).
Typically with an OSX release, the early point versions go through some growing pains, and it's not until the mid point releases that things get rock solid and fast. When I first tried leopard (10.5.0), it broke a number of things; it offered enough extra that I put up with what it broke, but I wouldn't recommend it to others especially for mission critical business stuff. It seems to be getting better with each point release that rolls in, and 10.5.3 just came in the other day (and things actually seem a bit peppier), but I get the impression it has a little way to go yet.
I think Leopard's early problems has hurt Apple a bit, and I'd hate to see a 10.6.0 come out too soon, with a lot of the same issues as Leopard's first release. I want a fast and stable OSX! (Even at its worst, Leopard was head and shoulders above XP in terms of speed and stability and usability, of course; but when I first jumped ship to Mac when Tiger was mature, things were even better stability-wise.)
While the Windows release cycle is painfully slow and buggy, I worry that Apple's is almost a little too fast with this announcement (although the wait for Leopard seemed to take forever.)
Now who knows, maybe Snow Leopard isn't too revolutionary; maybe in losing some of the backwards compatibility hassles of PPC to move Leopard forward it will improve its speed and stability. Keeping my fingers crossed.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
No, I'm New Here
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.
I still run 10.4.x on a Mac Pro because of issues I read about - and Apple still is issuing security patches and the like for 10.4.x, so I take it w/ a grain of salt they would stop supporting PowerPC at this point. I have a G4 I would like to upgrade the CPU - but who in their right mind would order a CPU card upgrade w/ the rumor floating around that PowerPC is about to get shut out? I pay a premium for Apple hardware, but I justify it by the ability to get 5 years out of their pro machines - the last 2 on CPU upgrade or Video card upgrade.
I would definitely reconsider my position if they went thru with this.
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.
I don't think we've ever gotten an actual answer from Apple, the the usual answers from Apple fans are:
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.
not easily
"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.
This isn't related to MacOS, but is as good a place as any to report it....
From a third-hand source, take with a grain of salt:
iPhone 2.0 goes on sale next week. Initial roll-out in NYC and LAX, not sure why it is staged.
iPhone 1.0 sales were suspended by Apple, to avoid the debacle when they lowered the price shortly after release (and subsequently gave rebates to people who had just bought one).
Apple still has plenty of iPhone 1.0's. After iPhone 2.0 is released, iPhone 1.0's will be offered at deep discounts.
As reported earlier, AT&T employees have been prohibited from taking vacation for a month, starting 2008-06-15.
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
It's pretty safe to assume that the commodity PC version of OS X would sell in the same price range as Windows: $400-$500. When you factor in that cost, it's cheaper to just buy a Mac in the first place.
There is no advantage for Apple to support the regular PC. And unless you are a part of the extremely tiny group of people who like to tinker with your hardware, there is no real advantages of running OS X on PC hardware either.
If you bought at versions of OS X ever, you're at $650 in the wost case (probably lower; you likely at least bought a new Mac in the meantime, which s one license less, and OS X only really came into its own with 10.2, so many people didn't buy it before).
In comparison, for Windows' top of the line editions of in the same time period (XP and Vista), you paid about $500. Note that OEM and system builder version of OS X don't exist for obvious reasons, so you can't compare those. And nobody ever said Macs were cheap. But it's certainly not outrageous.
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
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.
What cat is this one going to be, Ocelot? Domestic Shorthair? Mau?
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
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!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Leopard supports five year old desktops and laptops. If they release this on schedule they will be abandoning some people with three year old hardware at that point.
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.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I question the foresight of naming the new release after an endangered, almost extinct species.
I'll wait for OS X 10.7, codename "dodo" or 10.8, "brontasaurus."
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
I presume Apple maintain support for 10.5.x for some time yet?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
add Vista to your list
Surely 10.5.x and 10.4.x will continue working anyway when 10.6.0 comes out? Presumably that may mean a hit on resale prices for G3, G4 and G5 Macs but the machines will still work!
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
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.
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
Well, it is my feeling that 10.6 may bring forth some UI changes as well as under the hood improvements. also this WWDC may make mention of todays clones as well as the boys from OSX86. I think apple should really take advantage of this community because they are starting to make up a good amount of OS X 10.5.x sales as well as encouraging people to buy macs. In addition, I believe this may be the year of Mac OS on PC, this could be big, maybe 10.6 will support booting MBR and BIOS in addition to EFI and GPT. Who knows, something is always going on at apple and they do respect the hackerly community; for jobs and woz were hackers themselves at one point.
Dr. D
On a standard install of OS X on Intel hardware, all of the applications AND all of the command line tools are fat binaries. You can strip the PowerPC code out of the tools if you wish, but then when download an OS update, you get the fat versions again. How much network bandwidth and hard drive space is wasted because of that?
Clearly with a name like "Snow Leopard" it will:
- be released in the winter.
- be targeting the Central Asia market
- given taxonomic debate surrounding the "Snow Leopard", there will be much debate whether this iteration is more closely aligned to the leopard family or the tiger family
Well,
.4, not .5) will be supported likely 5 more years, and new features (like upgraded Safari etc.) keep creaping into the older versions.
I doubt they stop supporting PowerPC. This would make no sense, it is probably 90% of the actual running Mac OS X hardware. Also Motorolla 68k Support was available TILL MAC OS X 10.3!!!! They stopped supporting Classic Mode when they switched from PowerPC to Intel, after all the Classic mode would have needed to be either emulated 2x or ported from PowerPC to Intel.
OTOH if they indeed stop supporting PowerPC it is not a desaster as OS X 10.4 (yes
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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
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
It did work M$ just said to the OEM install OS/2 or BeOS and you windows OEM costs will go up.
If they want to abandon 3 years old machines including very pricey Quad G5, Dual G5 or high end powerbooks, fine. A Max memory (saw various ones) Quad G5 costed $7000 when it was shipped. Lets not forget Fiber/SCSI/RAID stuff.
If they want 10.6 to be PowerPC only and think PowerPC users will throw out millions of dollars working equipment, it is wrong. If Apple thinks I will throw all PPC equipment to move to 10.6 especially after 10.5.0 scandal release for PPC, I will surprise them.
BTW, pro machines never get virus infected or spyware infected since people having pro equipment also buys a $70/year Kaspersky AV to protect their work. It is not like people can't use windows and they abandoned PC because they got spyware, people chose PPC/OS X configuration while Apple was "Apple Computer Inc.", not "Apple the iPhone maker who codes OS X in spare time".
It makes me further mad since PPC/Linux has beat PPC/OS X several times, even on Leopard age. It is not like they can't find enough time to actually USE CPU features (Altivec etc.) and busy to code Intel stuff... G4/G5 users, especially ones using OS X has never seen their CPU's true potential at all.
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
1) None of my major applications were going to be out in Universial for at least 12 - 18 months (Final Cut Pro, Adobe et. al.)
2) I had no idea how this transition was going to go. It was either going to be smooth as could be or an unmitagated disaster. So I played it safe.
I bought an intel iMac for my Dad about a year and a half ago for christmas. It was absolutely amazing how well things went, but I did spend close $7k all said and done on my Quad-Core G5. It's still a powerful machine, with 8GB of Ram, for video editing and compositing using Shake as well as the limited 3D work I do in Lightwave.
That being said, I'm still on OSX 10.4 as well. My laptop is the last 12.1" powerbook G4 and I still love this machine for traveling as it fits on any airplane tray table. (I just shoved out another $80 for a new battery).
Now I have plans to get a MacBook Pro by the end of the year, but still i plan to keep this little machine for traveling as well I have no plans to upgrade my PowerMac to a Mac Pro for another couple years.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
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
It's too soon to drop PPC and way to soon to drop 32 bit x86 macs as well.
May then can keep G5 ppc.
There are still a lot of PPC uses out there some of them can't do want want to pay $2200 to replace there PPC towers that costed $1200 to $2100+.
Schools are a other place that uses alot of PPC as well and they also have g4 and g5 severs as well.
If apple does this then they will need to have a $700 - $2100 single cpu x86 mid-tower. The $600 to $800 mini is way to weak for it's cost and the imacs have poor build in screen and only has 1gb of ram + 128 video card in the $1200 system wtf?
Also may big apps are still 32 bit like CS3 and CS4 + M$ office.
There is lot of talk about this on appleinsider.com
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=87548
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/04/apples_mac_os_x_10_6_code_named_snow_leopard_report.html
The next version of the OS will be 'tiddles' followed by 'Fluffy' and then 'Mrs. Furry Paws.'
After that, they'll be moving over to partner pet names so expect Jobs to be announcing the great performance and features of 'Sprookums,' 'Melonpie' and 'Shnickety-huggle-buns.'
MS will be unveiling their OS X killer coming 'real soon now' to compete feature to feature with Apple's new os version.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Link?
My blog
If not apple should have a desktop mid-tower not a over priced and under powered mini or a over the top for most users mac pro.
My blog
You must be new here.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
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
3) By releasing it only on their hardware, they can avoid some of the huge headaches of compatibility. One reason why Windows is so buggy is that there are millions of combinations of hardware. "X-brand sound card is incompatible with Y-brand video card for some reason. Why didn't Bill Gates test that out and fix it?" By keeping their hardware combinations small, they can be assured of some measure of reliability. If you look at their line, they go as far to keep the number of models small too.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It may be more true than you think.
The hardware quality of apple's recent lines, particularly their video/display quality, has been appalling. I spent 1.5k on a macbook, and the display installed was of such obviously poor quality it's color was nearly inverted from the contrast at the top and so washed out at the bottom as to be nearly white. Its fidelity was so poor apple's own color calibration tools reached the edge of the scale approximately half way to the correct equilibrium in all tests. I have never seen a worse monitor in my life, this includes my great aunt's vintage dinosaur of a color tv TV, bought when tv shows were still advertized "now, in color!". The most shocking and heartbreaking aspect of this mess was that, presented with this, the geniuses said it was "within standards". I had to come within inches of making a scene in the store before they agreed to replace it, and when it came back, the replacement display was actually worse.
in other words, people who buy apple for quality may be a dying breed.
the final paragraph in this post reflect my sentiments well.
I became interested in mac because I'm a perfectionist. I wanted maximum compatibility, the most powerful user interface, and the best multimedia fidelity for both videos and photo editing.
If they are moving away from this niche, I'd sure as hell like to know who will be stepping in to offer equivalent hardware quality.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
How about that they do it right finally and have it only run on 64-bit Intel (or AMD) hardware?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"There is one option that didn't exist before, virtualisation."
There's also another one: Linux-style LiveCD systems that run directly without the need (or in the case of Apple, the ability) to install them on a hard disk.
"It would be so easy to sell
Taste the Apple eXperience, one bite will have you wanting more."
I reckon the LiveCD would be a really good option. You could download and burn an ISO, or pick up a ready-made disk from an Apple dealer.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
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"APPLE IS A HARDWARE COMPANY."
If this is the case, then why do they sell music and video, and write and sell a variety of their own software packages (Final Cut, Logic, iWork, iLife, Aperture, etc.)?
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Last time they tried licensing MacOS to other hardware companies, Apple nearly ran themselves out of business. Plus, my Motorola Starmax was a big P.O.S. Opening OSX to any hardware platform is like BMW putting their engines in any car chassis.
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There have not been 5? 6? versions of OSX that required purchasing. I don't remember exactly but I think I paid for 10.0 to 10.1 ($20 because I was a beta tester), then once in the 10.1 to 10.4 range, now again with 10.5. Whoopty-friggin'-do!
About 4 years ago 1gig of RAM was an acceptable configuration for "most people". Now it is increasingly common for people to bump up against the 4gig limit. I'm not saying that most people need more than 4gigs, but times change and i can see it being a standard fairly soon.
That's one reason for going 64-bit. I doubt many applications will benefit from 64-bit instructions (in fact some applications see a performance hit), but they will benefit from the 64-bit address space.
The music and video to psuh their ipods, and the software to 'have what Microsoft got'. The really high end software like Final Cut and Logic are of course to make money on, but I suppose they push their MacPro's too (they do sell $30000 machines after all, to this crowd).
I have plenty of things that are older than three years old. I don't, however, expect them to be supported in any way/shape/form. Why should a computer be any different?
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.).
"By releasing it only on their hardware, they can avoid some of the huge headaches of compatibility. One reason why Windows is so buggy is that there are millions of combinations of hardware"
This is an oft-repeated meme, but the fact of the matter is that most of the hardware support on Windows is actually provided by manufactures who supply drivers rather than MS. This is why there are so many moans from owners of peripherals whenever Windows has a new driver model, and their stuff stops working because its manufacturer won't spend money on writing new drivers for stuff they don't make anymore.
"By keeping their hardware combinations small, they can be assured of some measure of reliability"
Linux manages to be reliable without keeping its hardware selection small, so it's far more probable that Microsoft's reliability problems have been caused by crappy code and badly designed driver loading mechanisms that let a buggy one bring an entire system down than the fact they support lots of different hardware. And it's not even as if Apple aren't already supporting a bewildering variety of OS X host systems:
- it runs on three distinctly different CPUs (PPC, Intel, Arm).
- Many, many combinations of support chips have been used over the years.
- A variety of graphics cards from all three major manufacturers have been used (ATI, Intel, nVidia).
- There've been several different types of hard disk controller and CD / DVD interface.
- Several types of Firewire and USB hardware has been used.
- etc., etc.
So Apple already have a pretty comprehensive driver collection, and OS X is perfectly amenable to third party drivers that companies like Mark Of The Unicorn write for their specialist hardware, so it's just as flexible as Windows in this regard.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
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.
"I served with Leopard: I knew Leopard; Leopard was a friend of mine. That's Snow Leopard."
From what I gathered over on Ars Technica, OS X 10.6 is *not* supposed to really do much as far as "new features" go.
Rather, it sounds like it's aimed as a performance-boosting alternative to 10.5 for people using Intel-based Macs, who can take advantage of it.
Users of PPC Macs will (theoretically) be able to continue using 10.5 Leopard and not really see any visual or functional differences between it and 10.6.
If true, this seems like very smart marketing on Apple's part. This way, they can help nudge people to upgrade to newer Intel-based Macs, while not prematurely making PPC owners feel like they're losing out on anything. (By the time a 10.7 release comes along, anyone *still* on PPC architecture will have had enough time using it so they won't feel too "ripped off", having to upgrade to run OS X with the latest new features again.)
I don't get complaints like yours. Seriously, if Apple is doing you *such* a disservice by not providing 100% full support for your 3+ year old Mac purchases, why are you with them in the first place? What alternatives do you have in mind that will do so much "better" for you?
Apple is like any other industry leader. They keep moving FORWARD with new things, which means obsoleting the old. (Take, for just one example, Canon and their "Digital Rebel" line of cameras. Pro photographers everywhere use and rely on these products, yet you can spend thousands on a high-end Rebel, only to find it's out of production and considered "obsolete" in the industry within just 2 or 3 years.)
So what? Your options are simply; A. Keep using what you've invested in, since it should still do today exactly what it was doing for you yesterday, or B. Sell off your equipment for fair market value, and spend the difference to upgrade to the latest and greatest thing.
I think it's been pretty clear ALL ALONG that Apple is primarily focused on markets other than enterprise business sales. They have certain "niches" they go pretty deep into, like video editing and production, music editing and production, or desktop publishing -- but by and large, they're interested in making the best PERSONAL COMPUTER experience. Even as far back as the Mac + and SE days, they were far more worried about the educational market than enterprise business sales.
Besides, if you're in a line of work that can cost-justify maxxing a Mac Pro's memory out, hard disk space out, adding a costly hardware RAID controller to it, etc. etc. -- you really SHOULD be doing some kind of work with it that has a big payback?? If you can't justify your return on investment with a full 3 years of use of that Mac Pro configuration, maybe you simply over-bought?
You can argue whether it makes financial sense for Apple to license their OS to OEMs, but you can't really argue that it wouldn't work when it already has. And Michael Dell has openly stated that he'd love to offer OS X on Dell machines.
Apple's hardware has always been a strength... well designed and attractive. But their stuff is looking less and less attractive (or even distinctive), and more like ugly European kitchen hardware. I've gotten to the point where I'd welcome running OS X on third party hardware.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Not necessarily, because (non-hacked) OS X is keyed to the TPM or whatever it's called now. So Apple could charge an per-machine license fee for "OS X capable" PCs, while regular PCs would still require hacks.
(Not that it would happen, just thinking it through.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I've heard the same from folks that work there, so it may be true. Then again, Apple has layer upon layer of secretness in place, so it's hard for anyone but Steve to know. We do so love to speculate...
I wasn't blaming Windows but rather describing the crux of the situation. The reliability of 3rd party drivers is always an issue for any OS. With OS X, the list of 3rd party hardware is much smaller. To pinpoint an issue that X-brand sound card has with Y-brand video card, an engineer has to have that hardware/driver combination. With Apple controlling the hardware, the variation is minimized because they have built that variation. It's not that Apple does not have a variety of hardware drivers already, it's that they can fully test out the variations before market and diagnose problems after it's been sold.
For example, Apple doesn't have to support all nVidia, ATI, and Intel video cards, just the ones that are in their machines. The variations in video cards in a single manufacturer is daunting. The nVidia GeForce FX (FX4xx and FX5xxx) series supported color menus in their TV encoding. That little feature is great if you're using that card for a homebrew PVR. Other applications, not as much. For the GeForce 6 and higher series, nVidia removed the feature. nVidia did not release that fact; it was found by Linux developers working on MythTV.
MS can never test all possible combinations. At best, the OEMs can test their own hardware but may not in combination with other hardware.
Linux has reliability but that is more due to the community than the manufacturers. If a manufacturer doesn't want to cooperate with Linux developers, there's only so much that the devs can do in reverse engineering. So far they do a good job but you will run into hardware that isn't compatible because the manufacturer has not/will not release open source drivers. The quality of the open source linux drivers tend to be higher as there is some auditing. The quality of closed source drivers are unknown. Even a big company like nVidia releases some crappy drivers.
Which brings me back to the point. Although 3rd parties might release crappy software, Apple will get blamed like Windows gets blamed today. Now MS shares some responsibility in how they've maintained their APIs but Apple doesn't want that image.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Apple sells computers. Macs to be specific. Apple also sells phones, wireless base stations, etc.
Well the bigger problem there is not just that they'd fail-- but that Microsoft would pull MS Office from Mac in retaliation. iWork is good, but doesn't offer the same level of transparent interoperability within a Windows/Office dominated world.
And yes, I know MS Office for Mac isn't completely transparent, but it opens/saves Office formats more faithfully than iWork or OpenOffice.
Maybe 10.6 will actually make Bluetooh work on Macbooks. 10.5 has been like 10.1 for a lot of users.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It has never worked, and I don't think it has a stronger chance of succeeding now. The clones happened, and during that period the Mac market I don't think grew significantly, just fragmented.
Windows has for a long time not done anything interesting in the OS, but at the same time the market has demonstrated indifference to that fact. They care about the third party apps and toss money at MS because they just don't care.
I don't like this reality, particularly when Linux and OSX both provide a richer 'base' experience, but that's what it is. In the 200 dollar and cheaper markets, the economics may cause MS's stranglehold to weaken, but so long as they generally get subsidized by crapware writers that can't be bothered to port to Linux, OEMs will continue to subject people to it and people will just take it, because it is easier than change.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But if you run them on the Internet you're likely to get 0wned.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Hell, I'm still running 10.3 on my home computer
How do you feel about running with unpatched critical security vulnerabilities?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
before they dumped Classic with the Intel introduction.
:)
The new Leopard Security Guide was produced on FrameMaker, which only runs on PPC, Tiger machines.
Apple is going to have to implement a DTP package before dumping PPC security updates.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The biggest one for me is that at least 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 were corrupting data on USB drives at the device driver level. One of the guys working on ZFS for OSX noticed this (neither member of Apple's QA team did).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That's because everybody is drunk on Time Machine, and it still doesn't really work with FileVault.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I was going to say Mr. Bigglesworth needs to be in there before partner pet names.
"Snow Leopard"?????
Some idiot thinks it'll be called Snow leopard?
First - that'll be confusing since there already is a leopard, second, there are still a number of charismatic feline megafauna that are much better known - Lion, Cheetah, Puma, Cougar, (Yes, I know the las two are the same beastie as a Panther, but it's just a code name...)
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Well the bigger problem there is not just that they'd fail-- but that Microsoft would pull MS Office from Mac in retaliation.
They've already pulled VBA, making it useless for a large class of people. NeoOffice does as much as MS Office does, depending on your feature needs.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
and I don't think we're taking things too literally.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
IBM is a different case. With OS/2, they had a difficult time building a healthy base of 3rd party applications written specifically to OS/2's unique APIs, and the corresponding developer mindshare that comes with it. Many who ran OS/2 ran Windows applications on it. Apple already has a vibrant development community, and it's only going to grow as developers use Cocoa Touch. (Every such developer gets direct experience with XCode, Objective-C, and a foundational intersection of the APIs in MacOS X. I do not buy your argument that Apple's position today is anything like IBM's position with OS/2.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I heard that rumour, but I assumed 'Mr. Bigglesworth' was the deliberate leak that Steve put out to find out who's leaking all the NDA stuff.
Damn, that's both of us sacked now.
Maybe they'll take us on at Google so we can work on their new range of kitchen products like the Google Egg (Beta).
I'd like to add another aspect in which the IBM of the day was very different from the Apple of today: IBM was an enormous, lumbering bureaucracy and never could manage to put all of its wood behind one arrow. The Apple of today would never make a mere token effort to push its operating system, whilst simultaneously selling Windows boxen hand over fist, undermining the former.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
It's obvious OS X on PCs won't happen, and even fairly obvious why.
The white box PC hardware market is full of junk. If Apple tried to support it, they'd end up in the same Hell Microsoft is in. True, all Microsoft products are shit, but they get blamed for driver issues as well, which is probably fair since they bundle and "certify" them in some sense.
Not only is Apple hardware higher quality ("it just works... and keeps working") - the drivers are integrated (like Sun). PC people don't seem to get that point. They live in a different world, I guess, with much lower expectations and a much drearier experience.
Those who want OS X, quit whining and buy a Mac, and go ahead and enjoy computing again. There's ebay to get rid of your PC.
you had me at #!
Um, now I think about that some more, that's just stark raving nuts.
What the **** happened to the version that ran on NextStep/Openstep? That should pretty much be just a recompile to run on Cocoa.
No, I don't want to hear that Adobe lost the code or anything stupid like that. That's just inconceivable.
Am I the only one that recalls Steve Jobs announcing they'd support PowerPC for two more years after the launch of Intel Macs?
I've been reading tons of comments about how "Apple can't possibly abandon PowerPC."
Seems to me like it's right on schedule.
I'm at work, so I can't currently watch it, so I'll leave it up to somebody else to watch it and tell me I'm wrong -
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jun/wwdc2005/m_wwdc_2005_all_ref.mov
How is this operating system going to be "snowy"?
They must really be running out of names.
I vote for 10.6 to stick with the feline thing. Mac OS X 10.6...LOLCAT.
I'm in ur developrs, stealin' ur originality.
There's a lot of fucked up shit on the internet. And I've downloaded it all.
I have a G4 for my young kids running OS 10.4. I was hoping to use parental controls from 10.5, but giving up Classic is a non-starter. There is still quite a bit of software on the store shelves that is not Carbonized, it really sucks. For all the software they have, I still like Launcher better than the Dock.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
You buy hardware because the current one doesn't fit to your standards. Not because your hardware vendor forces you by abandoning OS upgrades for you.
Apple wasn't like that before, they were known to support their machines to the limit. That is before they dropped "computer" from their name.
Their biggest fault is making people like me understand and respect to Microsoft to a certain limit. Just checked the Vista Business specs you know...
>it will not contain major OS changes. Instead,
>the release is heavily focused on performance
>and nailing down speed and stability.
Sounds similar to the upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1.
Maybe Microsoft could take some cues from this and update vista to address performance... yet saying that I instantly know it's the sort of thing they would never do.
Aha! maybe that's why Gentoo isn't overly popular... 2008.0_beta2 just isn't that sexy.
I heard they are compiling a list of names right now.
Carbon is NOT being removed, but Cocoa interfaces to all heretofore "Carbon-only" code are being added.
Spotlight is being modified to remember the index of all external disks and network disks that a computer or any of its network peers see, so that when a Spotlight search is performed for something your computer has "seen" on an external drive at one time, the search results can tell you that the file exists on that disk, even if that disk is not attached at the time of the search.
Time Machine is improved in that a backup volume can be migrated to a new disk, and you can now specify any number of Time Machine disks and/or network shares for a single computer, and it will backup onto any or all of them each time it "sees" them.
Spaces is being improved such that on a multi-monitor system, you can merge any of the monitors together to display one large space, display any space on any monitor, or even display the same space on multiple monitors, for presentations and such (or any combination thereof). The last possibility replaces display mirroring in the display preferences.
Spaces is further improved such that each space can be a face of a cube, and switching between spaces occurs with a visual rotation of the cube. This dictates that six spaces can appear on a cube, so you can have multiple cubes and switching between spaces that exist across cubes will show a three-dimensional pan from one cube to the other.
It is the product of 5.3 and 2.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Having bought one of the last G5 machines and only having experienced Tiger and Leopard I would be greatly upset with the dropping of support for PowerPC machines at this time. Perhaps if the upgrade were a major change in the OS (pure 64 bit, multi-processor optimized or a next generation of the NeXT Step OS base or a new kernel like Linux perhaps). But at his time it is basically a compiler switch setting for Universal code generation and only low level code should require attention. Also the numbers that I have seen put PowerPC users at between 25-33% of the Mac Community.
From my experience with the Cocoa frameworks so far they are too restrictive in what they allow to be created and still stick with the Model, View, Controller software architecture. Take a look at the applications put forward by Apple. Why do applications hang around after you close all of their windows? It's because the current document framework doesn't offer that as a simple option. There are many such restrictions. The lack of a real DB interface framework comes to mind immediately.
Anyway, if I'm going to be abandoned now I'd at least, like to be left with a code base for development that is solid and well thought out. The NS libraries were a nice starting point for the 10. series but it is really a good time to rethink them especially in light of non-desktop/laptop needs.
Steve, please do not cut me off in my learning curve stages. I really don't have the money to fund an unnecessary change in platform at this time. Linux with a bit of work will be able to compete head-to-head with OS X in a year or two. I'm tired (yes, a grey-beard), please don't make me have to be one of the contributors to that contest.
Be as you would have the world become.
"I wasn't blaming Windows but rather describing the crux of the situation"
I was blaming Windows, because I lay its reliability problems squarely at the feet of those who designed a driver model that allows (or allowed: it's much less of a problem with Vista) an errant driver to bring an entire system down.
"The reliability of 3rd party drivers is always an issue for any OS"
Agreed. However, the way a particular OS handles errors produced by faulty drivers is entirely dependant on the way the OS itself is designed.
"To pinpoint an issue that X-brand sound card has with Y-brand video card, an engineer has to have that hardware/driver combination"
Indeed, but IMO this sort of problem shouldn't result in the entire OS hanging.
"It's not that Apple does not have a variety of hardware drivers already, it's that they can fully test out the variations before market and diagnose problems after it's been sold."
They can't always do that. PowerMacs and MacPro systems for example can be expanded by plugging cards in (many prior Apple systems also had this capability), and there've been entire internal CPU and memory subsystem upgrades sold by by third parties in the past. And as is the case with MS, the onus has always been on the third party to supply drivers for their hardware that work with various versions of Mac OS, and not all of those drivers have been satisfactory in terms of quality or reliability.
"With Apple controlling the hardware, the variation is minimized because they have built that variation."
Except in the case of PowerMacs and MacPro systems, and in the past, systems with internal CPU etc. upgrades.
"For example, Apple doesn't have to support all nVidia, ATI, and Intel video cards, just the ones that are in their machines."
While third parties support their own cards for PoweMac and MacPro systems, as is the case with Windows.
"The variations in video cards in a single manufacturer is daunting."
But the responsibility for supporting each of them on Windows lies with the card manufacturer, not MS.
"MS can never test all possible combinations. At best, the OEMs can test their own hardware but may not in combination with other hardware."
The same is true for Apple. There's less choice of expansion hardware for PowerMac / MacPro systems, but that's a function of relative market share (as indeed are the higher prices for Mac-compatible expansion cards). However, there's enough choice for it to be impossible for Apple to test every combination of expansions out there, so it's extremely common to see posts on both Apple and third party manufacturer fora from customers saying that such-and-such doesn't work properly with a new OS revision or computer.
"Linux has reliability but that is more due to the community than the manufacturers."
Linux has a wide range of hardware support because of efforts from the community, but its reliability comes from the way it's designed to interact with drivers.
"If a manufacturer doesn't want to cooperate with Linux developers, there's only so much that the devs can do in reverse engineering."
Yes, but even partially working or badly written drivers for Linux usually result in restriction or failures in the specific piece of hardware, not Linux itself (unless of course it's something critical such as a hard-disk controller or a key motherboard support component). If a graphics card or other component crashes X, then X has crashed, not the underlying OS, and the same goes for most of the hardware on a computer running Linux.
"The quality of the open source linux drivers tend to be higher as there is some auditing."
There are still a fairly large number of bad ones for hardware that's not very common, because there aren't many people who have both the hardware and the knowledge that's necessary to debug and alter somebody else's driver source code.
"The quality of closed source drivers are unknown. Even a big company like nVidia releases
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I quite like your idea, of a live CD, since it would be distributing a limited version of OSX so that people could try OSX on a particular system with little to no cost.
However it probably would not be difficult for Apple to be able to sell an unlock code to allow OSX to be installed from the same Cd/dvd image.
problem is while it is all possible, probably would make money for old rope for apple, it would take some persuasion to convince Mr Jobs it would be a good move.
Apple sells on exclusivity, and this would devalue that to an extent on the other hand most mac enthusiasts would see this as an inferior mac clone and social pressure to upgrade to a real mac would be there.
I don't think apple have the ambition to increase market share this aggressively, shareholders might.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
"However it probably would not be difficult for Apple to be able to sell an unlock code to allow OSX to be installed from the same Cd/dvd image."
I don't think Apple are currently interested in selling OS X to people who haven't bought Macs.
"while it is all possible, probably would make money for old rope for apple, it would take some persuasion to convince Mr Jobs it would be a good move."
Especially after what happened the last time Apple tried it.
"Apple sells on exclusivity, and this would devalue that to an extent on the other hand most mac enthusiasts would see this as an inferior mac clone and social pressure to upgrade to a real mac would be there."
The problem isn't Mac enthusiasts, but the much larger number of new customers they've gained over the last couple of years. How many of them would have bought Macs if they could've run the OS on a much cheaper generic machine? It's difficult to know for sure, but it's going to something that Apple's marketing people are certain to have thought about.
"I don't think apple have the ambition to increase market share this aggressively, shareholders might."
It's doubtful that Apple's shareholders would even consider trying to force Jobs to do something he's against, because the company would have been bankrupt years ago without him. Only utter fools would risk losing the goose that's laid so many golden eggs to take on MS, who've left the software world littered with the corpses of companies who tried to compete with them on the desktop, and although many shareholders are indeed utter fools, I doubt that many of them are _that_ stupid.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.