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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."
I've never owned a mac, but was thinking of getting a macbook in the future. Are OSX upgrades free?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I know the current version of OS X does not, and you're stuck with manual config or stateless autoconf, with no way to automatically configure DNS servers, NTP, and the rest of the goodies DHCP does for you on IPv4...
The only feature of Snow Leopard that looks at all interesting is the hanzi/kanji input on the trackpad. Probably hard to draw the twenty-stroke characters, unlike the five-stroke example screenshots. But since I rarely use my laptop OPEN (I run in clamshell mode to an external monitor most of the time), even that is not particularly useful to me.
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I'm one of those crazy ones who always installs the .0 release. (I also back up, which is something most computer users don't do, either, so my risk profile is still probably better than average.) Most of the time for vast majority of people the upgrades go fine. There are always a few problems and the people experiencing those problems jump on the nearest message board and you hear a lot of noise about it. The millions who don't have problems don't, and you don't hear about them.
Would I install 10.6.0 on a mission-critical, high-uptime machine? No, definitely not-- there's no immediate business justification for it yet. (Wait until more 64-bit and massively parallel software takes advantage of the new APIs.) My home machine, though, is for my own learning and fun, and it's definitely worth it for me there. I can always restore if things go terribly awry.
E pluribus unum
1) this is an update, not a full installation. There is no "full price" edition, you MUST have mac os 10.5 on it now
2) 10.6 drops support for PPC (already mentioned previously here) so if they have older versions of Mac OS X on them it doesn't matter. However, some of the earliest intel macbooks and imacs shipped with 10.4.7-9 and their owners have not upgraded to 10.5 so there are some intels floating around without leopard on them.
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.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Actually you could argue that Apple has named their operating systems after German tanks. Of course they probably never did it purposly, but it is interesting to consider: http://ormset.no/wordpress/2007/01/01/german-armored-vehicles-and-apple-mac-os-x/
Even "snow leopard" is a German tank. Not sure how many German Tank names are left, but we'll have to see what happens after SL.
Apple took out zfs support in the middle of development. Too bad since i was counting on it a lot to replace the aging hfs+ :/
I'm on 10.6 right now and even the betas seemed far more stable than 10.5. Also, the speed increase is definitely there. I honestly never expected moving to 64 bit using every day desktop apps like mail and safari would have a noticeable speed increase, but I was wrong. It is much faster. However, I admit the speed increase is the most noticeable on first load of that app, or a cold start. After that most apps in 10.5 are so fast the speed increase in 10.6 is hardly noticeable.
The dock has changed yet again. The even in the most resent release of 10.5 I have issues dragging an item from a folder in the dock to the trash. If I do this to quickly the trash can does not come up. 10.6 has cleaned out most (if not all) of the dock issues in 10.5 in my case. The new folder design in the dock is nice but I wish it had more options. I would love to shrink the icon size or change the display format (like details) in the folders in the dock.
Quicktime X bothers me. The logo for the new quicktime in the dock is terrible looking and when running the program even if the UI looks nice it doesn't match the rest of the OS. It is like running the most recent version of windows media player in Win2k. The theme may be nice but it is kind of odd. They also removed features I used from quicktime 7. Like, I would go into full screen and it would auto start playing. In quicktime X I have to manually hit the play button after full screen. If I stream a video I can't find the options any more to turn off the auto play. I hate it when it starts playing randomly when the window is minimized ffs.
All in all, 10.6 is nice but so is 10.5 and honestly the UI changes with the dock and quicktime in 10.6 I dislike. I would of been much happier with 10.6 looking identical to 10.5 and just running faster and being far more stable.
The only features I haven't "played" with yet is OpenCL. My macbook pro has a 128meg geforce 8600 which is the min requirements. In windows for openCL the min is 256meg (it sometimes works half assed with 128meg) so I need to make an RSA decrypter or something to see how well it runs. I'm honestly not expecting much in this area.
You'd think twice about that if you had an SSD in your machine. Think about the Macbook Air with the 64GB SSD... ;)
Menzoberranzan Networks
The thing is though, a -lot- of Apple update "problems" are things that I don't think I would notice. Things like noisy HDDs, worse wireless, strange fans, etc. I suppose Mac users notice their computer more than most other people (I mean, if I paid $1500 for a laptop I would be more attentive than on my $300 laptop) but most, if not all problems are trivial for 97% of the people affected with the problem and are really only noticed because of a forum post.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"a major one for some people will be Exchange support"
Maybe I look at things differently, but why should users have to upgrade their entire OS (from 10.5, which is an extremely modern OS already) to support something like Exchange?
Better known as 318230.
Presumably the support is in the bundled apps (Mail and iCal), but require some new licensing. If Apple has to pay Microsoft for each license, it doesn't seem strange that Apple would expect remuneration from each user.
Since these are "free" (bundled) apps, the clear path is a system release. Other approaches would be awkward. A paid point release with a parallel free version that doesn't upgrade Mail and iCal? Turn "Exchange" versions of Mail and iCal into paid downloads, while keeping the bundled versions free?
The situation is similar with the iPhone. 3.0 added Exchange support. The cost is obscured a bit by the fact that it is recouped through the ongoing service contract.
-Peter
Indeed - they've dug themselves into a hole in that "OS X" is the brandname, as much as "XP" or "Vista", and not simply a version number. Already they acknowledge this by the fact that they call it OS X 10.4, when repeating the "10" is redundant. It wouldn't surprise me if they bring out "OS X 11" or something dumb like that (or more likely, they'll eventually switch to a new brandname altogether).
It's not like the 10 was ever a version number anyway, in that it's a derivative of Next, not ("classic") Mac OS, which they had to ditch. The "X" has always been a marketing thing.
"a major one for some people will be Exchange support"
Maybe I look at things differently, but why should users have to upgrade their entire OS (from 10.5, which is an extremely modern OS already) to support something like Exchange?
Applications can support Exchange on OS X currently (i.e., MS Entourage). But with 10.6, the OS itself will support Exchange.
The irony here is that not even *Windows* supports Exchange directly.
I agree, but since their apps like iCal, Mail, notes...etc are all bundled with OSX this is considered a major feature when it really is nothing more than a application upgrade to include EWS.
Um, no. It's not using Exchange Web Service. It's interfacing with Exchange just like Outlook does.
And it's not just an "application upgrade", the support is at the very core of OS X. Contacts, email, calendar, any program can make use of these services. Address Book is just an interface to the system wide address book subsystem. iCal is the same. Mail is the only app that you have to use to interface with that particular service, but even there, any program can utilize it, just like on Windows, except that you don't have to buy Outlook to connect to an Exchange server.
Or, put differently, were MS to add Exchange support to Windows (which it doesn't have), it *would* be a big deal.
"There are many reasons to upgrade to Snow Leopard, for example a major one for some people will be Exchange support,"
pfft. Windows has had decent Exchange support since at least Vista SP1.
Unless I've missed something (which is entirely possible, but I did to a google search just to make sure), Windows doesn't natively support Exchange.
How nice. Apple is announcing the latest Service Pack for OS X. Too bad you all have to pay for it! Suckers!!! :)