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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."
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.
I don't see why they would drop PPC support yet. Certainly, stripping PPC code from an Intel Mac doesn't make much difference to the disc space use. Mostly, stripping out unused languages makes much more difference. I gained 2.5GB of space on my MacBook Pro by doing so and I now have universal binaries that are very similar in size to those seen in Snow.
They still have to maintain a port of Mac OS X just in case, and the also have to keep OS X running on the iPhone (Strong ARM) so I don't see the benefit of focussing just on Intel CPUs. In addition, keeping code running on PPC will help with keeping bugs down as it is often the case that just the act of compiling C code for a different architecture can result in unseen bugs showing up. As for performance tuning, rarely do you need to worry about much more than some small parts of the code to fine tune for a specific platform.
I'm not surprised that this developer preview is Intel only but I will be surprised to see the final release be Intel only. Leopard on PPC could no doubt do with some fine tuning although it does run surprisingly well on my nearly five year old G4 iBook. Besides which, the last of the PPC machines were being sold by Apple as late as the end of 2006 (PowerMac G5s) so I think it would be a bad move for them to drop support this early.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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."
Sure, the boosts in efficiency and stability will be welcome, but I for one am very excited about full Exchange support in iCal and Address Book. Heck, the Exchange support in Mail is a bit spotty as well, so touching that up would be great as well.
But what would really be great (and very much in line with the whole "embracing enterprise" thing) would be native support for Cisco IPsec VPN connections. As it stands, you have to use Cisco's own clunky client; if you could use the built-in client you could connect via a menubar icon. (Shimo does this pretty nicely, but it just became crippleware.)
It seems like an obvious addition, given the iPhone 2.0 OS is supposed to have it. Anyone know if it's on the docket for Snow Leopard?
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
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.
This seems to be a common failure to understand what Apple is claiming they will be adding in snow leopard. From TFA Apple will be adding... "...a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality."
That is, they're adding new technology that will allow for increased performance and stability. An example of this is OpenCL, which will make it easier for software developers to make use of the GPU for miscellaneous computing tasks... thus increasing the performance of those applications. Another new technology is Grand Central, making it easier for developers to get the most out of multi-core processors, again increasing performance and also increasing stability. Yet a third example is the move to 64-bit to allow applications to address more memory, thus increasing performance. You'll note none of these are about fixing performance or stability bugs in OS X; although doubtless Apple will apply them to do that as well.
I don't think I should have to shell out more money for "stability and performance" because they should have been included with Leopard, but obviously were not.Hey, if you don't like what is in snow leopard, no one is forcing you to pay for it. Just wait for the next release you do feel is worth the money. Still, I think you are misunderstanding the summary and the blurb. When Leopard was introduced one of the features allowed OpenGL applications to automatically spawn an extra thread to feed the GPU, utilizing a second core even for applications that had not been written to take advantage of it and providing significant performance improvements for many applications. This is more of the same, features being added to increase performance, not bugs being fixed to increase performance.
You make it sound like "features" exist on some continuum, where you can always add more, but stability, security, and optimization are some binary quantities where the OS either has them or does not. If it doesn't, then you're getting ripped off. If they say they're going to improve the features of the OS, you say "OK, that's worth paying for," but if they say they're going to improve one of the other three things, than you take that as evidence hat it didn't have those to begin with. Why not say "whoa, why should I pay for new features- it's just admitting that there were useful features that should have been here in the last release."
In reality, all four of these things exist on a continuum. OSX Leopard is very stable, hasn't had any serious security compromises in the wild, and isn't particularly slow either. It stacks up well against the competition. Yet, there have been things around before like BeOS- sure, it had its problems, but it was just blazingly, impressively fast, and it was beautifully, wonderfully responsive. OSX could be like that. And while OSX hasn't been the subject of major security exploits, researchers say the vulnerabilities are out there. And while it rarely kernel crashes, it certainly does sometimes.
So Apple sells an OS with a nice, competitive feature set, great stability, apparently effective security, and decent optimization. They need to decide what to do with their developer time for the next release. If they concentrate on features, they can make approximately $300 million dollars off it in the first week of selling it. If they concentrate on making it super stable, blazingly fast and responsive, or having security like a hardened SELinux or OpenBSD installation, then the attitude is "Why didn't they do that already for free? I'm not paying for that."
That attitude makes short-term profit motivation favor lots of new features with half-assed security, stability, and optimization. It takes someone visionary like Jobs to back of and say "look, we can't make a quick buck off this other stuff like we can some shiny new widgets, but these things have a big impact on user experience, which will affect the long-term viability of our platform, so we're spending money on it anyway."
But if users would just consider features, security, stability, and optimization all as things worth paying for, there'd be a lot more competition to deliver them.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
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.
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
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.