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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.'"
...as opposed to? An analogue download?
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?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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
Pay attention! Xcode 4.x is free from the Mac App Store if you are running Lion. They said this 2 weeks ago.
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.
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).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
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.
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
$ 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
Apple contributed a lot of changes upstream, but they were not merged. At some point, they stopped and decided to focus on LLVM instead.
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.
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$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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.