Apple Ships OS X 10.7 Lion 'Gold Master' For July Push

An anonymous reader writes "Apple released to developers the 'gold master' version of Mac OS 10.7, known as Lion, in a move that positions the company for a July roll-out. 'With Snow Leopard, Apple's previous Mac OS release, the time between going from gold master status to hitting store shelves was approximately two weeks. However that release required Apple to stamp and produce boxed discs to send out to retail stores. Lion will be the first by Apple to be released only through its Mac App Store as a digital download.'"

Comments

Stuff That Matters... Three Days Ago

[rakaur]

Didn't this happen like, days ago?

Re:Stuff That Matters... Three Days Ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter less now?

Re:Stuff That Matters... Three Days Ago

[Anonymous Coward]

No... lets it matter now

Re:Stuff That Matters... Three Days Ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter at all?

Fixed

"As a digital download"

[Inquisitus]

...as opposed to? An analogue download?

Re:"As a digital download"

[Vectormatic]

*cries his eyes out imagining updating to lion on a 56K line*

(and yes, i know the modem sends binairy signals over the analog line and all)

Re:"As a digital download"

[davester666]

Finally. A good excuse to upgrade from AOL.

Re:"As a digital download"

[smittyoneeach]

Don't mean to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an Internet connection worse than Afghanistan.
Everything is via satellite, filtered, over-subscribed, and frequently wrecked by weather.
Talk about making the inner child frown.

Re:"As a digital download"

[Gazoogleheimer]

Ethernet's just as analog as dial-up!

Re:"As a digital download"

[BrokenHalo]

You don't even have to go so far afield as that. I've always found internet connections in Greece to be pretty flaky. Hell, it wasn't that long ago you could barely make a phone call there. And here in Australia, there are lots of places where you won't get any kind of connection, for example Cocklebiddy, whose sole claim to fame is that it has a Wikipedia entry.

Re:"As a digital download"

[WillKemp]

*cries his eyes out imagining updating to lion on a 56K line*

(and yes, i know the modem sends binairy signals over the analog line and all)

56k? You youngsters don't know how good you had it! I had to download my first Linux installation floppy disk set via FTP-by-mail over a 2.4kbps connection.

Re:"As a digital download"

[WillKemp]

I used to enjoy brushing the snow off the satellite dish in Kabul! It worked a bit better for a while after you did that.

Re:"As a digital download"

[WillKemp]

You don't even have to go so far afield as that. I've always found internet connections in Greece to be pretty flaky [.....] And here in Australia [......]

I think you need to take a look at a map of the world! Kabul isn't as far afield from Australia as Athens is!

Re:"As a digital download"

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp?

xmodem :(

Re:"As a digital download"

[Anonymous Coward]

Before someone makes the wisecrack that they used their 2.4k accoustic coupler modem uphill both ways in the snow I'd like to point out that thermal noise and thus BER is significantly smaller at low temperatures.

Re:"As a digital download"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea sorry, anyone that 'remembers' 56k as slow dialup is too young to be on my internet. Maybe if you said 9600, you'd have pissed off the 300 baud guys but, 56k?

Also sickened by the modern slashdot crowd (aka the modern comp sci student?) who describes it as "the modem sends binairy signals over the analog line" as "analog downloading"

Re:"As a digital download"

[PopeRatzo]

Four Yorkshiremen

My favorite singing group from the '50s.

Re:"As a digital download"

[StripedCow]

Yes I don't understand it either.

Using an analogue, you'd need to send only one scalar value to represent the complete contents of the download. And you'd need zero bandwidth.

Sounds like a much better solution to me too.

Re:"As a digital download"

[smittyoneeach]

Actually, I'm in Mazar E Sharif. For internet service, Kabul is a veritible paradise.
Some of the FOBs suck still more.

Re:"As a digital download"

[realityimpaired]

It's also worth pointing out that much faster modems were readily available by the time Linux was officially released for the first time... My cousin was using a 9600bps modem when Linus first released it, and less than a year later I was using a 14,400 external modem.

Re:"As a digital download"

[mikael_j]

Ah, but v.90 was horribly slow. Yes, as far as modems went it was fast but it was still slow. My first DSL connection was a 512/800 kbps connection (yes, g.dmt with upstream uncapped), that's almost ten times the speed of a modem connection (not to mention that it had a lot less latency) and even at the time a regular ethernet network would be capable of at least 10 Mbps which in turn is 20 times the speed of the DSL connection.

So yes, 56k was slow (especially after 1996-1997 or so when a lot of content started showing up online that required a faster connection to really be usable).

Re:"As a digital download"

[mikael_j]

And yes, I know v.90 didn't show up until 1999 or whatever but 56k first showed up but there were 56k modems before that...

Re:"As a digital download"

[TheRaven64]

56k felt a lot slower than 2.4k, because back when I had a 2.4kbps modem, most of my Internet access was text. I used telnet and I used Mosaic and Netscape 1.0, which both defaulted to not downloading images unless I asked them to. By the time 56K was state of the art, large images (animated GIFs! Noooo!), and even audio and video (RealAudio... buffering...) were common on pages. I could load my default search page (Yahoo!) with my 2.4 modem when I used it a lot faster than I could down I could load my default search page (AltaVista) with my 56K one. This was one of the main reasons I switched to Google: their search page loaded almost instantly, while AltaVista took 10-20 seconds to load.

The 512Kb/s cable connection I got (and shared with three others) in my second year at university was the first Internet connection I had that felt fast. Until that point, content had been growing a lot faster than available bandwidth. Now I've got 10Mb/s, and it still feels fast enough - I'm not saying it's alway going to be fast enough, but my ISP has been increasing the speed of their cheapest connection faster than my bandwidth requirements have been growing now for a couple of years.

Re:"As a digital download"

[ubrgeek]

Anyone else remember, "Please do not run Minicom as root"?

Re:"As a digital download"

[Charcharodon]

My first modem was this 900 baud monstrosity that a friend gave to me(he "upgraded" to a 2400!). It was slightly faster than having someone just read the code off to you over the phone and type it in yourself.

We didn't have that inter-whats-it thingy back then. Just modems and some really high long distance phone bills if you wanted anything that was located out of town.

Re:"As a digital download"

[Charcharodon]

The only reason your connection is outstriping your requirements is that the servers are still throttling individual connections to content.

I can barely take advantage of my 25/25Mbtps FIOS line with a single website, but I can make it breath a little harder by doing 5-10 at once. Until I can get 3-5MBps transfer rates consistently from most websites I doubt I ever will push it to it's limits.

Re:"As a digital download"

[TheRaven64]

The only reason your connection is outstriping your requirements is that the servers are still throttling individual connections to content.

Pages load instantly, videos download faster than I can play them. I used to have a 1Gb/s connection at university, and the difference was noticeable for large downloads (the network was faster than my disk, so clicking on a link to a DVD image caused the machine to fill up all of its free RAM in a couple of seconds and then thrash heavily until the download was complete), but for normal use there was very little subjective difference between that and my 10Mb/s link at home. Being able to download file as fast as my laptop drive could write was occasionally useful, but most of the time it was unnecessary. If I downloaded a lot of multi-GB games, I'd probably feel differently.

I can barely take advantage of my 25/25Mbtps FIOS line with a single website, but I can make it breath a little harder by doing 5-10 at once.

Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to read 5-10 web pages at once, so that's not really an advantage.

Re:"As a digital download"

[Charcharodon]

:) No I'm talking about downloading 5-10 things at once. Not looking at webpages. Webpages still take a noticebable amount of time to load which is entirely dependent on the servers. So I'll open 10-15 of those and go back to them once they've all loaded.

A typical heavy load for me. (all at the same time) Running software updates, watching a movie (streaming), downloading another movie/game/etc, uploading a ripped dvd to a friend while talking to said friend on skype/video and poking around on the web. I might use 1/2 of my FIOS connection.

I'd love a 1Gbps internet connection. Doing transfers around the house over the 1Gbps lan is nice. On older spin drives it is faster than they can go, so it does feel like you are working with files on your machine.

;) Not faster than my harddrive I just swapped in a pair of Raided OCZ Vertex 3's which pretty much saturate the 6Gbps Sata 3.

Re:"As a digital download"

[marcovje]

I asked Dilbert's Topper, and he said he had to download my 4.3BSD distribution by training a parrot to whistle at 75baud.

Re:"As a digital download"

[pubwvj]

"Don't mean to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an Internet connection worse than Afghanistan."

A closer example would be a third world country like Vermont where very few people have fast internet connections. In fact, many people don't have internet connections or cellphone. Apple's policy is going to hurt rural Americans badly. The best we'll do on a "fast Vermont" connection is about five to ten hours of download time. Hopefully there will be no interruptions. Since we don't have Apple's TimeCapsule that means doing that ten hour download for every Mac in the place. Will we upgrade? No. Lost sales for Apple. They should be offering a DVD version and simply charge the extra $10 or $20 for the DVDs.

Apple is not a green company. They are in the business of making old hardware and software obsolete so that people are forced to upgrade. This creates e-waste and pollution. Bad.

Re:"As a digital download"

[farnsworth]

Yes I don't understand it either.

"Digital" has come to mean "lacking media". For example, some of the movies you can buy on dvd or blu ray come with a "digital copy", which is a (usually) DRMed file that is playable on a computer or tablet. Of course the "dvd" part of the disk is also digital. But outside of some niches, 100% of all entertainment/art people consume is digital. Using the word "digital" to characterize something as a stream of 1s and 0s is now a meaningless distinction.

For people who have a technical understanding of what a dvd or cd is compared to a netflix stream or mp3, using the word "digital" in this way is indeed a bit strange. But what would you suggest as the word to describe "lacking media"? "media-less" doesn't work because the music and movies are generally casually referred to as "media" (let's go to my media room and watch a movie). "disk-less" is awkward to say.

After seeing "digital" used in this way a couple times, I was able to get over it just fine.

Re:"As a digital download"

[@madeus]

I'll be very surprised if you can't share a single download of it over standard file sharing.

I'll actually be surprised if they don't sell DVD's too - even if not at first. When Snow Leopard came out (at $25 if I recall, was the same price point as previous "Upgrade Only" CDs and they said you *had* to have a copy of Leopard) they said very clearly it was "Upgrade Only". As with Windows CD's Mac OS "Upgrade Only" media had never previously been able to do Fresh Installs (that is, except via hackery).

It transpired how ever it did do fresh installs like every other ~$80 full Mac OS retail media before it, and the only "requirement" for Leopard was actually a note on the box, which just said so (making it, in practice, a purely academic licensing stipulation which it didn't make any attempt whatsoever to enforce).

I suspect they are not actually being straight about it this time round either, not least as it's in their own interest from a support PoV (as all over the world people in remote locations are going to have the same problem for one reason or another). I'm sure it will boost store usage though.

Re:"As a digital download"

[@madeus]

And another bird to listen in and etch the response into a stone disc with its beak?

Re:"As a digital download"

[Random Data]

Cocklebiddy, whose sole claim to fame is that it has a Wikipedia entry.

Hey, I saw that and thought of the caves immediately. There was a doco on ABC years ago about those, so the wikipedia article is not the "sole" claim to fame.

Re:"As a digital download"

[smash]

First online service i used was over 1200/75 turbo modem. (75 up, 1200 down). Do i get a prize?

Re:"As a digital download"

[Anonymous Coward]

Cocklebiddy, whose sole claim to fame is that it has a Wikipedia entry.

Well, the caves are fairly well known ...

Re:"As a digital download"

[Drinking Bleach]

I think the other word in the term describes it well enough: "Download"

Re:"As a digital download"

[bill_mcgonigle]

A closer example would be a third world country like Vermont where very few people have fast internet connections.

Apple doesn't want you as a customer. The PC and Mac are obsolete, they're moving their customers into the cloud, or so the Steve said. If you don't have fast Internet you're going to bitterly cling on to your personal computers.

As soon as Lion hits the streets I need to shut off my wife's Mac Mini's Internet access - no Snow Leopard or Lion for it, so no security updates. She just got an Acer laptop last week with Fedora and KDE set up to resemble OSX a bit and she's having no trouble adapting (and she's not Slashdot material).

Is XCode included in the download?

[the_humeister]

Hopefully it is.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Y-Crate]

Hopefully it is.

They'll probably still charge you $4.99 for Xcode. Not terrible, but not great. Finding out gcc4 was not included in the paid version of Xcode... now that was terrible.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in the download. Server tools and Xcode are separate downloads but WWDC videos say that Xcode will be free for everyone who buys Lion, just like FaceTime.
Probably SOX laws again.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably SOX laws again.

Yeah, we all know Enron happened only because Xcode was bundled with the OS. Good that they finally protect us from those things.

Signed,
The MBA

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[countertrolling]

They'll probably still charge you $4.99 for Xcode.

Heh, sounds like it will soon suffer the same fate as Hypercard

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay attention! Xcode 4.x is free from the Mac App Store if you are running Lion. They said this 2 weeks ago.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[BasilBrush]

$4.99 is great for a professional IDE. Yes, it used to be even better when it was free. But $4.99 is nothing for what you get.

You should find gcc 4.2.1 in /Developer/usr/bin.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[BasilBrush]

What? Providing the inspiration for the WWW, and then being made obsolete by it?

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

For now. To quote their slides from the WWDC, 'gcc is going away.' And I'm sure both people still using gcc on OS X will be devastated.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[beelsebob]

gcc is not included in any version of Xcode any more. It's not supported by apple. If you want a compiler on an apple platform, supported by apple clang is the way to go.

That all said – I'm pretty surprised that no one has bundled up clang/gcc for free yet.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[RedBear]

XCode is a 4GB download all by itself and is only used by a tiny fraction of Mac users. Why on Earth would Apple want to add that to the already 4GB Lion download? That would be a ludicrous waste of bandwidth, time, and disk space.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[BasilBrush]

It's going away, as in: it's no longer the default compiler. And I can't see them ever upgrading the version of gcc from the current one. But I can't see any reason why they'd remove gcc from the distribution of XCode in the foreseeable future. It does no harm to have the binaries sitting there. And some people will have custom build scripts that still use it for some arcane reason.

As you say most people couldn't give a damn about gcc on OSX. LLVM is a far superior compiler.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[BrokenHalo]

Finding out gcc4 was not included in the paid version of Xcode... now that was terrible.

If you know how to use it, then what's stopping you from downloading gcc4 from gnu.org and compiling it yourself?

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

Xcode 4.something is going free once Lion is released.
gcc is still included in Xcode, iirc, it will be gone in 4.2 or 4.3 (this was explained during WWDC). The gcc less xcode is going to be released around hte same time as iOS 5. "i686-apple-darwin10-gcc-4.2.1" is installed with 4.0.1
Xcode right now, iirc, defaults to LLVM, but if you want you can change it to GCC or LLVM/GCC

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[AresTheImpaler]

hat all said â" I'm pretty surprised that no one has bundled up clang/gcc for free yet.

Apple does :). You can use llvm/gcc (backend/frontend) if you want. The newer Xcode versions default to LLVM but you can choose llvm/gcc and even gcc..

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[node 3]

Hopefully it is.

They'll probably still charge you $4.99 for Xcode. Not terrible, but not great. Finding out gcc4 was not included in the paid version of Xcode... now that was terrible.

Apple is moving away from GCC and to Clang and LLVM. This is due partially to the GPLv3 (and the patent issues involved, and this is why Apple will never use the current version of GCC), and partly due to LLVM+Clang being quite an improvement over GCC (although it's presently a mixed bag, looking forward this is a good way to go).

As for the pricing of Xcode 4, it will be kind of disappointing if a license isn't included with Lion. $4.99 is a steal though, so it's difficult to complain too much, but one of the nice aspects of Mac OS X has always been the bundled developer tools.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[node 3]

They'll probably still charge you $4.99 for Xcode.

Heh, sounds like it will soon suffer the same fate as Hypercard

That actually, quite impressively, fails to make sense on so many levels. But the most direct is that Apple can never stop shipping Xcode while there isn't something to replace it, and there's nothing out, coming out, or even whispered about, to replace it.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TyFoN]

What the hell do they put into that package to make it 4 GB? Isn't XCode just an IDE and a compiler bundled together?

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

LLVM still produces slower code than gcc in almost all benchmarks. If they'd license Intel's compiler, now that would be another thing...

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[makomk]

Don't think the official gcc releases can compile code for Macs very reliably; Apple didn't contribute their changes upstream.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[RedBear]

What the hell do they put into that package to make it 4 GB? Isn't XCode just an IDE and a compiler bundled together?

There are tons of libraries and frameworks for the current version of OS X as well as for past versions of OS X (for cross-compiling projects) and now for different versions of iOS, since the iOS SDK is included. There are also sample projects and an interface builder and debuggers and probably lots of other neat things that I'm not even aware of.

What you install to your hard drive may not end up being that big since there is a lot of optional stuff included in the main XCode download. So no, it's not just an IDE and a compiler. And it would be quite silly of Apple to include something so huge and unnecessary with every download of Lion. Anyone who wants it can just download it separately.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

$4.99 is great for a professional IDE

It sure is! But I wouldn't give that much for Xcode. I wouldn't use Xcode if it was free.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[F.Ultra]

How do you define "far superior"? According to most benchmarks, LLVM still has some miles to go before it produces binaries that are faster than gcc (it does produce a few special cases where LLVM is faster though so it does show promise for the future). For example check out: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gcc_46_llvm29&num=1

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[BasilBrush]

Thanks for the benchmarks. That's interesting, and does indeed show that for some purposes where raw speed is vital, a final compile using GCC would be beneficial.

My view of LLVM/Clang being far superior is down to developer productivity. LLVM/Clang does fantastic static analysis of code, finding many more coding errors than GCC can. And it does this whilst still providing faster compilation times than GCC.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[A12m0v]

Isn't Apple moving away from gcc to clang?

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[tepples]

If you want a compiler on an apple platform, supported by apple clang is the way to go.

But does clang support the same command-line options as GCC, so that I can ln -s clang gcc and have ./configure; make still work?

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Nerdfest]

That's where they put the 'magic'.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[beelsebob]

Yes, clang was very specifically designed to be command line compatible with gcc. Of course, you'll likely hit one or two tiny little issues, but nothing that can't be figured out in half an hour.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

$ du -c -h -s *
312K About Xcode.app
234M Applications
2.3G Documentation
  62M Examples
  29M Extras
1.8M Headers
4.0K Icon
159M Library
1.1M Makefiles
151M Platforms
468M SDKs
244K Tools
509M usr
3.9G total

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Bengie]

I'm not concerned about size. It says Lion will *only* be for digital downloads. Say your HD died and you replaced it and you don't have a working OS X disc, how do you access the internet to download this?

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[BrokenHalo]

Really? I haven't had bad results using macports, which on this old MacBook has gcc at version 4.4.6. The Intel Core 2 Duo CPU is the same chip that lots of us have used in Linux, BSD and Windows boxes.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[ColdWetDog]

I'm not concerned about size. It says Lion will *only* be for digital downloads. Say your HD died and you replaced it and you don't have a working OS X disc, how do you access the internet to download this?

Hopefully, you've taken the concept of 'backup' to heart. It turns out to be relatively simple to create a more traditional installation environment for 10.7.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[dwightk]

I'm not concerned about size. It says Lion will *only* be for digital downloads. Say your HD died and you replaced it and you don't have a working OS X disc, how do you access the internet to download this?

what is this "it" you refer to?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/how-to-buy/

talks about how to "get your hands on Lion the minute it’s available."

They will most likely have disks available later. They will most likely let you burn a disk image (or make a usbkey) for first aid. Speculating that they won't is the same as speculating they will without further evidence.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Shin-LaC]

What are you talking about? gcc4 comes with Xcode (both the free Xcode 3 and the cheap Xcode 4).

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Shin-LaC]

Apple contributed a lot of changes upstream, but they were not merged. At some point, they stopped and decided to focus on LLVM instead.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[laffer1]

Yeah, too bad the GNU decided to change the license on GCC so many of us can't use it anymore.

Long live compilers with decent licensing.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

Apple is unable to ship the version of GCC benchmarked there, because of GPLv3. LLVM produces much better code than GCC 4.2.1, which is the last GPLv2 version, and the version that Apple ships.

Also, be aware that none of those benchmarks were for Objective-C, which is the language that Apple cares the most about. In terms of features, GCC now lags there. It doesn't support automatic reference counting, for example, and this gives a nice performance boost when coupled with the optimisations in LLVM (fewer autoreleased objects, faster reference count modifications, complete elision of some operations where it can prove that retains and releases are not needed).

Clang is also pretty modular. If you use XCode, the IDE is doing syntax highlighting using the same front end that it uses for compiling with clang. It's displaying error messages as you type via the same mechanism. The integrated static analysis and ARC migration tools are also implemented as Clang libraries and just called from XCode.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[wwphx]

That is my hope, that it will be available in physical form. I want a copy of that disk in my hand, plus I want the family pack as we have three laptops right now. I maintain very good backups, but I still want that disk.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[larry bagina]

Starting with OS X, Apple has been willing to throw away the past and replace it with something which may currently be a step back but has better internals and will be better in the future -- OS X, QuickTime X, Xcode 4, FCP X, clang, etc. (About time they do that with iTunes...).

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Trillan]

Mentioned in the WWDC Keynote: You can install a single copy on all your authorized Macs. I think that's 5.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[aztracker1]

with 2.3GB of documentation, assuming that is accurate, a compressed download version should be roughly half the size, since text files, or mostly text compresses fairly well.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

Some more detail:

234M Applications

This includes XCode, which now also includes Interface Builder, as well as things like Instruments (graphical DTrace front end), Quartz Composer (visualisation tool), and a load of profiling and debugging applications.

2.3G Documentation

To be honest, this is a waste of space. I've almost never used the XCode documentation, because it's more convenient to read it online. This includes both HTML and PDF versions of the docs for some reason. I'd be quite happy to see this removed from the standard download, and a separate documentation download made available for the few people who care.

62M Examples

This has been trimmed a bit in recent releases. A lot of the examples are now only available for download. Again, I wouldn't object to this being a separate download.

29M Extras

This contains some random things, such as a Processors preference pain that lets you selectively enable and disable processor cores (can be useful for debugging or profiling).

1.8M Headers

This is legacy Carbon stuff.

159M Library

This contains things like the core (private) frameworks that XCode uses. Lots of bits of XCode are structured as plugins, and they all live here.

1.1M Makefiles

More legacy stuff.

151M Platforms

This is only about 15MB for me, and contains the basic project templates. This is where it gets interesting. XCode is able to target various different versions of OS X and iOS. I have SDKs for 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 installed. These contain complete sets of system headers for each platform. Mine is actually 667MB, and with some iOS SDKs installed it would probably be even bigger. If you select a 10.5 deployment target, this prevents you from accidentally using any features that are not present in 10.5, and ensures that someone actually using 10.5 will be able to build your project.

509M usr

This includes all of the stuff that would be in /usr on other *NIX systems. You'll find a complete GNU toolchain, LLVM/clang, LLVM-GCC and GCC compilers, and a load of other stuff in here.

XCode is just an IDE, but the XCode download includes everything that you need to develop on OS X, including all of the command-line tools.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[KiloByte]

partly due to LLVM+Clang being quite an improvement over GCC

Strange, then why I'm getting way over twice as long execution times on clang as on gcc? Both on amd64 and armel.

Not tested on Macs, but I doubt code that does little I/O would be markedly different between platforms.
For example:
git clone git://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl.git
(compile, both with flto and -O9)
time ./crawl -rc test/stress/woken_rest -sprint -sprint-map dungeon_sprint_1
gcc: 12.609s
clang: 28.570s

Having an abysmal support for C++ standards and terrible diagnostics doesn't sway things towards clang as well.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[silly_sysiphus]

Er, how exactly are you arguing that Quicktime X is better than Quicktime 7 Pro? Sure, some newer video types are supported, but it went from being a useful editor to being a dumbed-down player. Yuck.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[willy_me]

You are assuming that the documents are not stored in a compressed format. Due to disk access speed, they should be quicker to access if compressed - unless possibly if you are using an SSD.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, in older versions of XCode you could download/update the documentation separately via an update panel in Preferences. You could also only download the documentation you needed: if you didn't care about Java bindings or WebObjects, you didn't have to download them. That's the way it should have stayed. Further, this updating 4G of XCode via AppStore every time a new point release comes out is just plain stupid. God knows the ISPs must hate Apple for that.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol a great professional IDE stuck in a boxed ecosystem, why dont you whip me up a little windows chat client there Johnson

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Xcode" is a full on development stack with about 20 GUI apps and hundreds of command line apps, and who knows how many SDK's.

It's a 4GB download, but that's compressed. It takes up about 15GB of disk space once installed.

And that doesn't even include documentation, which is now a separate download from within Xcode.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[wwphx]

Thanks! I haven't watched the keynote, I appreciate the info. I bought family packs for previous upgrades.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

-O9 isn't an optimization level on clang hell it's not even an optimization level on GCC. Clang supports up to -O3 and -O4 is adds link time optimization. So I'm betting that you build at -O0. The clang lto requires a linker that understands the llvm ir language ie. the Darwin linker on Mac OS X or the Gold linker with the llvm plug in.

Having an abysmal support for C++ standards and terrible diagnostics doesn't sway things towards clang as well.

Clang is the only compiler that supports C++ standards correctly that Boost requires no work arounds to work on Clang unlike gcc and MSVC. http://blog.llvm.org/2010/05/clang-builds-boost.html

And you must be seriously joking if you think

$ cat test.c
bar *b = 0;
$ gcc -c test.c
test.c:1: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘*’ token
$ clang -c test.c
test.c:1:1: error: unknown type name 'bar'
bar *b = 0;
^
1 error generated.

gcc has better diagnostics than clang.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[ILongForDarkness]

Yep, so I assume they will keep a record of your purchase in the app store like Amazon does with Kindle books. If you loose the OS you'll be able to download it again. That said not sure if you have a completely new HDD how easy that will be. You'll probably have to connect the disk to a working computer, copy the files over and then put it in the Mac and boot to install. Or of course there might be a thumb drive boot option so you'd just put the new disk in, get a copy on a thumbdrive and boot/install from there.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Bazar]

For it to read an uncompressed file, it simply needs to seek it on disk and read.
For it to read a compressed file, it needs to seek the compressed file, open the libaries needed to deal with the compression logarithm if not cashed, read to the index of the archive, read headers to find the desired file, seek to that location, read, decompress.

For any small document, the number of seek operations on a standard HD is goign to be the limiting factor far more then the bandwidth of a hard-drive. And compression has probably doubled that limiting factor.

Most Hard-drives can match SSD in bandwidth, its just that the biggest advantage of a SSD is that there really isn't a seek time, so finding then accessing the file is near instant in comparasion.

About the only way compression improves performance is when the actual bandwidth is botlenecked, but thats really not the case with documents, its just the seek delay accessing the file.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[larry bagina]

Quicktime X is something which may currently be a step back but has better internals and will be better in the future .

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

Xcode is the greatest thing apple has.
I really enjoy it.
Were it not for that I would stay with Linux.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[kevinmenzel]

If only they could use some of the massive amounts of investment they get to develop the replacement products in the background while they get them up to speed, instead of pushing them on users when they are actually worse.

Oh no wait, that kind of "Don't force change on users until you're damn sure it's ready" mentality is essentially why people are avoiding RIM like the plague these days. So obviously it's absolutely an irrational business decision to make. Yes, of course, much better to see how much crap you can push on to consumers with your branding magic.

Gosh sometimes I hate capitalsim.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Just Some Guy]

Apple is unable to ship the version of GCC benchmarked there

I think you misspelled "unwilling". I know they don't like the GPLv3, but what specifically about it would prevent Apple from shipping newer versions of GCC?

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Unlimited Macs on the Mac App Store. The limit of 5 is for iTunes music and video.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

The patent clause means that Apple would be implicitly licensing some unknown subset of their patents. Given the patent feeding frenzy that they're embroiled in, they'd be crazy to give up any that their competitors might be infringing. This is the same reason that several of the FreeBSD package mirrors refuse to carry builds of GPLv3 packages: they don't want to distribute someone else's code and find that they've just given the world a license to a load of their patents.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[smash]

Because gcc is shit and clang is far superior

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[smash]

Actually, apple gave up contributing because the gcc devs didnt care for implementing obj-c related stuff.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[grouchomarxist]

Good point. It's mostly documentation, most of which I don't use because I end of using Google. Apple should make the documentation optional.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[dwightk]

or you will install snow leopard from disk and then update to lion

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[pandrijeczko]

Apple is unable to ship the version of GCC benchmarked there, because of GPLv3. LLVM produces much better code than GCC 4.2.1, which is the last GPLv2 version, and the version that Apple ships.

Please explain what you mean by "better code".

And if you mean "better optimised code", why is that particularly important on a high power device like a Mac? I can understand it on an embedded device where raw CPU power and storage space are important.

GCC has been the benchmark for compiling Open Source code for years with regular updates and releases - to simply wave your hand and dismiss it so readily requires better explanation.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[pandrijeczko]

I fail to understand why you see this as an advantage.

There are huge amounts of Open Source applications out there that have code that compiles perfectly well on GCC on a multitude of platforms. Are you that confident that the same code is going to compile as well or as easily on another compiler?

It strikes me that potentially being locked out of all that free software out there is a huge disadvantage.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

Better optimised is one metric. This is very important for iOS. Apple has spent a lot of effort improving the LLVM back end for ARM, and it generally does quite a bit better than GCC. It doesn't make sense or Apple to use different compilers for iOS and OS X.

Better diagnostics are another metric. Compare the output from GCC and Clang if you do something wrong. After using clang for a bit, going back to gcc is painful.

Better modularity is another. LLVM and Clang are sets of libraries with a thin wrapper around them. This means that it's trivial to reuse parts of them. For example, Apple uses the same LLVM optimisation and back end code in the CPU fallback implementation for their GLSL and OpenCL implementations that they use in their compiler. The lack of modularity in GCC makes this very hard. Apple also uses the same parser that clang uses for syntax highlighting in XCode (I also use it in a couple of projects - my last book's code samples were all highlighted by clang, for example), meaning that if something is coloured like a macro instantiation in XCode, it will be seen as a macro instantiation by clang. The GPL makes it impossible to do this with GCC unless you are willing to GPL your entire IDE.

GCC has been the benchmark for compiling Open Source code for years

GCC has been the only open source compiler for a long time. That has been its only advantage. It's been consistently worse than other compilers. In terms of code generation, it's much worse than Open64, for example, for years. GCC was designed to promote Free Software, not to be a good compiler. It lacks a consistent intermediate representation, making writing front ends for it a pain. The code is littered with layering violations and is horrible to hack on.

A few years ago, I looked at adding Objective-C 2 support for the GNU runtime to GCC. After a few days of looking at the code and being confused, I decided to take a look at clang and see if it was any easier. It took me about two weeks to add code generation for Objective-C to clang (clang actually supported the GNU Objective-C runtimes before the Apple ones). Now, clang supports the same Objective-C features with the GNUstep runtime as it supports on OS X 10.7. GCC still doesn't fully support the things introduced with 10.5...

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

It strikes me that being locked into GCC is a huge disadvantage. Clang is a drop in replacement for GCC 4.2.1, except for a few corner cases (doesn't allow casting of super in Objective-C, actually follows the standard for template instantiation in C++, doesn't support __builtin_apply() and friends in C). In every open source C application that I've tried to compile, just setting CC=clang has been fine. Well, some need -Werror removing, because clang spots a lot of things that gcc lets through.

If your code is so tied to GCC that it won't compile with clang, then your code probably sucks. If it's standard [Objective-]C[++], then clang will compile it fine (modulo some bugs in C++ support). If it's using GNU extensions (except __builtin_apply(), which doesn't work correctly in GCC half the time either) that were present in 4.2.1, it will compile fine. If it's using some newer extensions, then it may compile.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from installing GCC on OS X yourself. It's just that Apple hasn't worked on their branch for a while. If you use Objective-C, then even Apple's branch lacks new features like ARC, weak class references, and instance variables declared in class extensions and implementation contexts. The FSF's branch doesn't even support the non-fragile ABI.

OS X isn't the only operating system that will be dropping GCC by the way. FreeBSD 9 is including clang as the system compiler and shipping GCC 4.2.1 as fallback, FreeBSD 10 is dropping GCC entirely.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

$5 is what I have to pay my ISP for uploading 5GB... So if I got it off bittorrent It'd cost me the same. Seems cheap enough to me...

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Trillan]

Yes. Apple already lets you download files a second time from the App Store. I've done this many, many times.

As for starting over with a clean drive, I imagine you'd have to boot off your existing Snow Leopard DVD. Maybe you'd be able to restore straight from Time Machine, or maybe you'd have to install Snow Leopard and upgrade again. Or, sure, have an existing USB thumb drive. I'm sure they'll be a way.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Ramin_HAL9001]

$4.99 is great for a professional IDE. Yes, it used to be even better when it was free. But $4.99 is nothing for what you get.
You should find gcc 4.2.1 in /Developer/usr/bin.

Yet Emacs is free and is the best IDE there is. Fortunately, Mac OS X also comes with Emacs pre-installed (last I checked), even before you install XCode. OS X also has Python and Perl pre-installed, so with those and Emacs you have all the software development technology you need (unless you want to do low-level stuff with C/C++), and it is available without installing XCode, all in the "Home Basic" version of OS X.

Of course, this is all true of Linux as well, and nearly every Linux distro out there also includes GCC in their installation media, so you can install it without a separate download. So the real issue is, will you use an open source OS or not?

"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

They all used to be in the applications and utilities folder. What could possibly be simpler than that? And now it forces users to open an online account with Apple. That's not very nice.. There's no mention in the article, does it come down as a burnable iso? And how screwed are the people who just don't happen to have fast internet?

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anubis IV]

It doesn't come as a burnable ISO, but people that lack fast Internet aren't necessarily screwed, since Apple is allowing anyone to use the Wi-Fi in their retail stores to download the OS. Presumably, they'd have it cached on-site in their stores so that it wouldn't take long at all.

And most Mac users already created an account with Apple anyway. Their online store, iTunes Store, iOS App Store, Mac App Store, etc. have all had linked IDs for years now, so if someone ever purchased anything from any of those, they already have the required ID.

As for applications, they're still in those folders, but they're adding something akin to the way iOS organizes apps. Basically, it's a first step towards hiding the file system, and it's essentially a layer that can appear on the screen with all of your apps. With the new way of doing cloud syncing with automatic saving and versioning that Lion adds, people will have less and less need to manage the files themselves, and will instead merely interact with the apps, which manage the files for the user. This new launcher is a way of helping to change that focus, from what I can tell.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Cinder6]

From what I've been able to gather from reading on forums:

Yes, you can burn it to a disc, or put it on a flash drive, or whatever you want. It also makes a restore partition on your drive by default (apparently some 650MB, but I'm not sure on that--seems like it would have to be bigger) from which you can reinstall OS X (or boot into Safari-only mode). Wish it wasn't mandatory, but I could see it being useful--and you can go and delete it if you want to.

And you can apparently go to an Apple Store for a super-fast download--but that's obviously not going to be an option for a lot of people, and if you're in an area where you can't get fast internet, you're probably nowhere near an Apple Store in the first place.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Tubal-Cain]

They all used to be in the applications and utilities folder.

It's the ones that you don't have that need to be easier to find.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[R3d M3rcury]

They all used to be in the applications and utilities folder. What could possibly be simpler than that?

Go to the the "Spotlight" menu and type the first few letters of the application name.

That said, I'm not convinced that LaunchPad is going to be all that useful when you have a few dozen applications installed--kind of like how the iPhone tends to get messy when you have a few dozen applications installed.

But don't worry--you can still go to the Applications and Utilities folders.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[SilentChasm]

And how screwed are the people who just don't happen to have fast internet?

Have you seen how large OS and Application updates are now? Pretty much everything seems to require a fast connection. Even slashdot has bloated (58,633 B for an article with 898,406 B of inline elements, adding up to almost 1MB for a single page). It seems that slow connections are no longer really considered that much when people design stuff. Even slow DSL (although still "broadband") is now causing problems with not being fast enough sometimes.

Therefore I would say the people who just don't happen to have fast internet are screwed.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

Presumably, they'd have it cached on-site in their stores so that it wouldn't take long at all.

Only long enough for the wife to cruise the mall and break the bank buying more shoes than Imelda Marcos

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Jeremi]

They all used to be in the applications and utilities folder. What could possibly be simpler than that?

Well, since you asked... what's easier is a "home page" that automatically appears, and automatically contains the icons of all your apps -- similar to how it works on the iPhone/iPad.

I agree it's a bit silly, but if it keeps me from having to tell my grandmother over the phone to "double click on the hard drive icon in the corner of the screen", and then spend the next 10 minutes explaining what a hard drive is, what the icon looks like (who outside of computer geeks knows that internal hard drives look like little silver boxes with a bar code?), and how to double-click on it, then I'm okay with that.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[hairyfeet]

That is why Apple is allowing you to download on their connection at the Apple store and why we Windows guys have WSUS Offline that lets you have EVERY version of Windows from XP 32bit to Windows 7 64 bit plus all the office versions from XP on up, all either burned to DVD or on a flash stick so all it takes is a single friend/relative with a decent connection. I have been using it for awhile now so I even have the complete Win2K in case I run into one of those that needs the final updates.

So it isn't like anybody is screwed here if they don't have fast net. If you have an Apple laptop I'm sure you know where the Apple store is so that is taken care of and WSUS Offline is "clicky clicky" simple so Windows is covered too. I don't know about Linux but I assume they have something similar as well.

But lets face it if you are still on dialup I don't think you really need to worry about updates as I don't you'll be downloading any big malware packages for either OS before you time out anyway. Hell does Apple laptops even come with modems anymore?

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[ActionDesignStudios]

There is a DMG within the download that you can restore to a DVD or flash drive and it works fine, yes. The recovery partition boots a minimal version of OS X in which you can restore Lion but you have to log in to your Apple account and download it which makes the recovery partition a lot less useful.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anonymous Coward]

So it isn't like anybody is screwed here if they don't have fast net. If you have an Apple laptop I'm sure you know where the Apple store is ...

I don't know about you, but the closest one to me is about 1500km away. Combine that with an 8GB/mo broadband cap (+$8/GB thereafter) and I'm left highly unimpressed by the download-only distribution.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[beelsebob]

They're still all there. What the AppStore makes easier is putting more things in there.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Chas]

You're just "not the market they're interested in selling into".

Ain't that fuckin' sweet?

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have an Apple laptop I'm sure you know where the Apple store is so that is taken care of and WSUS Offline is "clicky clicky" simple so Windows is covered too. I don't know about Linux but I assume they have something similar as well.

And if you have an iMac you should... what, get a bigger backpack?

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[BrokenHalo]

I agree it's a bit silly, but if it keeps me from having to tell my grandmother over the phone to "double click on the hard drive icon...

You're right, it's very silly indeed when all you have to do is simply put shortcut links to her apps on her desktop.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[boristhespider]

Or a flash drive.

1: Go to Apple store.
2: Use one of their computers to download the Lion update.
3: Copy onto a flash drive.
4: Go home.
5: Update computer.

Of course, this is no help if, like the guy commenting above, your nearest Apple store is 1,500km away. There *aren't* even any Apple stores in my country. But Lion is beginning to make me think that when Snow Leopard gets too old and tired to continue I'll be swapping back to Arch, so that's no trouble for me anyway.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[magusxxx]

That's kind of sexist. How do you know the wife isn't the tech of the family? ;)

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[node 3]

Wow, you managed to fail to make sense on many levels again! This isn't reddit, you don't have to live up to your novelty username.

They all used to be in the applications and utilities folder.

Apps that aren't on your computer used to be in those folders?

What could possibly be simpler than that?

Not much, really. But since that's not how it's ever been, the Mac App Store is quite a bit easier than the way things actually were before. Before, you had to go to the store and browse the shelves, or order discs online, or buy online from various different digital storefronts.

And now it forces users to open an online account with Apple. That's not very nice..

Better to have just one sign-in, than to have to manage many. And it's quite nice to have it be one that hundreds of millions of people already have. I suppose there is a minority of customers for whom this isn't "very nice", but they'll manage.

There's no mention in the article, does it come down as a burnable iso? And how screwed are the people who just don't happen to have fast internet?

Yes, it comes as a burnable, well, not ISO, but DMG. And most people in the target audience have at least reasonably decent internet connections (or access to such a connection) such that a couple gigs isn't some horrible torment. This is at least a reasonable point, there will be a very small percentage of people who want Lion, but don't have sufficient internet access to readily purchase it. Lion doesn't run on 64-bit systems either. Apple apparently isn't too afraid of leaving people behind if it moves the current state of the art forward.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[node 3]

An unfunny joke isn't a proper rebuttal. Somehow I think there are plenty of people who manage to go to an Apple Store without their wives breaking the bank on shoes.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Jane Q. Public]

Restore partitions are garbage. They promote overconfidence and make people neglect to back things up. Then, when they restore, presto! Not just their data but all their applications are gone, except for the apps on the original install disk.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[boaworm]

Lion doesn't run on 64-bit systems either.

I assume this is a typo? :-)

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or tell her to click File, New Window, or tell her to press cmd-N (with Grandma-level instructions), or tell her to use the magnifying glass in the top right and type "applications"...

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[CajunArson]

1500Km from an Apple store? You just used metric there! That means your not in the U.S. and according to the standard Slashdot groupthink, the second you leave the U.S. every single person in the whole world has a 20 gigabit Internet connection with no data caps that you can pay for with spare change you found in your couch. Therefore, this shouldn't be a problem for you at all, since Slashdot groupthink defines reality.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Haeleth]

people that lack fast Internet aren't necessarily screwed, since Apple is allowing anyone to use the Wi-Fi in their retail stores to download the OS.

Oh, that's OK then. It's not like most of the people who lack fast internet lack it because they live a long way from the big cities where Apple stores tend to be located, or anything. I'm sure they'll be very happy to pay 500 times the cost of mailing a DVD in gas just to get their OS upgrade.

Customer service. Reinvented.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[tepples]

That is why Apple is allowing you to download on their connection at the Apple store

Provided there's one within reasonable driving distance.

But lets face it if you are still on dialup I don't think you really need to worry about updates as I don't you'll be downloading any big malware packages for either OS before you time out anyway. Hell does Apple laptops even come with modems anymore?

Satellite and cellular Internet still have caps from 5 to 8 GB per month.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Midnight Thunder]

I am curious to know whether Apple has explicitly said they won't be providing DVDs. There must be a solution for people wanting to go from Leopard straight to Lion?

I suspect there may be a DVD to buy, but it will be somewhat more than $29.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

How do you know the wife isn't the tech of the family?

We aim to please...

Even Rosie the Riveter isn't without options

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Launchpad is an obvious attempt to capitalize off of iOS popularity. The fact Apple isn't making it the 'only' way to get your apps shows it's pretty experimental. With that, it looks cool, but isn't very functional, given most of us have been using the dock for 10 years, and most of us know how to make aliases on the desktop, and most of us know how to type the first few letters into spotlight.

The Launchpad has several egregious design errors that will be all over the blogs when it comes out. You can only remove apps from the Launchpad that you bought from the store. Others you have to go find them, delete them in the finder, then when you come back to Launchpad, their icon is there with the missing ?, and only then can you delete that icon. You also can't remove an icon in Launchpad that you don't want there, without deleting the app entirely. Users are going to have a "page 3" or "junk" folder of icons they'll never use, but can't hide. If Apple doesn't fix this for the launch, they better be prepared Final Cut X times 10.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[stewbacca]

It's 3.7GB. Sucks not to have at least DSL in the second decade of the 21st century I guess. Even then, I'm pretty sure the majority of western civilization is within driving distance of public wi-fi.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[stewbacca]

Yeah, I hear Apple is working on an Alice Springs store to help you out.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[stewbacca]

I agree it's a bit silly, but if it keeps me from having to tell my grandmother over the phone to "double click on the hard drive icon...

You're right, it's very silly indeed when all you have to do is simply put shortcut links to her apps on her desktop.

Um, that's kind of what Launchpad is, except for that whole annoying help your granny create aliases to her desktop because, a) she doesn't know what an alias is, b) she doesn't know what a desktop is, c) she doesn't know where the original apps are to make alias from, d) she doesn't know how to right click and pick "create alias" and instead deletes/duplicates/drops the alias in another directory without paying attention...

Even worse, Granny calls you up because you are the Mac guy in the family, to come over and setup her shiny iMac. Within a day she has lost (delted/moved) all the nice aliases you set up for her, to include the persistent icons in the dock and you are back over at granny's house, smelling like cat pee, no time.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

Restore partitions are garbage.

If the drive fails, yes, but they're very convenient for those machines without built in CD-ROM drives.. Usually I can get their docs and apps off the drive when booting from a Linux USB stick (provided it's a big one), then do the restore.. And the beauty of Apple is that most apps can simply be copied back in place, no 'install' required.. puts it miles ahead of the PC

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

target audience

Thank you :)

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Jeremi]

You're right, it's very silly indeed when all you have to do is

You're missing the point... I don't want to "have to do" anything. Ideally, grandma should be able to buy her new Mac, take it home, plug it in, and do what she wants with it, without ever feeling the need to call me for help.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that a boon to people without fast internet? I've never seen Apple in an area lacking fast internet. Clearly there are going to still be people without it in some of those areas, but are you suggesting that they pick up their iMac and drag it down to the Apple store to install a service pack? Screw slow connections. Let's talk bandwidth capped connections.

Also, they will almost certainly have it cached as the next Time Capsule will include support for cached downloads.

Apple is making a huge mistake if they do not allow people to burn the download to a disc. What happens if my computer fails on the road? Time to install Snow Leopard and then download Lion? Brilliant, Apple. Just brilliant. There goes hours of productivity.

Apple: the new Microsoft. So satisfied with itself that it thinks it can do no wrong, so it is about to get easily trounced by Windows 8: the new Mac OS X.

In my house right now, I have one MacBook Pro, one iMac, and one MacBook. I am typing this on one of the three PCs (one does not really count as it's hooked up to the TV), but does Apple seriously expect me to tote the Macs into my local Apple Store, or download Lion three times? And do they seriously expect that installing should be from a base of Snow Leopard (almost completely asserting that the install is in fact a Service Pack) without exception?

If the answer to either of those is true, then guess how many new Mac's are in my future? If it was zero, then you were right.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[slyborg]

It's really more than "a bit silly" it's Apple's move to make the computer a consumer device like the iPod. Apple's vision is that the non-mobile devices become, essentially, static iPhone/iPad with large screens and storage, with Apple getting its 30% cut of every revenue stream that transits the device.

However, I didn't sign up with Apple computers 25 years ago because it was "Computers for Dummies". Windows is the corporate computer, and Linux is and always will be for guys with lots of free time and a burning desire to swear like a sailor any time you need to attach hardware. Where have you gone, Computer for the Rest of Us??

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anonymous Coward]

And now it forces users to open an online account with Apple.

Nobody's forcing you to do anything.

And how screwed are the people who just don't happen to have fast internet?

It isn't 1998 anymore. If you don't have a fast internet connection, find a fast WiFi hotspot or just run the download overnight.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[bonch]

And how screwed are the people who just don't happen to have fast internet?

Just as screwed as the users of Linux package managers that download all their software over the network, I guess. Chances are that if you have a Mac, you have access to fast internet.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Doctor O]

Oh, that's OK then.

No, it's complete bullshit. How do you download from a borked machine? How do you boot and restore from your Time Machine backup? How do you reformat and install from scratch? (Please don't tell me they're starting this "service partition" crap.)

I sure hope they offer real media, even if they do at additional cost. At 30 USD for the OS I'll happily pay ten bucks more for packaging and media...

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

What, you find it unimaginable that I could have rescued one from the dumpster? How 'bout two? One of them is an original iMac with System 9. Mostly used as a display piece, next to my 60 year telephone, which is in perfect working order. The other is the one I'm actually using, an old PPC Mac Mini, so the best it will see is 10.4 anyway..

It's time to face facts, the Mac is becoming a technical trinket for teeny boppers, that's where the big money is.. It will soon be a 27 inch iPad. Even Final Cut is suffering for it. I'm only saddened to see the pro market lose the best computer interface ever up to this point. Such is life

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[BasilBrush]

I am curious to know whether Apple has explicitly said they won't be providing DVDs. There must be a solution for people wanting to go from Leopard straight to Lion?

Unless the price of $29.99 is the cost of upgrade from Snow Leopard, rather than Leopard or anything earlier.

Maybe a DVD would be priced as a new install rather than an upgrade.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

Try to get a handle on the art of figurative speech, please...

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Jane Q. Public]

Yes, that's true. They're not useless. And perhaps Mac users are somewhat more knowledgeable than your average... but that seems to have been changing lately.

I was lead tech in a big-name computer store when Compaq started putting restore partitions on their drives, rather than supplying CDs with the OS & software. And the original implementation was very poor... there were lots of failures. But even when the idea of restore partitions caught on, and became regularly used by HP and others too, they were the source of endless complaints. People would complain that after they restored, all their valuable data, or their valuable program(s), had disappeared, and they had no backups...

A partition containing the software for re-installation of the OS and/or system software is a good idea. A "restore" partition, which restores your machine to its original "factory" condition, is as often as not a mistake. It should not be available to your typical home user, who will use it inappropriately to fix relatively minor problems.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[jasomill]

It doesn't come as a burnable ISO

This is true, but only true in a uselessly pedantic sense — it comes with the recovery/installation environment as a bootable HFS+ disk image; "burn it" if you like, but it's likely to install much faster from magnetic or solid state media, and Mac OS X doesn't tend to care much about what sort of medium it's installed from or to.

Contrary to popular belief, you need a working Snow Leopard to purchase and download the OS, not to boot and install it. Do people seriously think Apple will continue supporting Snow Leopard on newer hardware just to bootstrap Lion?

Jobs clearly wants to eliminate optical media as a preferred installation vector because he plans to ship more Macs without what he sees as the 2011 equivalent of floppy drives, and he wants to push Lion out over the App Store to drive adoption of the App Store. Hard to see this as a "secret plan," as it's more or less what he's been saying, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. Customers underserved by the distribution channel are free to "bootleg" it — "non-officially," of course, but the "losses" are likely to be a smaller hit to Apple's bottom line than would be maintaining production and distribution channels for a small number of shrink-wrapped copies, especially in light of the likely demographics of underserved populations.

Cheers,
Jason

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[node 3]

Yeah, I left out a "non" (obviously).

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[smash]

Citation needed

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[smash]

Of you dont like it, dont use it. The old way works fine.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[smash]

So, it will cost you about $4 to download?

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Midnight Thunder]

I suspect the price be whatever it costs Apple to manufacturer, ship and provide to the middle men. If I look at other software solutions that offer download or DVD, then I reckon an extra $10-$20 would be in order. Either way this is pure speculation and we will see what happens in a few weeks.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[cthulhu11]

If you don't like a given new feature, then DON'T USE IT. How hard is that?

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Burz]

They're garbage because they often don't work. HP was one of the pioneers of restore partitions... go ahead and Google 'HP restore partition' and behold the hundreds of people who are left with no recourse but to order (yes) optical disks from HP for a fee.

Restore partitions are also a target for malware, and that's on top of everything else that can render them non-functional.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[mr100percent]

A burnable ISO supposedly won't be necessary, since when you sign in with an AppleID into the Mac App Store on OS X 10.6 and above, it auto-downloads the OS to the machine

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes apple should have gone with a harder way to open applications

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[bledri]

They all used to be in the applications and utilities folder. What could possibly be simpler than that?

OK, the applications are still in the Applications folder and you can still open the Applications folder and scroll through it and double click away. Or you can use Spotlight, which is what I do and will still do. Command-Space, type the first few letters of the application name and hit return. Or if you want you can use the "open" command on the command line which is handy in a script. Now there is a new option of using gestures to swipe through all applications to find and launch them. How is having a new option horrible?

It's still UNIX under the covers. No one is taking that away. The beauty of OS X IMHO,is that it's UNIX for those of us that care but a usable tool for those that don't.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[dissy]

I didn't sign up with Apple computers 25 years ago because it was "Computers for Dummies". Windows is the corporate computer, and Linux is and always will be for guys with lots of free time and a burning desire to swear like a sailor any time you need to attach hardware.

Over 25 years ago and neither Windows nor Linux even existed, while Apple did and had the leading business desktop computers being made. Back in the beginning their only competition in the work place was large mainframes, which clearly are not personal computers.
That is a huge amount of inertia you overlook, and the main reason people kept using Apple in the workplace for some time.

Those companies that got into personal computing on the desktop only had one option, and they likely stuck with it.
It was only the ones avoiding personal computing that seemed to wait until IBM gave it their blessing with their DOS machines.
It was not until then that DOS overtook Apple.

Slightly after that time (Right at the 25 year mark or so), Linux still did not exist (Though BSD sure did!), and the Windows GUI was still a large number of years behind Apples GUI. Windows was not used much in the business area at first, that was still dominated by MSDOS systems and apps, which was the doing of IBM, not Microsoft directly.

Your choice of OS back at the time you claim would not have been related to the reasons you give (Since none of those existed), but due to the inertia from what was going on at the time.

When you are an accountant and the only spreadsheet app that existed was Visacalc on Apple//, you either wanted it and got it, or did without for a few years until Lotus hit the market on DOS PCs.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[dissy]

How do you download from a borked machine? How do you boot and restore from your Time Machine backup? How do you reformat and install from scratch?

Well if you have not yet purchased and downloaded Lion, then you will use your existing OS X installer DVD to recover your machine. Once it works again you then go purchase Lion.

When you download it online, it comes as a .dmg disk image file. You pretty much Have to burn it to DVD to boot from it.
So you simply do not throw away the DVD you burnt after you upgrade, and then you have your recovery media for Lion as well.

I sure hope they offer real media, even if they do at additional cost. At 30 USD for the OS I'll happily pay ten bucks more for packaging and media...

No fast Internet? Go to the Apple store, purchase it there, and they will put it on a DVD for you. Perhaps they will charge a small fee for that (I do not know for sure), but as you say, you (And I imagine most people going that route) would not mind a couple extra bucks to have them burn the disc at the store for you.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Doctor O]

By now some AC has posted what looks like inside knowledge, some of which covers my questions - there will be a way of creating a bootable USB stick or DVD from which one can install. I'm on 10.6, so buying online will not be a problem for me.

I was rather fearing that 10.7 would be the double-installation joke you propose - first set up an old OSX and install the new one from there. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I mean, hey, all they have to do is have a first step in the installer that says "now please insert a blank DVD so we can burn your installation medium". :-)

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anonymous Coward]

"so it is about to get easily trounced by Windows 8"

Yeah, easily. All you Apple folks, just trade in your Mac's while you have time.

But don't forget, 2012 will be the year of Linux, so don't keep your Wintel boxes too long.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[Anubis IV]

They explicitly said that it would only be available through the Mac App Store when they gave the WWDC keynote just a few weeks ago, and Steve Jobs has confirmed since then via e-mail that Snow Leopard is necessary to upgrade to Lion.

What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[Y-Crate]

With Lion coming from the App Store you need to have OS X installed to install OS X. What happens if you buy a new hard drive? Have your hard drive partition table lose a leg? How do you get 10.7 on your Mac? Apple won't say just yet.

Those who have broken their NDAs suggest there might be workarounds with delving into the .mpkg files and such, or that Apple might force you to install Snow Leopard and then upgrade from there. Neither option is particularly desirable.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[whiteboy86]

>> ..hard drive partition table lose a leg? How do you get 10.7 on your Mac? Apple won't say just yet.

Easy, you have to buy a new Apple hardware, obviously.

/s

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[pathological liar]

The rumours sites are claiming the latter, that you'll need to install SL first.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[Bert64]

Does this mean they will be updating snow leopard to support new hardware?
If you take an old OSX dvd and try to install it on a newer mac, it usually fails to install...

You would assume that at the very least Apple will make install media available for new hardware.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[Anubis IV]

They'll probably do what they've been doing with the MacBook Air for awhile now, and will simply include a USB recovery drive.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[R3d M3rcury]

What happens if you buy a new hard drive?

Well, the rash assumption is that you're going to want to move stuff from the old hard drive to the new one. So, at least briefly, you'll have two hard drives. Run the installer and tell it to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion on the new hard drive.

Have your hard drive partition table lose a leg?

Take it to the local Apple Store and have them fix it. And, while you're there, consider throwing out your flaky machine and getting teh new shiny or, at least, a cool cover for your iPad... ;^D

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[beelsebob]

No, it means that as with all new macs, you'll get an system restore DVD/USB stick with the current OS on it.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[boaworm]

Hm, this is what troubles me with this move. I don't really mind buying the stuff and all that, but it makes it a bit more troublesome with older Macs.

I currently have a 4yo MacBook Pro that came with 10.3, and a 3yo Mac Pro that came with 10.4. Both of those are shipped with installation/restore disks for their respective OS.

So if I need to reinstall my laptop in six months, will I be able to install 10.3, install the App Store and put lion directly on it? Not likely... So the reinstall path would be to throw in 10.6 on it, then install the App Store, and then upgrade to Lion.

This is kind of fine as long as 10.7 installs on top of 10.6, but what in a version or three. Will I have to download 10.7, then 10.8, then 10.9? Or will my laptop simply self destruct before that? :-)

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[beelsebob]

No, you'll buy 10.7 from the app store, burn it to a DVD, and have an install media ready.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right click Install Mac OS X Lion, click Show Package contents. Go into Contents -> SharedSupport and you'll find InstallESD.dmg (3.74gb disk image file). Burn this to a DVD or restore it to a flash drive partition and boot. It comes up with a Mac OSX Utilities menu/dialog where you can do a fresh install, run disk utility, restore from time machine backup, etc...

It's been this way through all the DP releases, and remains in the GM.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[mikael_j]

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released in april 2005, 10.5 "Leopard" was released in october 2007. Your Macbook Pro would've shipped with 10.4.4 at the very least, especially since 10.4.4 was the first version of OS X released with support for Intel processors...

Also, a 3 year old Mac Pro should've shipped with 10.5 (since it was released almost four years ago).

And from what I've heard you can burn the 10.7 dmg to a DVD.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[mr_lizard13]

It's possible to burn the app store download to a disc or save it to a bootable USB flash drive. There are instructions on the Internet for both these options.

If you're the type of person who is replacing the hard drive yourself then you're already reasonably technically proficient, and so jumping through another hoop to burn the install package to a disc should be no problem for you.

If your hard drive fails and you're not technically proficient, then you were never going to be comfortable swapping out the component anyway and you'll be taking your unit to an Apple store or some other repair shop. They'll charge their fee (assuming it's out of warranty) and deal with the reinstallation of the OS for you.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[stewbacca]

That would be nice, but it's not true (you are thinking of the Macbook Air, I presume).

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[stewbacca]

I think your reinstall path would be boot from the 10.6 disk, update to 10.6.6 (to get the Mac app store), then reinstall Lion (you'll be able to redownload Lion as many times as you like).

I keep hearing this complaint, but given most of us have spent several Saturdays a year for 15 years now futzing with Windows installs, this most likely one time nuisance is nothing, relatively.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[beelsebob]

What's not true? Which mac does not ship with a restore DVD or restore USB stick?

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[stewbacca]

No Macs ship with a USB stick other than the Macbook Airs. And new Macs that ship with Lion probably? won't ship with DVDs either.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[beelsebob]

No Macs ship with a USB stick other than the Macbook Airs.

Correct – because all the other ones have optical drives and hence ship with restore DVDs instead.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[TheRaven64]

If you have a Mac that came with 10.3, then it's PowerPC and doesn't even support OS X 10.6, let alone 10.7. If you have a Mac that came with 10.4, then it's probably PowerPC, but might be 32-bit Intel, and either way doesn't support 10.7. If you have a three year old Mac, then it will have come with 10.5 - mine is four years old and came with 10.5. If you need to do a reinstall of 10.7 onto it and didn't remember to burn the install image, then yes, you will need to either install 10.5, then 10.6, then 10.7, or download the install image from another machine with 10.6 / 10.7 and burn it. Since it doesn't require activation, if you have a valid license then there's nothing stopping you from just borrowing someone else's install image.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[slyborg]

The new hardware will come with Lion, obviously.

Re:What comes first, the Lion or the Leopard?

[King_TJ]

Not necessarily correct!

I recently read over on MacRumors where a guy confirmed he was able to do a full install of OS X Lion's "gold master" from a removable drive, onto a Mac with a blank hard drive. A prerequisite of Snow Leopard is most likely stated simply because you'd need it on a machine to use the Apple App Store to BUY Lion in the first place.

Once you've got the files though, they can be arranged in such a way so they act as an installation point for new systems.

Oh the memories

[tftp]

This gold master, does it by any chance have anything to do with Bullfish Interactive or their CEO Phraud Hogslop?

Finally

[93 Escort Wagon]

People have been focusing on the visual tweaks almost exclusively - but the main thing I'm interested in is Lion finally brings full-disk encryption to us Mac laptop owners.

I kept hoping Truecrypt would offer it, but that feature never made it to the Mac side...

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

My question is...

Who gets to keep the keys?

Re:Finally

[CAIMLAS]

The big things of interest for OS X to me, as someone who likes efficiency and stability out of his systems, are:

* will they finally fix the horrible threading and context switching implementation so that running something like a spreadsheet program with a large spreadsheet not cause the gnashing of teeth? (This has been a problem since the beginning of 10.x, but I started notcing it around 10.4 with the Intel macs and able to compare apples to apples - ie linux or Windows on the same hardware).
* HFS+ replacement so IO won't be a horrendous bottleneck?
* Better wifi implementation so that the macs I've got to deal with are not the main ones to have signal issues? (Seriously, when macs have more issues with APs than XP, you know you've got issue. You can't completely say it's the hardware, because Linux on the same systems is at least better...)
* will they allow me to do what I want with the 'dock' and the sparse UI elements, or am I restricted to using it how they say I should (particularly as it pertains to multitasking/not multitasking: it doesn't matter if they make that not suck at the techincal level if the UI is still horribly crippled).

Re:Finally

[TheRaven64]

And, more to the point, is DriveVault actually useful yet? I did use it, but it doesn't work properly with Time Machine, so I had to pick between encryption and backups. I chose backups, and when the hard disk in my laptop died I was very glad that I did. Given that most laptops as single-user devices, the sane way of implementing it would have been to have an encrypted disk image on the backup disk that was mounted and then do the normal backup stuff to that while the user is logged in. Instead, they required you to log off and then run the backup as another user, just copying segments of the encrypted disk image.

Re:Finally

[kevinmenzel]

When it comes to the last point, Apple will NEVER EVER change. The whole "Think Different" mantra is left in the dust by the new "Jobs knows best" theology of Apple.

Re:Finally

[93 Escort Wagon]

Better wifi implementation so that the macs I've got to deal with are not the main ones to have signal issues? (Seriously, when macs have more issues with APs than XP, you know you've got issue. You can't completely say it's the hardware, because Linux on the same systems is at least better...)

Interesting, I've had exactly the opposite problem. With the Macs we've got around, wi-fi has been set it and forget it - it always works. The XP/7 laptops seem to consistently have issues with randomly dropping their connections to the access points (well, technically the connections look like they're still there, but the computers just seem unable to send or receive bits for a while...).

Haven't really seen any Linux laptops in the wild, so I can't say how they've fared.

Re:Finally

[93 Escort Wagon]

And, more to the point, is DriveVault actually useful yet? I did use it, but it doesn't work properly with Time Machine, so I had to pick between encryption and backups. I chose backups, and when the hard disk in my laptop died I was very glad that I did. Given that most laptops as single-user devices, the sane way of implementing it would have been to have an encrypted disk image on the backup disk that was mounted and then do the normal backup stuff to that while the user is logged in. Instead, they required you to log off and then run the backup as another user, just copying segments of the encrypted disk image.

I haven't had access to Lion, so I haven't had a chance to try any of this. If what you say is accurate (meaning it's what I end up seeing as well), that'll be quite disappointing. Under those circumstances I'd have to make the same choice you did - but it's rather silly if it's an either/or situation. It sounds like basically the same situation as currently exists with FileVault, which renders it not particularly useful.

My experiences from the last two major OS X updates (meaning 10.5.0 and 10.6.0) has, to some degree, made me think about following the same philosophy I have with Windows updates. Like many other people, with Windows I've found it useful to wait until the first service pack; and with these last two iterations of OS X, in hindsight I would've been better off waiting for 10.x.1 or even 10.x.2. Don't get me wrong... in the long run both Leopard and Snow Leopard were worthwhile upgrades; but their initial releases were by no means problem-free.

Re:Finally

[Stormwatch]

What do you want to do with the Dock, exactly? A lot of hidden options in OSX can be customized with programs like Tinker Tool, iTweax, OnyX, or Secrets.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found wifi to be a little flakey in that it doesn't always reliably report its state. It'll show no problems (or take a long time to report) when it couldn't receive an IP address. Generally though it's reliable. No idea how other operating systems handle this? My other systems run in VMs. I do recall wifi setup in XP being oddly complicated when compared to OS X, but I imagine that Windows 7 has improved on this.

Re:Finally

[Dystopian Rebel]

I will add one more point:

* Better package management for UNIX/FOSS development. As much as I want to like OS X for development, it can't compare to any Debian-based Linux distribution using apt-get.

Re:Finally

[dgatwood]

It sounds like basically the same situation as currently exists with FileVault....

The pre-10.7 FileVault didn't work well with TM because users couldn't see each other's files even if the permissions allowed it. In Lion, there are no per-user disk images; your boot volume is just a volume. I would not expect similar problems with it.

Re:Finally

[ColdWetDog]

The big things of interest for OS X to me, as someone who likes efficiency and stability out of his systems, are:

* will they finally fix the horrible threading and context switching implementation so that running something like a spreadsheet program with a large spreadsheet not cause the gnashing of teeth?

You're holding it wrong.

* HFS+ replacement so IO won't be a horrendous bottleneck?

See above

* Better wifi implementation so that the macs I've got to deal with are not the main ones to have signal issues? (Seriously, when macs have more issues with APs than XP, you know you've got issue. You can't completely say it's the hardware, because Linux on the same systems is at least better...)

The problem here, as you should already know, is the Windows boxes are polluting the spectrum and slowing down the system. The Macs are desperately trying to clean up the air but you probably have too many copies of XP floating about. Buy everyone a nice shiny Mac and the problem will go away. (Notice I didn't say that the wifi speeds would be any faster).

* will they allow me to do what I want with the 'dock' and the sparse UI elements, or am I restricted to using it how they say I should (particularly as it pertains to multitasking/not multitasking: it doesn't matter if they make that not suck at the techincal level if the UI is still horribly crippled).

Do you really need me to answer that? You do it OUR way or the highway.

Steve

Sent from my iCloud

Re:Finally

[ColdWetDog]

At least for me, 10.3 was the 'first stable' release of Snow Leopard. Since Lion doesn't give me any 'must have' features, I will wait for a couple of weeks and let the beta testers do their job.

And a big Thank You to all of you early adopters out there! You make my life much easier.

Re:Finally

[TheRaven64]

will they finally fix the horrible threading and context switching implementation

Context switching isn't that bad, but the Darwin pthread mutex implementation is horrible. If it's uncontended, it's slow. If it's contended it's completely unusable. If you're porting code to OS X 10.6, you can just use the libdispatch versions of synchronisation primitives instead - these are about as fast as everyone else's versions. Hopefully with 10.7 they've just copied the libdispatch versions into libc...

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used FileVault since the 10.3 days. You'll be happy to know that FileVault in 10.7 offers a huge, noticeable boost in performance over the two major versions of FileVault which preceded it. The only downside is that you'll eventually want to turn off the "Legacy FileVault" and this will require a lot of free disk space (related to how big your FileVault home folder is). I'm very happy with 10.7 just for this one upgrade alone.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

-- I thought threading got better and I've yet to see anybody point out (with evidence) of poor threading of the kernel, especially since 10.6 and the intel switch. As for loading some massive spreadsheet (ms office?) that sounds like a poor example as office software tends to not be well threaded (if at all) or even designed to scale up or run properly-- the needs are so slow they seriously never think about performance anymore. I've used office software 15 years ago that is more snappy than todays; its not the OS... I suppose you could go in and change the timeslice rate of the kernel if you think context switching happens too often... or cut down on your interrupting devices; a bad firewire device can cause a lot of troubles. Or bitch to people like Mozilla who still use run loops in their apps when in the background instead of sleeping indefinitely. Perhaps you'd prefer the WINDOWS approach where there are fewer processes running than a unix system's tendency to divide things up into many processes?

-- HFS+ show me proof. HFS is an elegant simple design (by IBM.) It lacks some features which actually make it take less CPU than other systems. If you are talking raw IO and not filesystem related processing then its possible that needs some work but somehow I doubt it hasn't been fairly well optimized. If you are talking about file IO, their old b-tree databases are simple and the alg is fast; although, now there are additional databases to make entries into...but also fast. Device IO it wouldn't surprise me if Apple didn't put much time into tweaking it for each minor change to SATA etc. Fragmentation still is a problem but far far less than before because of the new allocation alg in OS X; in OS 9 it was a big problem. The allocation system is about as simple as one can get and while I could think of a faster alg to search for empty space; the size of the problem makes it a moot point. Since 10.6 they broke the HFS paradigm and store tiny files in the FS database directly rather than make a real file (big speed boost) which is not adding complexity or overhead for a half-ass form of file fragments. IO is almost always a horrendous bottleneck because its so much slower than RAM-- its rare to have the task evenly paired to the speed of the IO. The big problem I have with HFS+ is their poor error checking system; disk errors creep up and don't get fixed because journaling disables that-- which causes plenty of odd things to go on as it progresses. FreeBSD never seems to have these issues... (although they check the whole FS in the background after a crash; apple just checks the journal.) It doesn't do ZFS style data integrity checking which would be nice despite the overhead. I would like to know how well ZFS did compared to HFS before apple stopped working on it.

--Wifi I've never seen a mac have more trouble with Wifi over a PC. I've avoided "secure" wifi which is probably where the troubles come in.

--Dock: hide it. almost never use it myself; no pro should need it. Full screen apps are for windows wimps (except games or graphics apps.) Wish I could kill it off... if it didn't run the dashboard, keyboard task switcher, spaces, and expose... I'd figure out how to kill it. Very un-UNIX behavior... each should have a process; f*** the context switching overhead.

Re:Finally

[smash]

Virtualbox + os of your choice. You get a test environment for free as well.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

A post clearly not from a Mac user, or even a computer user, but a tinkerer that creates nothing. The post is moronic, but of course Insightful according to /.
p.s. Cut down the level of self referential using ``I'', ``me'', etc.

Re:Finally

[pandrijeczko]

Why would the target audience of Macs, namely people who don't care about how a computer works and don't want to use Windows (or Linux) care about disk encryption?

Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC cause this is NDA stuff.

1) 10.7 can be burned to a DVD or dumped to a USB Flash Key and installed off of. It does NOT require an existing installation of 10.6.8 to INSTALL. You only need an existing 10.6.8 installation to download it- IF you want to get it from the Mac App Store. The relevant file is called "InstallESD.dmg" and weighs in at around 4GB. It is essentially a restore image of what you would otherwise find on a shipping DVD. It comes with what you get off the Mac App Store.

2) 10.7 does NOT REQUIRE AN APPLE ID.

There is NO PROTECTION in 10.7 against piracy. There is NO ONLINE ACTIVATION. There is NO receipt checking through the Mac App Store. For all intensive purposes, it is IDENTICAL to 10.6.8 in that the Mac App Store is just another application in /Applications. The operating system IN NO WAY attempts to verify the legality of your installation, nor does it case.

You can install, configure, and use your machine WITHOUT creating an Apple ID. It is -TOTALLY- optional.

3) 10.7 Server does NOT REQUIRE AN APPLE ID. The Server administration bits come as a single app ("Server.app") that downloads and installs Server Essentials, which is basically all the server side stuff (Open Directory, PostFix, etc). This application does NOT attempt to verify the legality of your "server" NOR DOES IT REQUIRE A SERIAL. Just like #2- if you obtain Server.app from some other place, you can install and use it on a Mac OS X 10.7 system without the need for an Apple ID, or even an internet connection after the Server Essentials packages have been downloaded!

So, please, stop spreading FUD!

10.7 is identical to 10.6. You can clean install it. You don't need 10.6, except for the initial download (which Apple expects you'll do legally- through the Mac App Store). You do not need an Apple ID for anything (you don't loose functionality).

The only thing that has changed- is that Apple is going the digital *distribution* route. They have NOT gone the "digital distribution and locked down DRM and online activation" route.

-AC

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[R3d M3rcury]

10.7 can be burned to a DVD or dumped to a USB Flash Key and installed off of. It does NOT require an existing installation of 10.6.8 to INSTALL.

Uh...doesn't there need to be a Mac OS X installation somewhere if you want to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? Otherwise, what's going to magically read your DVD or USB Flash Key? And I rashly assume that you can't run the installer if your machine has booted into 10.5.x...

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

The InstallESD.dmg image that you've burned to DVD (or cloned to your USB stick) is bootable.

Also, to the GP, intents and purposes.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

(Same AC as GP)

The restore system. InstallESD.dmg contains a bootable version of OS X much like the 10.6 installer. Except things work a little differently now:

1) The installer is split into two stages. The first creates a recovery partition on your disk drive, and dumps the OS X installer and a nifty repair/utility system to it.
2) The second stage occurs after the first has completed. The system reboots onto the fresh recovery partition, and restores the operating system off it.

The difference between a clean install and an install-from-your-existing-system is only the first stage. If you're installing from 10.6.x, then you're running a tool that does #1 under your existing OS and then reboots to perform #2. If you're installing from a USB key or DVD-R, then the bootable system on the disk is performing step #1 for you, then rebooting to continue with #2.

The installer might just work under 10.5, I haven't checked. Apple says you need 10.6.x to download Lion (which you do). If you already have the Lion *.app bundle saved somewhere else (this is the same bundle that contains the aforementioned InstallESD.dmg file), then you might be able to copy it to a 10.5 OS and run it from there. The only reason why this wouldn't work is if Apple is checking for it and actively denying attempts; or if 10.5 is lacking some runtime component or framework that the *.app installer requires.

Again, the situation is far more flexible and far less 1984 then people are currently freaking about. The only thing that has changed is the (primary) method of distribution. In fact, given that Server doesn't even need a serial anymore (and doesn't attempt to authenticate with the Mac App Store- that would be stupid), things have gotten considerably simpler (anyone remember the serialnumberd issues in 10.6 where a dual-homed server would see itself and invalidate it's license?)...

-AC

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[RedBear]

10.7 can be burned to a DVD or dumped to a USB Flash Key and installed off of. It does NOT require an existing installation of 10.6.8 to INSTALL.

Uh...doesn't there need to be a Mac OS X installation somewhere if you want to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? Otherwise, what's going to magically read your DVD or USB Flash Key? And I rashly assume that you can't run the installer if your machine has booted into 10.5.x...

Umm, no. You are very confused. Unless that was meant as a joke. How could anyone ever install an operating system if you needed an operating system installed to install an operating system? Google "BIOS" and "bootable DVD".

Every OS X intall disc has been a bootable image (already containing a fully bootable copy of OS X) that allows installation onto a clean hard drive. The Lion installer contains the same standard bootable disc image. The only difference is that the computer can apparently be booted from that disc image while it is still just sitting on the hard drive (if you are running Snow Leopard 10.6.8). That is, Lion REQUIRES no external boot media, but it can still be used from external boot media if you so choose, and if you have the very simple knowledge to open Disk Utility on ANY Mac and "restore" the DMG file onto a DVD or USB flash drive or external USB or FireWire or Thunderbolt hard drive. Anyone who "administrates" Macs should already know how to do this, so I'm really not sure why so many Mac admins are freaking out about the no-media policy. Some "Real" Mac admins are probably out there somewhere NetInstalling the new Lion install image on hundreds of machines at the same time as we speak.

If you are running anything prior to Snow Leopard 10.6.8, you will of course have to either upgrade your machine to Snow Leopard first or or use external install media just as you would with a clean machine. Either way, not really a big deal. Seriously.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

For all intensive purposes ...

INTENTS AND purposes not INTENSIVE purposes. The rest of your text suggests that English probably isn't your second language, so that's not an excuse. If you're going to use the language, don't abuse it.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

For all intensive purposes

Holy shit. No.

What the fuck.

'Intents and purposes.'

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Raenex]

Wrecking havoc on the English language.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[fnj]

Why do you say you need to be running 10.6 to download 10.6.8? What if you only had 10.5? 10.1? What if, by some happenstance, your only computer with a hard disk that still booted was Windows or Linux?

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[fnj]

s/10.6.8/10.7/
sigh, it's very early

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Jane Q. Public]

This is not criticism. I am taking the opportunity to point this out because it is a pet peeve of mine. So I'm saying this for my own selfish reasons, not in order to criticize or to troll. Anyway:

The phrase is not "for all intensive purposes". It is "for all intents AND purposes."

Everybody who did not already know that, please take note.

Thank you for your attention.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[F.Ultra]

>How could anyone ever install an operating system if you needed an operating system installed to install an operating system?
Good luck buying Apple hardware without a preinstalled os...

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can the space allocated to the recovery partition during the install process be claimed back once the installation finishes?

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Pascal Sartoretti]

They have NOT gone the "digital distribution and locked down DRM and online activation" route.

Not YET ?

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

For all intensive purposes

intents and purposes. "intensive purposes" doesn't even make sense! For all intents and purposes!

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[itsdapead]

Not YET ?

No, not yet. As opposed to Windows which has had annoying online activation since Windows XP, not to mention the whole "Windows genuine advantage" thing.

And even where Apple has gone for lock-down and digital distribution, we've at least seen a quid-pro-quo in terms of prices and terms of use (20 quid for Lion, 35 quid for Lion server, one purchase covers all your macs...) The only exception is with books, and I suspect that's because of the publishers, not Apple.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[lordholm]

OK, that sounds great! The problem is that Apple has denied that it is possible to make a bootable DVD. Your post does make me calm down, I was actually planning on not upgrading due to the issues you mention.

The recovery partition (which I will never use for reinstall since it is on writable media), will it be a proper partition (so my partition tables gets messed up) or will it be a DMG on the normal OSX partition?

Another issue: Does it include Xcode? Xcode has been included in every OS X release ever. I could understand they want to charge for the IDE, but they should at least include an installer with all the headers and tools (git, svn, clang, gcc, make, xcodebuild et.c.) with the OS. This is after all fundamental infrastructure for the OS.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[tepples]

Good luck buying Apple hardware without a preinstalled os

So I buy a Mac. I buy Lion and burn the installer image to a recovery DVD. The Mac's hard drive fails. I buy a new hard drive and install it. Now I have a Mac with no installed operating system. (Next steps: reinstall Lion from the recovery DVD, then restore documents from backup.)

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[bruceg]

Well said, my man..

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[quacking duck]

Good luck buying any off-the-shelf replacement hard drive with a preinstalled OS...

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[NekSnappa]

Thank you for saving me from playing the pedantic ass.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[ugen]

I am guessing this post is vetted by higher ups at Apple.
I think they realize that the new paradigm of Apple deskop/notebook OS does not sit too well with the geeks, and they feel the need to connect and explain in this fashion.
I also think that if 10.7 Lion was something Apple wanted to distribute openly in earnest, they would have done so without resorting to the locked-in App store (even if the actual 10.7 is not locked in).
Apple is playing a double game here - they want to hook in users with a new shiny OS and at the same time get them to embrace the lock-in of App store which will provide a stream of paid and DRMed applications. However, what worked for "consumption devices" like iPad may not necessarily work out so well for general purpose devices like a Macbook.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

And prior to that, it was the British legal term "TO all intents and purposes." But I'm okay with using "for" in modern contexts. Just figured if we were going down this road, it doesn't hurt to explain things more fully.

And BTW, "for all intensive purposes" refers to Vaseline, if I'm not mistaken. ; )

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Huge_UID]

You should have also pointed out that it is lose, not loose: "you don't loose functionality".

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[F.Ultra]

Not that I'm denying that you are right, but this is Apple after all so I wouldn't be surprised if you had to turn in the computer to have it fixed in that situation (if the install required en existing OS that is, which I don't think. I was just replying that it was quite possible for Apple people to already have a OS installed).

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[F.Ultra]

Good luck getting Apple to care ;)

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[605dave]

I did not already no that. Your probably right though. I did a total 360 on the subject.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[stewbacca]

Uh...doesn't there need to be a Mac OS X installation somewhere if you want to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion?

Have you ever booted a blank Mac hard drive from a CD (mid 90s), SCSI target disk mode (mid 90s), DVD (late 90s), thumb drive (late 90s), firewire traget disk mode (late 90s)? I have. Do any of these methods no longer work? It seems Apple figured out how to do system installs the not-microsoft-way 20 years ago.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[stewbacca]

Have they "denied", or have they not affirmed. Those are two different things entirely.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[ColdWetDog]

I am guessing this post is vetted by higher ups at Apple. I think they realize that the new paradigm of Apple deskop/notebook OS does not sit too well with the geeks, and they feel the need to connect and explain in this fashion. I also think that if 10.7 Lion was something Apple wanted to distribute openly in earnest, they would have done so without resorting to the locked-in App store (even if the actual 10.7 is not locked in). Apple is playing a double game here - they want to hook in users with a new shiny OS and at the same time get them to embrace the lock-in of App store which will provide a stream of paid and DRMed applications. However, what worked for "consumption devices" like iPad may not necessarily work out so well for general purpose devices like a Macbook.

I'm guessing that you should switch to decaf in the very near future and loosen the duct tape holding your tinfoil hat on.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly because its simply not necessary. Mac OS itself only works on Mac computers to begin with (thats the DRM); e.g. the user is already 'guaranteed' to have paid for the OS. Checking for legitimacy in updates is simply not deemed worth it.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Graymalkin]

Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh! I've had nightmares about sentences like this one. I'm going to go have a little cry now. Thanks.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope you're kidding. There are hundreds of thousands of third party developers who could have written that, and only dozens of internal ones that could have. Only a truly paranoid person would assume it had to be someone from the smaller camp.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can install, configure, and use your machine WITHOUT creating an Apple ID. It is -TOTALLY- optional."

Great, so technically you can install it without.

But doesn't using the App Store require an Apple ID? And if this is the only legal way to buy it, then doesn't that mean the only way to have a properly licensed copy is to have an Apple ID?

I suppose somebody else with an Apple ID could buy it, but I would be surprised it there isn't something in the licensing prohibiting transferring the license to somebody else.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can also download the image from a local Apple Store computer and write it to your thumb drive. I'm pretty sure the retail staff would help you log in and out from the App Store for that purpose.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

OMFG I think I love you.

I was just about to post this.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[hechacker1]

Is there an advantage to a reformat?

You say it creates a recovery partition? But when I run it from an existing Snow Leopard install, my existing Snow leopard partition size remains unchanged. I don't have an extra partition after installing Lion.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Jane Q. Public]

You are welcome.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pedantic response:

"For all intensive purposes..."?

That should be "for all intents and purposes".

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[ILongForDarkness]

You have to have 10.6.8 according to the keynote in order to have the right version of the App store to download the OS. I'm not sure if you only have 10.5 if they will give you a copy of a OS 10.6 disk so you can upgrade and then go to 10.7 through the app store or if they are just going to make physical disks eventually available for people that want to skip a release, or maybe they'll have people go to the Appstore and have a genius upgrade them to 10.6 using a disk they use for service and fire off the 10.7 install for them.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[ILongForDarkness]

awk s/post/nice :-)

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

For all intensive purposes

What about for less intensive purposes, like just intending to download it for the purpose of installing it? ;)

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you're going in the same direction you were before then?
(Oh, you mean a 180...)

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[victorhooi]

heya,

It's "I did not already *KNOW* that".

And it's "I did a total *180*" - if you do a 360, you simply end up where you started. Coincidentally one of my friends said something similar the other day, and there was a long pause afterwards...

Cheers,
Victor

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Altus]

All mac's come with install media which can bring the machine up from a bare drive, unless this changes when machines start shipping with lion you would use that and then install any OS upgrades from your recovery DVDs or download them from the apple store.

Id be surprised if your recovery DVDs weren't bootable themselves, but I cannot confirm this as I haven't tested Lion at all yet.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Suttle troll is suttle.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh! Look, thar goes the joke over head!

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

You do not need an Apple ID for anything (you don't loose functionality).

Really? You don't "loose" functionality? Rather, do you lose it? loose != lose.

I'm tired of seeing this.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

So how do you buy it without an Apple ID?

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, the situation is far more flexible and far less 1984 then people are currently freaking about.

I find it funny that the Mac users are already stating most of what you said.

It's the non-Mac users whom claim they would never purchase from Apple who are doing all the freaking out, as if it somehow affected them in any way if that statement was true.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Alioth]

Sorry to be a grammar and spelling nazi:

It is "all intents and purposes", not "all intensive purposes"

"you don't loose functionality" - You meant "lose" not "loose". Loose means something entirely different to lose.

HTH, HAND.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[innit]

Actually it's "TO all intents and purposes", or, as originally used in an Act of Parliament under Henry VIII, "to all intents, constructions and purposes". The OP who used "for intensive purposes" is without doubt an idiot but he does at least need to be corrected accurately :) Every day's a school day.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Out before the shitstorm

That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[JohnG]

I am stuck with Hughesnet, due to living in the boonies. They impose a 425 megabyte limit on my downloads even at the $100 a month plan. The only time it is unlimited is between 2am-7am, which I'm betting isn't enough time to grab an entire OSX distribution. Just getting XCode and the iOS SDK became a race against time once the file hit the 4gb range. I guess I can stay up until 2, then set an alarm for 7 to pause the Mac App Store download until 2 am the next morning. But still, I'd really like to just pay a few extra bucks and have them ship me a DVD. It doesn't even have to come in a fancy box.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand, don't you get a URL that you can download from, and resume your download at specific times?

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am stuck with Hughesnet, due to living in the boonies. They impose a 425 megabyte limit on my downloads even at the $100 a month plan. The only time it is unlimited is between 2am-7am, which I'm betting isn't enough time to grab an entire OSX distribution. Just getting XCode and the iOS SDK became a race against time once the file hit the 4gb range.
I guess I can stay up until 2, then set an alarm for 7 to pause the Mac App Store download until 2 am the next morning. But still, I'd really like to just pay a few extra bucks and have them ship me a DVD. It doesn't even have to come in a fancy box.

Your options:
1. Download at work.
2. Download at friend's house.
3. Download at relative's house.
4. Move.
5. Raise hell with Hughesnet.
7. Raise hell with Apple.
8. Cry.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Pascal Sartoretti]

I am stuck with Hughesnet, due to living in the boonies. They impose a 425 megabyte limit on my downloads even at the $100 a month plan. The only time it is unlimited is between 2am-7am, which I'm betting isn't enough time to grab an entire OSX distribution. Just getting XCode and the iOS SDK became a race against time once the file hit the 4gb range. I guess I can stay up until 2, then set an alarm for 7 to pause the Mac App Store download until 2 am the next morning. But still, I'd really like to just pay a few extra bucks and have them ship me a DVD. It doesn't even have to come in a fancy box.

Just wait mid-July, sure there will be a torrent somewhere that you can download during a few nights.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[pbjones]

Lion is downloaded via the app store, no URL, but you can pause the download if you want.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[aardwolf64]

You have several options...
1. Find someone local you know to buy/download it for you. Have them burn the file to a DVD.
2. Find someone you trust online to get it for you and mail you the DVD.
3. Download it from work (becomes more of an issue if you don't have a Mac laptop, but still doable.)
4. Local Coffee House/McDonalds and plenty of coffee...

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Lion is downloaded via the app store, no URL, but you can pause the download if you want.
With the paws button, I guess.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Haeleth]

Your options:
1. Download at work.
2. Download at friend's house.
3. Download at relative's house.
4. Move.
5. Raise hell with Hughesnet.
7. Raise hell with Apple.
8. Cry.

Good God, how can you be posting on Slashdot and yet forget the best option of all?

9. Linux.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have a script to do this for you? You don't belong here :P

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

If good internet isn't where you are, then you need to go to where the good internet is.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can pause your download at 6:59am and resume the next day at 2:00am. Apple servers support this, and so does Safari.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Download over night.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[perlith]

If you don't have cell phone reception where you live, my sympathies. If you do, buy yourself a router which allows a cellular aircard to be plugged into it and use it as a WAN connection (I have a Cradlepoint MBR-1000). Internet comes in over 1xRTT or 3G if you are lucky enough. You usually can get 1.5Mbps (~160KB/s). 5GB cap for most carriers, no cap for other carriers with restrictions (Cricket as one example will not charge overages but will throttle your speed).

Not great, but beats the heck of out Satellite or Dialup when no other high-speed alternatives are available in the boonies.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Kjella]

Good God, how can you be posting on Slashdot and yet forget the best option of all?

9. Linux

Better find a distro with delta packages then, most Linux distros are happy to give you another 20MB download if there's been a 1kB fix. I don't care but if you're highly bandwidth limited, most distros are bandwidth slobs.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any friends with better internet speeds?

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hughsnet gives its customers one free "Restore Token" a month and you can buy more for $10.50 or get 3 for $25. This way you can nab those bigger files, run over your limit, and restore the connection so you don't have to suffer (worse-than-dialup!) for the next 16+ hrs. You should be able to go to http://192.168.0.1/fap_meter/ to see your allowance meter and note at the bottom of the page there's a link you can use to restore the connection if you're over your limit. You'll need your SAN identifier to restore the connection which you should be able to find at http://192.168.0.1/sys_info/ HTH! :)

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[sirsnork]

Or you could use a download manager and schedule it... assuming one exists for the Mac with those features

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Just Some Guy]

This won't help you at all for the initial install, but you might like knowing that delta updates are one of the nice new features in Lion. Subsequent patches and software updates should be much smaller once you're up and running.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

The torrents are already here.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just download it off bittorrent - there are plenty of clients which can be configured to only run between 2 and 7.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the Starbucks next to the bestbuy you would have bought it at and download it there.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can pause/resume the download, so even if it takes a couple nights you should make it. It's frustrating but not the end of the world. I have friends similarly in the boondocks; they do a lot of cron based downloading because of the policy; app store downloads I doubt are going to be so easy, but at least you can still get it.

There is a file InstallESD that you will want to burn to DVD using the Disk Utility so you never have to download again. This allows for clean installs too.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[grouchomarxist]

Why stay up until 2? There are many different ways you can do this automated.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[rastoboy29]

I feel your pain but...it's a computer...PROGRAM it.  Staying up til 2am to do something on your computer is, generally, asinine.

Ever hear of a cron job?

Just trying to help--really!

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, visit the Apple store and download it there. Burn it to a DVD for backup, just in case.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://imzdl.com/

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[terminal.dk]

Apple's App Store allows you to pause and resume downloads. So that would be fine. Not sure if you can script it though.

Re:That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[kundziad]

Or rather, wait until the next night after release...

Not "download only"

[glitch0]

Apple will still offer the disk in stores, Google it. You'll find that Apple employees have confirmed that users with bandwidth restrictions or users without an internet connection can still update by buying a disk in store.

Re:Not "download only"

[Anonymous Coward]

>Apple will still offer the disk in stores, Google it. You'll find that Apple employees have confirmed that users with bandwidth restrictions or users without an internet connection can still update by buying a disk in store.

Hopefully you also mean they will sell to people who just want a nice shiny factory pressed DVD, want to pay using good old American cash, or just don't want to hassle with a huge download even over a "fast" connection.

So the only time 10.7 will "only" be available on the App Store will be a few weeks until the DVDs are printed and shipped to the stores.

Putting it on their app store is great for those who want it that way, but making that the absolute only way would be dumb.

Re:Not "download only"

[itsdapead]

Apple will still offer the disk in stores, Google it.

I tried. How about posting a link?

Not that I'd be surprised if this happened as a result of public pressure - I think His Jobsness may have overestimated the availability of fast, uncapped internet connections.

Re:Not "download only"

[am 2k]

Hmm judging from the way the stores are run, I imagine that you could download it there and burn it to a DVD-R on one of the Macs in any case.

Re:Not "download only"

[Anonymous Coward]

I would also be surprised if it's download-only from the point of view that if it is, you wouldn't be able to upgrade if you had a Leopard machine since Leopard has no App Store access.

Re:Not "download only"

[tepples]

Apple will still offer the disk in stores, Google it.

Google apple lion disc stores doesn't appear to produce anything relevant in the top ten results. Nor does apple lion disc stores cap. And even if so, what's the best way to justify a four hour round trip drive to and from the nearest Apple Store to others in one's household?

Re:Not "download only"

[ColdWetDog]

And even if so, what's the best way to justify a four hour round trip drive to and from the nearest Apple Store to others in one's household?

I take it you're not married?

Sounds like a good reason to call apple suport

[Anonymous Coward]

Just say you have Dial-up... Ask how good the drivers are for Win7 with you mac?

And a large part of Australia...

[namdanog]

In most cases people who have "unlimited" plans get traffic shaping to 64KB after a couple of GB are downloaded, or they get charged extra. I wonder how this is going to pan out for those users who normally never exceed their limits, and naïvely think that upgrading the OS would fall within normal usage patterns.

Re:And a large part of Australia...

[pbjones]

who are you kidding? most caps start at 6GB, so a Lion System Download is not that much out of an average monthly allowance. If you only have 'a couple' of GB limit, then you're only checking email.

Re:And a large part of Australia...

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys should move away from a "third world" nation. :D Your connections sucks sooo much monkeyballs its hard to imagine!
Here where i'm at (Finland) i'm using 200/10Mb connections(cablemodem) without ANY limiting caps, costs about 40-50 euros/month. That really means i could download 100+ gigs easily without any throttling. Example downloading a Bluray x264 movie, 5-10 gig takes only 5-15 minutes, giving me about 12-18Megabytes per sec.

ps. it toke about 5 minutes to download Lion GM from usenet :p

Re:And a large part of Australia...

[theskipper]

Hypothesis: Dickishness is directly proportional to the speed of a person's internet connection.

Conclusion: Proven. Elevate to theory.

Re:And a large part of Australia...

[TheRaven64]

6GB a month? That's 200MB/day. One TV episode a day will take you over that limit without doing anything else. Listening to Internet radio for 4 hours a day will take you over the limit. Even web browsing can, if you go to a few Flash-heavy sites. I've heard people complaining about 30GB/month caps, but 6GB? Unless that's for a mobile phone, it's pretty inexcusable.

Re:And a large part of Australia...

[ILongForDarkness]

Ah but in a lot of the world you can't legally download 1 tv show a day. Problem solved. Damn you Hulu for being US only.

Re:And a large part of Australia...

[smash]

So, how's the weather out there? Cold here today, expecting 16-20c (middle of winter).

Just go to the MAC App Store.....

[theVarangian]

... aw crap! ... there is no Mac App Store access for my country. Should I do what the local Apple dealer is telling me which is go to a gift card scalper? The one they recommend charges $62.50 for a $50 giftcard. The bastards were happy enough to sell me a Mac but now I'm stuck dealing with scalpers to get OS updates. It was bad enough having to shell out giftcard money for XCode which used to be freely downloadable. I didn't really care that much either that my country has not been 'blessed' with an iOS App Store by saint Steve, I don't buy that much iPhone software anyway but the whole Mac App Store concept simply sucks ass.

Re:Just go to the MAC App Store.....

[Anonymous Coward]

No idea what backwater country you live in but... Just register in another country for the App Store and sign up for a prepaid creditcard in the country you 'said your in'?

Re:Just go to the MAC App Store.....

[Midnight Thunder]

There will probably be solutions, though I am not sure what? Maybe they won't have eliminated the DVD completely or you will be able to buy it through the regular online store and get a download link.

Lion breaking Time Machine backups to NAS devices?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read posts about Lion using AFP newer features for its Time Machine implementation that are not available in most NAS boxes.
NetAFP appear to complain lack of contribution / paying customers among the NAS manufacturers and will release their current code only as closed source. Open source implementation will follow later but it is not said when: http://www.netafp.com/open-letter-to-the-netatalk-community-501
So maybe wait with upgrade plans until this is resolved and vendors provide updated AFP support.

Like MacPorts, or Fink?

[itsdapead]

I take it you've discovered MacPorts and/or Fink which implement a BSD-like "ports" system offering all the usual FOSS suspects?

OK, they're source-based rather than binary, but if you're into development that probably wouldn't worry you.

Re:Like MacPorts, or Fink?

[TheRaven64]

I'd rather have something that is a bit more Mac like. When I compile UNIX stuff on OS X, I configure it with --prefix=/opt/{package_name}. I can then uninstall it by just deleting the package directory and copy it to a new machine by just copying that directory. I'd love to see a simple package manager built around this idea.

Re:Like MacPorts, or Fink?

[omen]

I'd rather have something that is a bit more Mac like. When I compile UNIX stuff on OS X, I configure it with --prefix=/opt/{package_name}. I can then uninstall it by just deleting the package directory and copy it to a new machine by just copying that directory. I'd love to see a simple package manager built around this idea.

You're after stow http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/

"GNU Stow is a program for managing the installation of software packages, keeping them separate (/usr/local/stow/emacs vs. /usr/local/stow/perl, for example) while making them appear to be installed in the same place (/usr/local). "

not All Intel Macs

[pbjones]

Although most of the stuff that I have seen says an 'Intel Mac', Lion does not support Core Duo macs, like the 'old' iMac that I am typing this on, bah, poo!

Re:not All Intel Macs

[am 2k]

As far as I know, it's 64bit Macs only. That's great for us developers, no more 32bit binaries to create when you go 10.7 only! The 32bit Cocoa runtime is totally outdated and creates quite a few problems for modern development.

Re:not All Intel Macs

[Macthorpe]

Aren't those Macs less than 2 bloody years old? Are they actually ending support entirely, or will 10.6 still get security updates?

Re:not All Intel Macs

[Moldiver]

I agree. Lion-only Apps will be a lot faster and more stable because of this.

Re:not All Intel Macs

[laffer1]

Core duo != core 2 duo

I had a 2008 iMac with a Core 2 Duo that would have worked fine as it was a 64bit capable CPU. (emt64) This only applies to the very early Intel iMacs that were white and not aluminum. Most likely some early MacBook or Mac Mini systems are also 32bit only.

Re:not All Intel Macs

[itsdapead]

Aren't those Macs less than 2 bloody years old?

No. It was only the first generation of Intel Macs that were "Core Duo" (32 bit). Worst case scenario is, I think, the original Mac Mini which (according to Wikipedia) didn't go "Core 2" until August 2007 - everything else was "Core 2" by the end of 2006.

Don't know if Apple announce "end of life" dates for OS X, but as of this spring they were still producing security updates for 10.5 so unless they have a drastic policy change, 10.6 should be OK for a while. Plus, their recommended way of upgrading from pre-10.6 to 10.7 is to buy 10.6 first, so they're going to be selling 10.6 for a while longer.

Re:not All Intel Macs

[donscarletti]

Um, no? They've been using Core2 Duo and i5 for the last 4 series I think. Core Duo was just the first series of Intel Macbook.

Re:not All Intel Macs

[Macthorpe]

Yeah, this is a lesson to research before you write. I kind of figured I was wrong the moment I wrote it :(

Re:not All Intel Macs

[TheRaven64]

Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo. They only shipped Core Duo machines for a short while, and you'd have been crazy to buy one. I delayed getting my current machine until they switched the MacBook Pros to Core 2 Duo because it was clear back then that 32-bit Intel support wasn't going to be around for long.

Re:not All Intel Macs

[TheRaven64]

The 32bit Cocoa runtime

What does this even mean? I assume that you're referring to the Objective-C runtime, but presumably you're aware that there are two 32-bit runtimes, the 'legacy' and 'modern' runtimes, and that the 32-bit modern runtime and 64-bit runtime are more or less identical. There are just some minor differences with regards to the exception model, as far as I remember.

Re:not All Intel Macs

[am 2k]

Yes, that's what I was referring to. However, there's no 32bit modern runtime for the Mac, this one is iOS-only.

Re:not All Intel Macs

[TheRaven64]

Yes there is. Compile with -fobjc-nonfragile-abi and -m32 and you're using the modern 32-bit runtime. With the 64-bit runtime. It's been there since 10.5...

Re:not All Intel Macs

[King_TJ]

Might be worth mentioning that at least one owner of an older Macbook that used to only run with 32-bit mode in OS X can now run Lion in 64-bit mode on it without problems.....

Re:not All Intel Macs

[King_TJ]

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1104342

(So that's at least hope for some aluminum Macbook owners out there.)

Torrent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrent it, use a torrent client that allows you to throttle to 0kbs at certain times of day.

When the Apple Store is two hours away

[tepples]

people that lack fast Internet aren't necessarily screwed, since Apple is allowing anyone to use the Wi-Fi in their retail stores to download the OS.

Does this apply to Apple Authorized Resellers as well, or does it apply only to "Apple Store"? These may be well over an hour's drive away from even a substantial city; for example, there are only two in Indiana. And does it apply to iMac and Mac mini, or only to MacBook?

Re:When the Apple Store is two hours away

[Anubis IV]

Apple doesn't speak for the Authorized Retailers, so it's just for the stores they own, and as far as I heard, it applies to desktops as well. I know the Genius Bar has plenty of power jacks, always.

Re:When the Apple Store is two hours away

[DarkXale]

Not to mention outside of the US - Apple stores practically don't exist.

Re:When the Apple Store is two hours away

[BasilBrush]

We don't do too bad in the UK. We have 30 stores, and the UK isn't that big.

Re:When the Apple Store is two hours away

[keytoe]

Does this apply to Apple Authorized Resellers as well

I assure you that resellers will be offering this as well. What's a few bucks worth of bandwidth if it pulls people into your store?

Re:When the Apple Store is two hours away

[Anonymous Coward]

HEY DAD! Don't worry we can take it to the nearest apple store and use their internets...how far away? oh I guess a 4 hour drive..I'll pack up the imacs in their boxes - what do you mean we don't have them? ok I'll sling them on the back seat while you go and start up the car...no I don't think we can claim the cost of the gas back...

"a hardware" ---?

[jabberw0k]

Grammar nitpick: I have been seeing the mangled "a firmware" for awhile, and occasionally "a software," but this is the first time I've seen "a hardware" in the wild. Please, folks: firmware, hardware, and software are like "clothing" -- you have a piece of clothing (not "one clothing"), a piece of firmware, a piece of software, a piece of hardware -- you can't have "a hardware," two "hardwares" ...

Re:"a hardware" ---?

[whiteboy86]

Thanks for the "two" article grammar helper, I have no english lang. education, still figuring things up.

Parent just had to say it.

[Anonymous Coward]

"For all intensive purposes"

Apple tax

[DogDude]

Wow. Apple has made it such that every Apple device owner pretty much needs to be tied in to the company with an umbilical cord made out of money. I can't believe people still buy this shit. Apple has attained a level of lock-in with its customers never before seen, yet the customers continue to eat it up. It's amazing to watch people hand over their privacy and their paychecks to a company like this.

Re:Apple tax

[stewbacca]

Yeah, because $29 is so much money...especially for something that I actually want. I've had an Apple ID from day one, and as far as I can tell, I've never had my info sold to spammers/junk mailers, and I've never been contacted/pestered by Apple for anything relating to my Apple ID. And last I checked, while all the other major companies are being hacked and our privacy is being abused, I don't think it has happened to Apple.

So good luck with the tinfoil. May it spare many a brain cell for you in the future.

Re:Apple tax

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been running Windows XP for 10 years? I bought a book 15 years ago and, beyond repairing the spine, I haven't spent another dime on it. By, by all means, keep handing money over to the electric company if it makes you happy.

Out of curiosity, do you regularly have dates sneak away while you're busy reminding the waiter that it's illegal to charge for tap water?

Re:Apple tax

[stewbacca]

Well $29 for what I consider to be one of the best versions of OS X yet (and I've only had the dev previews) is a good deal. And I've never spent a dime on XP (other than the cost of the computer it came on).

And yes, I'll keep "handing money" over to Apple as long as they keep making the quality products they do.

Re:Apple tax

[Jeremi]

$29? For a software update? And you're happy about it? Wow. I've been running Windows XP for almost 10 years, and haven't spent another dime on it.

Upgrading a 10.x Mac to 10.7 is something like upgrading a Windows XP machine to Windows 7. How much would Microsoft charge you to do that?

Of course, if your main goal is to never spend a dime on your computer, then as a Mac owner you would be free to continue running your pre-installed version of MacOS/X without upgrading. Nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade.

Re:Apple tax

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, how much does a Windows upgrade cost? Just out of interest, not that I'd want one - I stopped downgrading past Windows XP..

I use all 3 platforms, Windows, OSX and Linux (OK, with the occasional *BSD thrown in). I only started with OSX a year ago, and now only use Windows if it's really unavoidable - it's just so much more efficient to do things on the Mac (after you get used to the %Ã*£ lack of cursor navigation, which is IMHO the only problem).

You also seem to be confused about privacy. Tell me where Apple has exposed or abused customer data, compared to, say "do no evil Google".

Re:Apple tax

[bledri]

Not sure what you mean by cursor navigation, System Preferences->Keyboard->Keyboard Shortcuts->Full Keyboard Access->All Controls is something I always enable, but mat not be what you are looking for.

Re:Apple tax

[Anonymous Coward]

$29? For a software update? And you're happy about it? Wow. I've been running Windows XP for almost 10 years, and haven't spent another dime on it.

You are already correctly modded as troll, and we know you don't really care about fact from the crap you make up.. But for everyone else:

I've been running 10.6 for a long long time as well and never spent another dime on it either. Funny how not upgrading your OS to the next major version doesn't cost anything.

Of course going from OS X version 6 to version 7 costs $30, where in Microsoft land going from XP (version 5.1) to Vista (version 5.2) costs $130 for home and $280 for professional.
I'd have to say you are being ripped off!

Unless you mean to say you are pirating Vista and that is why it is cheaper for you.. In which case your point is moot cuz I can pirate 10.7 for free too!

Torrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

At 4G they should have it on bit torrent! That would speed things up tremendously, provided they had enough full time seeds, of course. I remember several "overnight downloads" of Linux ISOes in the dial-up days, I can certainly relate to that! Start the download today, finish by Tuesday!

Re:Torrent?

[stewbacca]

At 4G they should have it on bit torrent!

Or a giant cloud computing facility in North Caronlina...oh wait...

Will new mac ship with a restore disk or usb key?

[Joe_Dragon]

Will new mac ship with a restore disk or usb key?

Or will you have to take to an apple store if you need a new HDD or old one get's messed up?

NOT Like MacPorts, or Fink, or Homebrew

[Dystopian Rebel]

OS X needs one, comprehensive package-management tool.

Re:NOT Like MacPorts, or Fink, or Homebrew

[Anonymous Coward]

MacPorts is hosted by Apple. Install it and manage your packages.

Nobody seems to be losing out here except...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the people who used to make the DVD's.

Re:Lion breaking Time Machine backups to NAS devic

[TheRaven64]

Time Machine needs a filesystem that supports hard links on directories to be even remotely sane to use. Given that this isn't supported by most operating systems (for good reason), you're much better off backing up to an iSCSI volume on your NAS than to a shared directory.

Re:Will new mac ship with a restore disk or usb ke

[jo_ham]

It will install onto a blank drive - you only need 10.6.8 (or higher) to be able to download it from the App Store. You can then save that onto a USB stick or burn to DVD.

You don;t need to put Snow Leopard back on, and then upgrade over it immediately, it will simply install onto a fresh drive if you want to, eg in the case of a drive failure or upgrade, or installing onto a second volume or into a VM.

Only via app store

[nurb432]

So, i buy a new mac with lion preinstalled. My drive goes belly up. Now what do i do?

Re:Only via app store

[bledri]

Well, if you used Disk Utility to create a restore boot disk you use that, if not you ask a friend to make one or go to an Apple store or Mac repair shop.

Re:Only via app store

[Anonymous Coward]

You insert the OS-X Lion DVD that will come with your new mac, and connect your time machine backup drive. Click a few dialog boxes and wait an hour or so. Your machine will then reappear as if nothing had happened to your drive since your last backup.

Bye Bye Hackintosh

[4pins]

Why are they not giving people an option to buy physical media? Because the Hackintosh community is running around tell people that it is alright to install that license of OS X they payed for on their computer, even if it is not a Macintosh. If they are legally in the right or not, this significantly weakens their argument. We go from the user saying, "I purchased this box of software and now you think you can tell me what computer I may install it on." To Apple saying, "You agreed to the iTunes store terms (or those presented at time of purchase) before you licensed Lion from us. You clearly cannot claim that you are now allowed to install it on a generic PC when you already agreed you would not."

Thank goodness I only run OS X on Apple branded hardware.

Re:Bye Bye Hackintosh

[bledri]

I really doubt that Apple loses much sleep over Hackintoshes. They just don't have any interest in supporting them. Lion's installation "app" includes a bootable disk image and I suspect there are already Hackintoshes running the Lion beta.

so the hacked version

[Anonymous Coward]

will be called "i ain't lion"?

It's obvious why LION is download only!

[Chris Tucker]

Steve hates Apple Stickers.

No DVD, no Apple Stickers.

Apple is abandoning one of it's oldest, most beloved tradition.

It's the end of an era.

Static analyzer vs compiler

[FlaSheridn]

You can (and should) use the LLVM/Clang static analyzer regardless of whether you compile with LLVM, GCC, or the hybrid of the two. During development, it’s sometimes worth experimenting with the compiler you’re not using, e.g. if you’re struggling with an error message. I’ve generally found LLVM’s diagnostics more useful, but sometimes a second opinion can be helpful, and Googling a GCC error message generally gets more hits.

re: wi-fi issues?

[King_TJ]

I'd have to argue the exact opposite about OS X and wi-fi issues, actually.

Wireless is *always* going to be fraught with issues, because there are so many variables involved. Is a given machine in a given location simply picking up a reflected signal better than other machines do in the same location, perhaps simply because of the shape or position of its antenna? Are you fighting a compatibility issue between different vendors' chipsets? Is it really a problem due to interference from other devices in the area that share the 2.4ghz spectrum (cordless phones or microwave ovens -- maybe owned by someone next-door to you, if not yourself)?

All in all though? I find that I can count on my Apple-branded devices to pretty reliably use a given wi-fi source with minimal hassles. By contrast, I've got a Lenovo Thinkpad running XP Pro sitting right next to me, here at work, that has all kinds of wireless problems. If it's not sitting VERY close to a source, it randomly connects and disconnects, and large file xfers freeze up intermittently.

I think ONE reason some Apple users keep reporting issues is simply because they don't understand the technologies they're using. With the dual-band wireless "n" standard Apple now employs on the Airport Extreme router (and some other companies use, as well), you can optionally connect to your wi-fi router's SSID either on a 2.4Ghz band, or on a 5Ghz band. The 5Ghz band claims to be more "interference free" and capable of transferring data faster, BUT it has a huge down-side of less usable range. I've got one of these at home myself, and if I'm upstairs in a bedroom of the house, the 5Ghz band is the optimal one to connect to and use, if a given Mac or iOS device supports it. But as soon as I go downstairs, the signal level drops off sharply and 5Ghz starts displaying connectivity problems. If I switch to the 2.4Ghz version of the wi-fi signal? It works great again.

Apple is kind of dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

So they are sending themselves the Gold Master of their new OS so they can put it on their App store for download????

Also, why ship disc's period. I know whole heartedly believe that Apple is moving (or returning) to a sealed box approach to computers and I am sure the optical disk will go the way of the Dodo in a generation or two of Mac hardware, so why not bite the bullet and stop shipping an upgrade disc period? Who bought an overpriced Mac but doesn't have broadband Internet access? Install disks are for cheap PC users that bought a $200 PC to run on their free dial-up networking.