Slashdot Mirror
Apple To Ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard On August 28
okapi writes "Apple announced that Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple's online store is now accepting pre-orders."
All updates within a particular version are free (10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3, etc.), but jumping to a major version (10.4 -> 10.5) cost something. This particular upgrade is a little different insofar as they've tweaked the behind-the-scenes stuff more than anything else, which some folks might consider nothing more than a service pack, but because of that it's only $29 instead of the usual $129.
HTH
OSX upgrades are as free as Windows upgrades are-- which is to say minor updates and bug-fixes are free, but major updates cost you.
Lots of Windows fanatics like to point to the numbering scheme and claim that Apple makes you pay for "service packs", so they'll note that 10.4 to 10.5 is a paid upgrade, even though the version number stays the same. However, in OSX, it's the third version number that's similar to a service pack, i.e. 10.4.1 could be called Mac OSX v4, service pack 1.
And that's not necessarily too different from Windows versioning. Windows 2000 was Windows 5.0, and Windows XP was version 5.1. Windows XP service pack 3, under Apple's versioning number scheme, could be called 5.1.3. Or really, since Apple isn't incrementing the "10" part of their versioning number, it could be 10.5.1.3.
Ultimately I'm just saying that whole side of the argument-- that is, the version numbering-- is a little arbitrary and stupid. The point is that Apple releases small improvements and bug fixes all the time, and those are free. Every two years or so, they release a new version with new features and major improvements, and those can cost as much as $130. However, in the case of Snow Leopard, most of the improvements are under the hood, so the upgrade price is only $30.
There's a large number of under-the-hood rewrites and redesigns. The Finder is finally rewritten (so it's not using 10+ year old technologies), the major parts of the OS (kernel, most built-in apps) are 64-bit, and there's several other new things - like the new QuickTime (which serves, however terrible the app on other platforms is, as a very nice media playback framework on OS X).
also 4) for $170 you can get the 10.6 box set that includes ilife and iwork. that is the only option apple will offer you if you get stuck with a 10.4 intel after the 28th.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
3) VERY IMPORTANT - Apple will stop selling 10.5 the day they release 10.6. So if you have a macbook or intel imac with 10.4(.11) on it and don't get it updated to 10.5 before the 28th you cannot install Snow Leopard. The AASPs are going to go mad as of today trying to order as many 10.5 retail packs as they can get their hands on. If you will be needing one, you'd better get it NOW.
Apple sells a "boxed set" that upgrades Tiger to Snow Leopard, with no intermediate steps.
Yes, the Boxed Set is $169, which is more than Leopard alone was($129) but it does inlcude iLife and iWork as a bonus. (Yes, this is just a ploy to get more copies of iLife and iWork out there.)
There are many reasons to upgrade to Snow Leopard, for example a major one for some people will be Exchange support, and another one will be a performance tweak. For example, even though very little is different from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, 9.04 sped up the boot process a lot and as such starts about 45 seconds faster for me on a normal HDD. Snow Leopard is expected to clean up the code and make it be in general faster.
However the main reason will be the new APIs that will eventually require everyone to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but even before the new APIs get used much, its still a worthwhile upgrade.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Picked up a mini first of the year. This will be my very first upgrade.
As I understand it, the version numbers here are pretty much on par with a Microsoft OS version number so 10.5 to 10.6 will be like going from 98 to Win2k and should be handled the same way, upgrading will make for an unstable system so I should backup everything and do a fresh install. Is this conventional wisdom still correct?
You shouldn't have to backup your Mac just for Snow Leopard; ideally you've been keeping backups all along. Leopard made keeping good backups so brain-dead easy that all you have to do is get yourself an external USB/Firewire drive and plug it in, and let Time Machine take care of the rest. You don't even have to start the process in any way -- plug the drive in occasionally and let it do its thing in the background.
However, presuming for a moment you haven't being doing regular backups: yes. Backup everything first.
That having been said, with OS X I've never had to do a full wipe and reinstall. OS X has this very, very nice "Archive and Install" option that will move all of your existing system files into a "Previous System" folder, and then do a clean system install (optionally preserving all of your users and network settings, which I suggest). This does require a lot of free disk space, but it's safe and effective, and has always given me a very nice stable install of each new OS X release since Panther (10.3).
Yaz.
As someone who has been testing Snow Leopard in many different scenarios for the past four months, I can say this is one update that will likely give you no problems if you install over the top of your existing 10.5.x installation.
But, for maximum speed and efficiency, I would back up your user data and apps, and do a clean install. Snow Leopard is very lean and mean, and I noticed considerably more Snappiness on machines where I clean-installed and manually migrated my data.
:q!
OpenCL is going to change scientific computing, for good. NVIDIA's CUDA is great and all, but you get bogged to one vendor's platform. With OpenCL you can define compute kernels that will be run in the GPU, if the thing supports it. For neural networks, genetic algorithms, matrix stuff, fast fourier transform, etc, expect HUGE performance gains. Especially whenever there's an NVIDIA TESLA with 192 cores behind it you might find gains of 100x speed. I'll probably be modded as funny or some shit, but imho OpenCL is a game-changer for the scientific community.
Finally, ONE DAY, there will be a killer app for the general public using the power of the GPU. Then I hope everybody will understand.
In the meantime, I, and my students, will be studying and working with it.
Without a doubt what you say is true.
However, the parent is right in that increasingly, over time, Windows systems typically slow down. even if you don't add much in the way of applications or other software. Without a doubt, part of this phenomenon is related to increasing data bloat, especially in the registry. (After all, this is where things like the a MRU lists and settings are stored.)
But the difference between Mac OS X, Linux, etc. over Windows is that the former lack the registry altogether, instead preferring to store this data in individual files rather than one huge database.
Like it or not, this slowdown is a limitation of the system as designed.
My blog
OS X apps have had 32-bit and 64-bit executables in their bundles for quite some time now. At least since 10.4, if not some point in 10.3 (it was definitely soon after the arrival of the first G5), so this is a non-issue.
I know there are true shared libraries (Unix-style) and OS X Frameworks--two separate entities--but I was dumbing it down for those who don't want to get all pedantic about it.
And, lastly, I know that OS X apps have always utilized Frameworks. But the point is, in Snow Leopard, Apple is utilizing Frameworks more than ever. I mean, how else can Mail.app shrink for 192 MB to 16 MB? It's not just the PPC code being excised.
I appreciate your clarifying things, but it is obscuring my main point--apps in Snow Leopard, and the OS itself, are VERY lean compared to any previous version of OS X, and there is a noticeable speed boost.
:q!
OS X apps have had 32-bit and 64-bit executables in their bundles for quite some time now. At least since 10.4, if not some point in 10.3 (it was definitely soon after the arrival of the first G5),
Nope - the output of "file" on the Mail executable on 10.5.8 is:
$ file /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc
No 64-bit code there. Perhaps you're thinking of the libraries, some of which had 32-bit and 64-bit slices in 10.4, and most if not all of which had those slices in 10.5. They would still need their 32-bit PPC slices, even on Snow Leopard, for the benefit of PPC binaries running under Rosetta, although they could lose their 64-bit PPC slice, as Rosetta doesn't support 64-bit PPC binaries.
And, lastly, I know that OS X apps have always utilized Frameworks. But the point is, in Snow Leopard, Apple is utilizing Frameworks more than ever. I mean, how else can Mail.app shrink for 192 MB to 16 MB? It's not just the PPC code being excised.
Where do you get the size figures from? ls -l? size? Activity Monitor? Some other tool? I'm not seeing them.
The only valid way to determine whether, for example, Mail is using more libraries and frameworks is to run otool -L on the binaries and seeing whether it reports the Snow Leopard binary as being linked with more libraries and frameworks. That wouldn't tell you whether a given bit of functionality was moved from Mail to a framework, for use in other applications, but "Mail.app shrunk" won't tell you that, either.
I appreciate your clarifying things, but it is obscuring my main point--apps in Snow Leopard, and the OS itself, are VERY lean compared to any previous version of OS X, and there is a noticeable speed boost.
That wasn't your main point, it was the main point in the posting to which you were responding; the points in your article were claims as to the reason why that was the case: