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OS X Snow Leopard Details
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Jun 13, 2008 12:05 PM
from the padding-on-little-cold-feet dept.
from the padding-on-little-cold-feet dept.
JD-1027 writes in to kick off a discussion of OS X Snow Leopard. Apple's stated goal: "Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard's enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality." The technologies: Grand Central to get better use of multiple processors and multicore chips, OpenCL to tap the power of the GPU, 64 bit so we can finally have our 16 TB of RAM, QuickTime X for optimized modern codec performance, and built in Exchange support in iCal, Address Book, and Apple Mail that most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments. We've previously discussed ZFS in the server version of Snow Leopard."
Related Stories
[+]
Hardware: ZFS Confirmed In Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard 178 comments
number655321 writes "Apple has confirmed the inclusion of ZFS in the forthcoming OS X Server Snow Leopard. From Apple's site: 'For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots.' CTO of Storage Technologies at Sun Microsystems, Jeff Bonwick, is hosting a discussion on his blog. What does this mean for the 'client' version of OS X Snow Leopard?"
[+]
Khronos Releases OpenCL Spec 115 comments
kpesler writes "Today, the Khronos Group released the OpenCL API specification (which we discussed earlier this year). It provides an open API for executing general-purpose code kernels on GPUs — so-called GPGPU functionality. Initially bolstered by Apple, the API garnered the support of major players including NVIDIA, AMD/ATI, and Intel. Motivated by inclusion in OS X Snow Leopard, the spec was completed in record time — about half a year from the formation of the group to the ratified spec."
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One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh and one more thing, we've already done it and it's going to be in our next release
Then I read posts about "well what about NTFS or Power PC".
Jebezus! get a sense of proportion here. Yeah NTFS might sell a few enterprise computers. So maybe that matter financially. But apple's doing fine with it's cash flow and we won't be talking about NTFS 5 years from now.
We will be talking about the future of computing which is how to tame and unify alternative and multicore architectures in a way the programmer does not need to worry about.
That's earthshaking if it could be done next year! Now a lot of people have blunted there spears chargin at this one so one needs a healthy dose of skepticism that it could be accomplished in a decade let alone in a few months. On the other hand the one person we know not to scoff at when he says he's going to make something complex really simple, retain 99% of it's power, and deliver it ubiquitously and accessibly is Jobs/Apple.
So doubt and wonder. Pour awe and skepticism. But fuck, don't ask about NTFS when this kind of thing is being annouced. You might as well ask about Zune support in Itunes.
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Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Funny)
Well... What about Zune support in iTunes?
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Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Funny)
Lost tribe from central Africa. Members went around squirting each other and throwing chairs to communicate. Unless action is taken, expected extinction in 2010.
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Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Funny)
Single-handedly?
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Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Interesting)
And no, I'm not a switcheur nor a noob. I've used/owned Macs since System 7, I've been using Linux for 8 years now, and I started with DOS 5 on an 80286, and ran every Windows and Mac version from then to current.
XFS is a fast format, ext3 takes a few minutes depending on the size of the partition, and NTFS is a few seconds in quick mode. Quick format has been there for quite a while (even DOS) and without it I always assumed format was zeroing the partition, which is slow of course.
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Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, this misinformed Bumpersticker logic has to stop, and now...
NTFS may be a bit long in the tooth, but it has taken 15 years and ZFS to catch up to NTFS on a number of features. And even with that said, ZFS, still lacks several important features that is just expected to be there by people using NTFS.
Can't believe I'm going to use quick Wiki here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs [wikipedia.org]
If you want 'technical' information, go freaking read the NTFS whitepapers, or even get a academic code release version of how and why it works WITH SOURCE code. There are important reasoning to the technology of NTFS, especially in terms of performance and features just not currently found in ANY OTHER File System made, and this even includes ZFS, that gets close.
Back to the myth. Does the poster know why NTFS will fragment a bit more than older File System technologies? Apparently No...
NTFS has copy of write and snapshot features, this adds to the fragmentation on a volume by the nature of the way snapshots and copy on write operations are handled.
This feature (snapshots/copy on write) is a MAIN FEATURE of ZFS, so if OS X moves to ZFS, it will have the same inherent added fragmentation as NTFS. Whoops, guess you should be making fun of something you are getting as an UPGRADE in terms of features.
1) Microsoft never said NTFS didn't fragment, they said it was less prone to fragmenting that DOS's FAT/FAT32, which is TRUE.
2) Microsoft did state NTFS's fragmentation was not as great of a performance issue compared to FAT/FAT32 because of how NTFS's lookup behavior works, making no additional fragmentatin lookup seeks, like FAT does. This means it can get the file locations and read it in a swipe, even if it is in 1000 fragments.
3) Microsoft has always stated snapshot and copy on write features of NTFS would mean it will always have a bit more fragmentation than 'simpilier' file systems, like OS X and most default Linux installs use today.
Just to recap:
When/if Apple adds ZFS to OS X, its inherent level of fragmentation will be equal to NTFS, because it is the nature of the File System design features of both that prevent this trade off for more advanced features.
Also, people do realize that NO FS is fragmentation free, even the current mainstream file systems in OS X, right?
OS X runs a background defragmentation utility, just like Vista does. There is nothing hard or special about this. (Vista has a low I/O priority added to the inherent NTFS priority abilities, making backgroun operations like defragmenting seamless in terms of performance to the user.)
ZFS is good and finally steps up to the plate on some important and modern File System features long needed. It still is young and lacks inherent encryption, file level quota management, and other little features, but with some good support will be a good alternative to NTFS in the UNIX world. NTFS is far from primative or old in terms of features, as it has been the File System to live up to or beat outside of Microsoft.
However, NTFS is MS Intellectual property and MS probably won't be giving up the code to it anytime soon. I actually wish Sun and Microsoft had a better relationship, as it would be nice to see a unified File System technology across all platforms, and a combination of Sun's ZFS work and NTFS would be a freaking awesome mix of technology in terms of File System features, and performance.
NTFS is nothing to mock, especially when you are responding to an article talking about Snow Leopard getting ZFS which will present the same issue for OS X you are making fun of NTFS for...
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Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Interesting)
And can you point to any standard??
Last time I was checking, only few applications were using Direct X 10. For any kind of productivity more or less everybody uses bunch of wrappers or some commercial library.
The whole point here that there is no standard. And M$ forces everybody to kiss PR ass of Direct X, though literally nobody directly uses it, except for hardware manufacturers (nVidia and ATI). Some proprietary half-arsed spec in .DOCX peppered with implementation details from actual version of Direct X (even is such document exists) hardly qualifies as standard to me.
On other side, Kronos group is something. They are slow on up-take, but generally deliver usable standards industry needs. They are vendor neutral what is also important.
Do not expect anything in particular from OpenCL. I'm pretty sure that it would try to appeal to wider audience - consequently it would be pretty dumb down. But still it would let any developer to access GPU chip. Knowing how Apple does things, with couple of extra objects in one's program and few extra checks on whether you can use GPU, many tasks would get a decent performance boost. It wouldn't be high-end nor exclusive - it would be something for wider audience.
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Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is moving towards ZFS, I just hope they'll start using it in Mac OS X client as well. All the neat features that *do* take up space (like revisions) and which people aren't used to can be easily turned off.
Most of Apple's reconsiderations of UNIX have been made to simplify or streamline what's there. Take launchd, which is their daemon that replaces rc.d and the startup system surrounding it. It was built to work with programs as they worked today. Upstart in Ubuntu was developed to be an entirely new design and work better and as a consequence probably does not work with completely unaltered programs. Tell me honestly: do you think people wouldn't have ragged on Apple for "being Apple" if they had done Upstart instead of launchd?
The problem isn't Apple making up new solutions to problems solved years ago, the problem is thinking these solutions can't be improved. Most (not all) of Apple's own problems in OS X with respect to being a UNIX citizen consists of compatibility junk that they're just now going to get around to dropping. (The newest version of Mac OS X manages to be certified as UNIX compliant, even if it's obviously not Linux certified since a different kernel is used.)
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Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why no-one expects to pay for service packs. Can you imagine the uproar if MS charged for XP SP1/2/3?
The fun part is the counter-argument has always been "This OSX point upgrade has over 200 breathtaking new features!", but here even that doesn't apply; it really is going to be a stability upgrade like a service pack.
No-one but Apple would escape criticism for selling stability, security and performance updates...
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
In reality, all four of these things exist on a continuum. OSX Leopard is very stable, hasn't had any serious security compromises in the wild, and isn't particularly slow either. It stacks up well against the competition. Yet, there have been things around before like BeOS- sure, it had its problems, but it was just blazingly, impressively fast, and it was beautifully, wonderfully responsive. OSX could be like that. And while OSX hasn't been the subject of major security exploits, researchers say the vulnerabilities are out there. And while it rarely kernel crashes, it certainly does sometimes.
So Apple sells an OS with a nice, competitive feature set, great stability, apparently effective security, and decent optimization. They need to decide what to do with their developer time for the next release. If they concentrate on features, they can make approximately $300 million dollars off it in the first week of selling it. If they concentrate on making it super stable, blazingly fast and responsive, or having security like a hardened SELinux or OpenBSD installation, then the attitude is "Why didn't they do that already for free? I'm not paying for that."
That attitude makes short-term profit motivation favor lots of new features with half-assed security, stability, and optimization. It takes someone visionary like Jobs to back of and say "look, we can't make a quick buck off this other stuff like we can some shiny new widgets, but these things have a big impact on user experience, which will affect the long-term viability of our platform, so we're spending money on it anyway."
But if users would just consider features, security, stability, and optimization all as things worth paying for, there'd be a lot more competition to deliver them.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
Consumers don't make such hair-splitting distinctions. The consumer's view is that any aspect of the OS X that prevents applications from being perfectly stable constitutes a defect, and consumers don't like to pay for somebody else's mistake. Consumers would doubtless willing to pay for an upgrade that actually made the applications that they already have run perceptibly faster (which for most people means something like 20% or better) but it is hard to imagine that this is achievable.
So if it is to be a full-price upgrade, Apple needs to have some sort of bonuses up its sleeve, such that the consumer who upgrades will perceive an immediate, easily perceptible benefit.
Knowing Apple, they probably do, they just aren't disclosing it this early.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
We always will be as long as Apple doesn't provide a built-in way to stop dropping dot-file turds all over shared resources.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Informative)
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That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, this attitude of consumers is exactly why companies like Apple and Windows have so far focussed more on building OSes that look good, rather than work well. People want a shiny new thing, not a really efficient, rock solid operating system, because they have got used to crashes, useless error-messages, viruses and spam.
For me, this is the most enthralling idea in the End-User computer market in years. Finally, a company decides it's time to stop adding new eye-candy. Instead, Apple is taking a step back and taking their time to iron out the bugs and add actual innovation.
OpenCL sounds amazing. If it works as advertised, it will give developers who really care about performance the option to tap into the hugely parallel architecture available on the GPU that was inacessible to most of us so far (unless we wanted to learn the obscure proprietary semi-languages of ATI, IBM and nVidia).
Grand Central seems to be just the opposite of this: It will make sure those eight cores we'll soon all have in our machines will actually get used, even if the developers who wrote the programs we run didn't care to think about parallelization.
I'm bying Apple stocks. At a time when Microsoft's developers are once again falling victim to the marketing department (remember when Windows 7 was supposed to be a clean new start?), Apple is taking a bold step in what I think is the right direction.
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Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:4, Insightful)
To add to your mentions of OpenCL and Grand Central, from what I've seen it looks like both will be used in the background for most processes, so by default your system will be sending blocks of instructions to CPU or GPU cores depending on who would get it done faster. This would seriously rock and really increase the power of the system!
I can even see that chip company Apple bought creating specialized chips that can be dropped in place and used by Grand Central and OpenCL automatically without the developer having to worry about it.
I will definitely be purchasing 10.6, if nothing else to show support to a company willing to spend time/resources going back and cleaning up their work. It's something I've always wanted to do after every project I've worked on, but it's something that's nearly impossible to sell to the customer.
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Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple didn't just add bling - they made the operating system more stable and fixed a lot of bugs. So, be fair - we didn't pay $120 for a new dock.
Full list of new features in Leopard: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html [apple.com]
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Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your analogy is flawed. It implies the improvements Apple is making are bug fixes, ie, a missing wheel. What Apple is adding are new technologies. It is more akin to turning around and paying to convert your 2 wheel drive vehicle to all wheel drive, which allows increased performance in off-road conditions. Grand Central is not a bug fix, but it does increase performance for multi-core systems. OpenCL is not a bug fix, but it allows increased performance for applications that have spare GPU cycles. Neither is needed to have a functional and fast system, just as adding all wheel drive and an airfoil are not fixing problems with the car you bought, but do provide improvements to performance and the former may keep your car from bogging down in adverse conditions.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, the boosts in efficiency and stability will be welcome, but I for one am very excited about full Exchange support in iCal and Address Book. Heck, the Exchange support in Mail is a bit spotty as well, so touching that up would be great as well.
But what would really be great (and very much in line with the whole "embracing enterprise" thing) would be native support for Cisco IPsec VPN connections. As it stands, you have to use Cisco's own clunky client; if you could use the built-in client you could connect via a menubar icon. (Shimo does this pretty nicely, but it just became crippleware.)
It seems like an obvious addition, given the iPhone 2.0 OS is supposed to have it. Anyone know if it's on the docket for Snow Leopard?
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Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Interesting)
But what would really be great (and very much in line with the whole "embracing enterprise" thing) would be native support for Cisco IPsec VPN connections. As it stands, you have to use Cisco's own clunky client; if you could use the built-in client you could connect via a menubar icon. (Shimo does this pretty nicely, but it just became crippleware.)
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Sorry. (Score:4, Funny)
Let me get the rest out of my system, so I am not tempted:
o Does it run Linux?
o Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
o Profit!
o In Soviet Russia, post firsts you!
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, Apple has done amazing things with every release of OSX and I look forward to Snow Leopard as much as every other release. I simply didn't read it as something that anyone should treat as a Really Big Deal, even to the point that Jobs barely mentioned it in the keynote, unlike Leopard that got its coming out party twice.
Therefore, if a 10.6 box just appeared in the Apple stores, but didn't get much mention, it would probably be missed by most. Sure it would be pre-installed on new machines, but where would be the hype to get everyone on it as quickly as possible? This is why I was thinking about the 10.0->10.1 upgrade; if this is the first Intel-only release, how would they sell a version that offers no new features, and is unavailable to everyone who doesn't haven an Intel machine? I, personally, wouldn't want to be in the marketing department trying to sell 10.6; if they just make it available as a download, they might ultimately save a lot of $$$ that would have been spent trying to market it, then explain it, correct the marketing, etc.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Interesting)
Or so I've heard.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hahaha. IRIX back then was so buggy I'm amazed that the user experience was as good as it was.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to be a common failure to understand what Apple is claiming they will be adding in snow leopard. From TFA Apple will be adding... "...a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality."
That is, they're adding new technology that will allow for increased performance and stability. An example of this is OpenCL, which will make it easier for software developers to make use of the GPU for miscellaneous computing tasks... thus increasing the performance of those applications. Another new technology is Grand Central, making it easier for developers to get the most out of multi-core processors, again increasing performance and also increasing stability. Yet a third example is the move to 64-bit to allow applications to address more memory, thus increasing performance. You'll note none of these are about fixing performance or stability bugs in OS X; although doubtless Apple will apply them to do that as well.
Hey, if you don't like what is in snow leopard, no one is forcing you to pay for it. Just wait for the next release you do feel is worth the money. Still, I think you are misunderstanding the summary and the blurb. When Leopard was introduced one of the features allowed OpenGL applications to automatically spawn an extra thread to feed the GPU, utilizing a second core even for applications that had not been written to take advantage of it and providing significant performance improvements for many applications. This is more of the same, features being added to increase performance, not bugs being fixed to increase performance.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Interesting)
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10.5.3... (Score:5, Insightful)
10.6 is something I'd be willing to pay for, though. Grand Central and true Intel 64 bitness would be awesome and make this MacBook rock. And as I mentioned earlier ZFS on a multi-disk future Time Capsule appliance would rock my world.
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Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Interesting)
I noticed that 10.5 seemingly has more stability problems than previous versions of OSX since 10.1. Is it unfair?
I don't know if it is unfair but it sure is incorrect. Did you use the Finder from 10.0 through 10.3? It got slightly more stable with 10.4 but it was only 10.5 that a network outage didn't take down most of the Finder.
OSX wasn't even usable until 10.2 and not really preferable until 10.3. (IMO)
Now I will say that 10.5.2 was the first point update that I thought caused tons of problems. I ended up having to reinstall Leopard from scratch and then apply the updates. I haven't had to do that since the old XP SP1 days.
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Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just the Apple mindset, and it's kind of ironic. Apple computers do tend to be well built, and last a good while, but Apple's stance seems to be that everyone should always be buying the latest and greatest, and that you should ALWAYS have their latest OS release.
Look at software applications for example. Many of them already now require OS X 10.5 or newer. My PowerPC mac runs 10.4 and I have no intention of upgrading it, so I'm shut out of those applications completely (except for older versions). Windows software on the other hand: most stuff out there now will work at least as far back as Windows 2000. Not as much, but still a lot of stuff will work back to Windows 98 and some ever Windows 95.
Basically just accept: if you want to be part of the Mac club, Apple expects you to be regularly dishing out cash for their stuff.
For what it's worth, I do thoroughly enjoy using a Mac (though I have Windows and Linux systems too). I just am not happy being forced to move up from 10.4 to 10.5 when I didn't want to at the time.
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Re:Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:5, Informative)
There's also the case where many of Apple's own applications work in much the same way (the newest version of Safari for example, requires not only 10.5, but 10.5.2).
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End of PowerPC Support? (Score:5, Informative)
A good analysis of this decision can be read at RoughlyDrafted Magazine [roughlydrafted.com].
Re:End of PowerPC Support? (Score:5, Insightful)
They still have to maintain a port of Mac OS X just in case, and the also have to keep OS X running on the iPhone (Strong ARM) so I don't see the benefit of focussing just on Intel CPUs. In addition, keeping code running on PPC will help with keeping bugs down as it is often the case that just the act of compiling C code for a different architecture can result in unseen bugs showing up. As for performance tuning, rarely do you need to worry about much more than some small parts of the code to fine tune for a specific platform.
I'm not surprised that this developer preview is Intel only but I will be surprised to see the final release be Intel only. Leopard on PPC could no doubt do with some fine tuning although it does run surprisingly well on my nearly five year old G4 iBook. Besides which, the last of the PPC machines were being sold by Apple as late as the end of 2006 (PowerMac G5s) so I think it would be a bad move for them to drop support this early.
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Re:End of PowerPC Support? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Kick the Finder. (Score:5, Insightful)
After years of complaints from OS 9 and OS X users about the Finder Apple should confess to the difficult reality that - for many, not all - it is a major bottleneck to ease-of-use and therefore adoption. Students of mine - in general - spend far too much time second-guessing OS X where file and software management is concerned. Why are users' *losing* software and files so often that they need a *Finder*? Why are they so dependent on Spotlight that OS X might as well house all files in a flat-file-system? Why does the parent-window of an application still dominate the core navigation context even when minimised? This stuff confuses and frustrates people far too often I think.
It may not be the case for pro-users but I see students of mine spending far too much time clicking and dragging windows around in the course of trying to find and get stuff done on OS X.
My 2 clicks.
Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:How about NTFS read-write? (Score:4, Informative)
If this is your situation, speed is not your primary concern, it's interoperability. That's where MacFUSE comes into play. Sure it won't access that NTFS drive as fast as Windows would, but so what. With MacFUSE, you can access just about *anything* in *any format*. Got a ext3 filesystem? MacFUSE reads/writes that too.
Just because Apple doesn't provide it doesn't mean it can't be done.
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Re:Yeah, if the Winbox and Mac are separate machin (Score:5, Insightful)
The GP was referring to a 'coporate' environment. It's pretty rare to have dual boot machines, it's either one or the other, with networked resources. If you want to dual boot, your data would still be stored on remote servers and accessed via CIFS/whatever in a corporate environment anyway.
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Re:To wait or not to wait (Score:4, Funny)
XP to Vista, arguably, was a more minor upgrade. (And, I use the term "upgrade" very loosely. That should be good for a few mod points.)
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Re:To wait or not to wait (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:To wait or not to wait (Score:5, Informative)
10.0 - March 24, 2001
10.1 - September 25, 2001
10.2 - August 23, 2002
10.3 - October 24, 2003
10.4 - April 29, 2005
10.5 - October 26, 2007
That's 6 months, 11 months, 14 months, 18 months, 30 months.
Heck looking at Wiki, Apple has always kept a relatively short release time (Nothing as short linux kernels, but absolutely nothing as long as Microsoft)
1.0 - Jan 84
2.0 - Apr 85
3.0 - Jan 86
4.0 - Mar 87
5.0 - ???
6.0 - Apr 88
7.0 - Jun 91
8.0 - July 97
9.0 - Oct 99
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Re:Who is in charge of codenames at Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
Batman: Shut up. It's just 10.6, dude.
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Re:Who is in charge of codenames at Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
For the end user, it sounds like Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade. With bug fixes, performance enhancements, etc. It's a 10.5 -> 10.6 upgrade. Perhaps that's why they have a minor name change, from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
Or maybe they started following the Ubuntu naming Model. Let's see, is Hardy Hippo the same thing as Ubuntu 7.06 or what?
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Re:Microsoft will never do this (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure many slashdotters have shared in the experience of a project rewrite that ended up bigger, buggier, and all around worse than the system or project it replaced...
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Re:Why did Apple ever go 32-bit x86 anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple can't "go back" to something it never went away from. Tiger had limited support for 64-bit code, whether on PPC or x86, and Leopard had 64-bit versions of most of its userland libraries. The Snow Leopard page doesn't say much about what's being done other than "Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM - up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today."
Some of the PowerPC machines were 64-bit. The notebooks and the Mac mini were 32-bit.
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Re:first post (Score:5, Funny)
Translation: "Let's see if we can distract Mac owners from the fact that the recent Apple developer conference produced no new upgrades, no new hardware, no Jobs-ian announcements on OSX, just iPhonery."
Translation: "We're an iPhone company now"
Translation: "We've put off any serious work on OS X for eleven months"
Translation: "We're hoping to bugfix some of the the low-level tweaks promised for Leopard and finally get them out the door... if we're not too busy with the iPhone."
Translation: "We really might be able to fix those bugs..."
Translation: "Yet another feature, like resolution independent graphics, that didn't make it into Leopard, because we were way too busy with the iPhone. But we might have it for you in a year. Read-only, of course. And not turned on by default. For developers only. And only in beta, of course. Use this feature at your own risk."
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Re:first post (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got five Macs. My daily driver is an 8GB, 8-core Intel Mac Pro [flickr.com]. My carry along a is loaded dual-core Macbook pro. Both are typically running linux, windows, and OSX all at once. I write graphics software for a living. Powerful graphics software, written at the metal level. I'm all for multicore/multiprocessor at the OS level; the easier, the better, and likewise, multi-machine for even bigger jobs. However, this does not change the fact that Apple is mostly doing iPhone work, and that not adding obvious consumer-level goodies to OS X will cost them dearly -- which they don't care about, because -- wait for it -- they're all about the iPhone now. I meant the post to be funny, all right, but only because it's true.
The very idea that low level improvements and bugfixes precludes feature addition at the GUI/high level is absurd, and if anyone at Apple had half a brain focused on the Mac, they'd never have said anything like that, or even implied it.
OS "features" can be as simple as adding a nice set of programs to the stable. Things like a decent personal finance manager. Wouldn't affect system stability one whit, but it'd increase the value of the Mac to the first time buyer by quite a bit. How about a nice, basic paint program? Or a set of kids coloring books / tools? A basic expert system? Lots of middle to high end users could use one, and heck, they're not that difficult to write. I wrote one in python that, minus the knowledge base, isn't even 10k and you'd be blinking amazed at how much it knows about rocks and minerals, and how well it can generalize and leap to conclusions. How about including a language teacher? How about a finder with a decent feature set? Something like... Pathfinder - buy it, maybe tweak it, and ship it. That would be @#$%^&*$ awesome. Heck, I'd probably pee right down my leg if they simply shipped a working, color version of midnight commander (a findery thing for shellfolk.)
See where I'm going here? Put an expert programmer in a corner, say "make a COOL one of these apps" and leave them be. In a year, if you don't have something really cool, the programmer should be shot. Total investment, one programmer's salary. Put ten programmers to ten tasks, watch em decently, and in a year, you'd have ten new selling points that had ZERO to do with OS stability, etc. Or just reach out the the Mac community and buy a few things, again, there are tons of them out there and I can assure you that many of them could be had for what amounts to peanuts. And also as we know, Apple's got more than peanuts in its pocket, and dropping a few million on programmers and/or acquisitions isn't a problem if they simply want to. So when they say "no features for you", what they're telling you is, "we're not going to exert ourselves on your behalf." They're not saying why... but just wake up and smell the iPhone marketing, man.
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