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OS X Snow Leopard Details
JD-1027 writes in to kick off a discussion of OS X Snow Leopard. Apple's stated goal: "Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard's enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality." The technologies: Grand Central to get better use of multiple processors and multicore chips, OpenCL to tap the power of the GPU, 64 bit so we can finally have our 16 TB of RAM, QuickTime X for optimized modern codec performance, and built in Exchange support in iCal, Address Book, and Apple Mail that most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments. We've previously discussed ZFS in the server version of Snow Leopard."
...if this will be a free upgrade similarly to the upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1. It would seem hard to justify a purchase price of anything more than $20 that adds only additional stability and developer tools. If anything, this version seems more geared for developers than end-users.
It is rumored that 10.6 is going to be the end of PPC support. I suppose it's time, although there are some PPC machines that are less than 4 years old. Still, as bittersweet as it is, it's probably time to let go of the legacy code and firm up the OS. I'm happy running Leopard on my Frankenmac 1.8ghz (Sonnet upgraded).
A good analysis of this decision can be read at RoughlyDrafted Magazine.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
You mean, sort of like how MacFUSE enables tons of FUSE filesystems, including NTFS, to be used with your Macintosh? Old news.
Jobs announces he's going to enormously simplify the morass of parallel programming and then also take GPU programming languages far beyond NVIDIA. And he's going to make this all in the core of the OS so it will be ubiquitous.
Oh and one more thing, we've already done it and it's going to be in our next release
Then I read posts about "well what about NTFS or Power PC".
Jebezus! get a sense of proportion here. Yeah NTFS might sell a few enterprise computers. So maybe that matter financially. But apple's doing fine with it's cash flow and we won't be talking about NTFS 5 years from now.
We will be talking about the future of computing which is how to tame and unify alternative and multicore architectures in a way the programmer does not need to worry about.
That's earthshaking if it could be done next year! Now a lot of people have blunted there spears chargin at this one so one needs a healthy dose of skepticism that it could be accomplished in a decade let alone in a few months. On the other hand the one person we know not to scoff at when he says he's going to make something complex really simple, retain 99% of it's power, and deliver it ubiquitously and accessibly is Jobs/Apple.
So doubt and wonder. Pour awe and skepticism. But fuck, don't ask about NTFS when this kind of thing is being annouced. You might as well ask about Zune support in Itunes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Robin: Leaping Leopards, Batman! Is that a Hardy Herron or a Gusty Gibbon???
Batman: Shut up. It's just 10.6, dude.
Yeah... "Leopard"... "Snow Leopard"... that's not gonna cause any confusion, right?
For the end user, it sounds like Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade. With bug fixes, performance enhancements, etc. It's a 10.5 -> 10.6 upgrade. Perhaps that's why they have a minor name change, from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
Or maybe they started following the Ubuntu naming Model. Let's see, is Hardy Hippo the same thing as Ubuntu 7.06 or what?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
"That doesn't help with dual-boot PCs"
The GP was referring to a 'coporate' environment. It's pretty rare to have dual boot machines, it's either one or the other, with networked resources. If you want to dual boot, your data would still be stored on remote servers and accessed via CIFS/whatever in a corporate environment anyway.
I.O.U One Sig.
There are already some programs that provide only Intel builds out there for Mac. It's annoying, but my Intel machine is my main one (the PowerPC one I keep just because I don't want to sell it or throw it away :)).
It's just the Apple mindset, and it's kind of ironic. Apple computers do tend to be well built, and last a good while, but Apple's stance seems to be that everyone should always be buying the latest and greatest, and that you should ALWAYS have their latest OS release.
Look at software applications for example. Many of them already now require OS X 10.5 or newer. My PowerPC mac runs 10.4 and I have no intention of upgrading it, so I'm shut out of those applications completely (except for older versions). Windows software on the other hand: most stuff out there now will work at least as far back as Windows 2000. Not as much, but still a lot of stuff will work back to Windows 98 and some ever Windows 95.
Basically just accept: if you want to be part of the Mac club, Apple expects you to be regularly dishing out cash for their stuff.
For what it's worth, I do thoroughly enjoy using a Mac (though I have Windows and Linux systems too). I just am not happy being forced to move up from 10.4 to 10.5 when I didn't want to at the time.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Only after posting did I realize it was the "first" and got swept up in the excitement of it all. I promise it won't happen again. :)
Let me get the rest out of my system, so I am not tempted:
o Does it run Linux?
o Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
o Profit!
o In Soviet Russia, post firsts you!
Leopard was the longest time we waited between OS X releases (And one of the top few longest between all Apple releases). You must be new to Macs/Apple. I would be very surprised if Jobs didn't say anything about the 'next' release. Whether it be 10.6 or 10.5.5
10.0 - March 24, 2001
10.1 - September 25, 2001
10.2 - August 23, 2002
10.3 - October 24, 2003
10.4 - April 29, 2005
10.5 - October 26, 2007
That's 6 months, 11 months, 14 months, 18 months, 30 months.
Heck looking at Wiki, Apple has always kept a relatively short release time (Nothing as short linux kernels, but absolutely nothing as long as Microsoft)
1.0 - Jan 84
2.0 - Apr 85
3.0 - Jan 86
4.0 - Mar 87
5.0 - ???
6.0 - Apr 88
7.0 - Jun 91
8.0 - July 97
9.0 - Oct 99
Apple indirectly causes it by setting up Xcode so that by default (and often by requirement depending on the features you want to use) it always wants to produce code that works on the same version it's running on.
There's also the case where many of Apple's own applications work in much the same way (the newest version of Safari for example, requires not only 10.5, but 10.5.2).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You see, this attitude of consumers is exactly why companies like Apple and Windows have so far focussed more on building OSes that look good, rather than work well. People want a shiny new thing, not a really efficient, rock solid operating system, because they have got used to crashes, useless error-messages, viruses and spam.
For me, this is the most enthralling idea in the End-User computer market in years. Finally, a company decides it's time to stop adding new eye-candy. Instead, Apple is taking a step back and taking their time to iron out the bugs and add actual innovation.
OpenCL sounds amazing. If it works as advertised, it will give developers who really care about performance the option to tap into the hugely parallel architecture available on the GPU that was inacessible to most of us so far (unless we wanted to learn the obscure proprietary semi-languages of ATI, IBM and nVidia).
Grand Central seems to be just the opposite of this: It will make sure those eight cores we'll soon all have in our machines will actually get used, even if the developers who wrote the programs we run didn't care to think about parallelization.
I'm bying Apple stocks. At a time when Microsoft's developers are once again falling victim to the marketing department (remember when Windows 7 was supposed to be a clean new start?), Apple is taking a bold step in what I think is the right direction.
...is solid as the Rock of Gibraltar on my MacBook. It's a stability improvement over 10.5.2 and a far cry from 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 which I avoided and stuck with 10.4.11. I'd put it right up there with Debian.
10.6 is something I'd be willing to pay for, though. Grand Central and true Intel 64 bitness would be awesome and make this MacBook rock. And as I mentioned earlier ZFS on a multi-disk future Time Capsule appliance would rock my world.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Apple can't "go back" to something it never went away from. Tiger had limited support for 64-bit code, whether on PPC or x86, and Leopard had 64-bit versions of most of its userland libraries. The Snow Leopard page doesn't say much about what's being done other than "Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM - up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today."
Some of the PowerPC machines were 64-bit. The notebooks and the Mac mini were 32-bit.
Translation: "Let's see if we can distract Mac owners from the fact that the recent Apple developer conference produced no new upgrades, no new hardware, no Jobs-ian announcements on OSX, just iPhonery."
Translation: "We're an iPhone company now"
Translation: "We've put off any serious work on OS X for eleven months"
Translation: "We're hoping to bugfix some of the the low-level tweaks promised for Leopard and finally get them out the door... if we're not too busy with the iPhone."
Translation: "We really might be able to fix those bugs..."
Translation: "Yet another feature, like resolution independent graphics, that didn't make it into Leopard, because we were way too busy with the iPhone. But we might have it for you in a year. Read-only, of course. And not turned on by default. For developers only. And only in beta, of course. Use this feature at your own risk."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I work in a multi-OS educational environment and see the weaknesses of all popular OS's in a short-exposure, high-contact learning context. The one area OS X really falls down is in the area of file-system and application navigation. I often see a student coming from Windows become comfortable managing both their files and applications with Linux (GNOME or KDE) far faster than they do with the Finder/OS X interface. While perhaps being a tired metaphor, the application tray, where any application minimised or otherwise can always be found (regardless of virtual desktop) works: they have per-application visual contact with what is active in their desktop session, uncomplicated by a dock doubling as a menu of popular applications.
After years of complaints from OS 9 and OS X users about the Finder Apple should confess to the difficult reality that - for many, not all - it is a major bottleneck to ease-of-use and therefore adoption. Students of mine - in general - spend far too much time second-guessing OS X where file and software management is concerned. Why are users' *losing* software and files so often that they need a *Finder*? Why are they so dependent on Spotlight that OS X might as well house all files in a flat-file-system? Why does the parent-window of an application still dominate the core navigation context even when minimised? This stuff confuses and frustrates people far too often I think.
It may not be the case for pro-users but I see students of mine spending far too much time clicking and dragging windows around in the course of trying to find and get stuff done on OS X.
My 2 clicks.
I've got five Macs. My daily driver is an 8GB, 8-core Intel Mac Pro. My carry along a is loaded dual-core Macbook pro. Both are typically running linux, windows, and OSX all at once. I write graphics software for a living. Powerful graphics software, written at the metal level. I'm all for multicore/multiprocessor at the OS level; the easier, the better, and likewise, multi-machine for even bigger jobs. However, this does not change the fact that Apple is mostly doing iPhone work, and that not adding obvious consumer-level goodies to OS X will cost them dearly -- which they don't care about, because -- wait for it -- they're all about the iPhone now. I meant the post to be funny, all right, but only because it's true.
The very idea that low level improvements and bugfixes precludes feature addition at the GUI/high level is absurd, and if anyone at Apple had half a brain focused on the Mac, they'd never have said anything like that, or even implied it.
OS "features" can be as simple as adding a nice set of programs to the stable. Things like a decent personal finance manager. Wouldn't affect system stability one whit, but it'd increase the value of the Mac to the first time buyer by quite a bit. How about a nice, basic paint program? Or a set of kids coloring books / tools? A basic expert system? Lots of middle to high end users could use one, and heck, they're not that difficult to write. I wrote one in python that, minus the knowledge base, isn't even 10k and you'd be blinking amazed at how much it knows about rocks and minerals, and how well it can generalize and leap to conclusions. How about including a language teacher? How about a finder with a decent feature set? Something like... Pathfinder - buy it, maybe tweak it, and ship it. That would be @#$%^&*$ awesome. Heck, I'd probably pee right down my leg if they simply shipped a working, color version of midnight commander (a findery thing for shellfolk.)
See where I'm going here? Put an expert programmer in a corner, say "make a COOL one of these apps" and leave them be. In a year, if you don't have something really cool, the programmer should be shot. Total investment, one programmer's salary. Put ten programmers to ten tasks, watch em decently, and in a year, you'd have ten new selling points that had ZERO to do with OS stability, etc. Or just reach out the the Mac community and buy a few things, again, there are tons of them out there and I can assure you that many of them could be had for what amounts to peanuts. And also as we know, Apple's got more than peanuts in its pocket, and dropping a few million on programmers and/or acquisitions isn't a problem if they simply want to. So when they say "no features for you", what they're telling you is, "we're not going to exert ourselves on your behalf." They're not saying why... but just wake up and smell the iPhone marketing, man.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.