OS X Snow Leopard Details 489
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."
One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow! great decision (Score:3, 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.
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.
Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Grand Central -- details, anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm. Last I checked AIX and Solaris and HP-UX supported 128 CPUs or more. They all scale pretty well. So either he's talking about the desktop OS, where more than 2 CPUs is pretty new, or there's something new here.
I'd guess that it's not really something new; the basic problem of making programming for multiple CPUs "easy" has been around since the 1980s and it's still not "easy" -- oddly enough, you still have to think about concurrency, locks, multiple threads, etc.
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.
Re:One wonders... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lack of PowerPC support? (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
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...
Re:Why did Apple ever go 32-bit x86 anyway? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:End of PowerPC Support? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One wonders... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously: like it or not stability and performance _are_ features. It's just that they are vague enough and lied about enough that people don't like paying for them. Yet they pay for them anyways: in trouble and time. Just because you expect them to be there doesn't mean they are. I've spent far too much time struggling with buggy software to believe otherwise.
I noticed that 10.5 seemingly has more stability problems than previous versions of OSX since 10.1. Is it unfair? Maybe. Whatever: I'm glad Apple is going to focus on stability for a year. If that's what it costs in manpower, and they succeed in stabilizing things, I'm willing to pay for it. If you're not... enjoy your buggy system. It is what it is, right?
Cheers.
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.
Re:Why did Apple ever go 32-bit x86 anyway? (Score:2, Insightful)
When you sell as many portables as Apple does, that's an issue.
So the choice was either hobble along on the old-and-outclassed G4 for another year waiting for Intel (because there was just no way a G5 was ever going to shoehorn into a Powerbook), or endure a few years of mixed code.
Don't forget: Dropping PPC! (Score:3, Insightful)
The last Power Mac G5s were released in late 2005 and weren't replaced by the Mac Pro until late 2006.
The last revision to the PowerBook line was also released in late 2005. I'm still very happy running 10.5 on my 12" PowerBook G4/1.33Ghz from early 2004.
The last iBook came out in mid-2005, replaced in mid-2006. The last PowerPC iMac was released in late 2005. We have 10.5 happily running on my wife's 12" iBook G4/1GHz from 2003 as our kitchen TV.
It's pretty shitty that Apple is dropping support for machines less than 4 years old, and older machines that run 10.5 very well. It's especially galling that they are dropping support with a release that sounds like it should really be a free service pack or point release to 10.5 anyway.
Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple in particular has been steadily improving the inner workings of OSX, not just adding new layers of shine and sticking it in a box. They do love their shine, no doubt, but there's been plenty of new stuff under the hood with just about every release as well.
Re:Don't forget: Dropping PPC! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait till the rumor is actually confirmed before complaining about it. The developer preview doesn't support it... yet. We still don't know if they plan on PPC for the final version, or if we do we signed an NDA.
Where is Adam Smith when we need him? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Insightful)
Charging for stability is not going to go over well with consumers, because lack of stability is a product flaw, and consumers do not appreciate being charged for fixing a product flaw. People will certainly pay for improved speed, but it needs to be enough of an improvement to make a difference.
Of course, Snow Leopard is still some time away, and this is a conference geared to developers, not consumers. If Apple is planning some new applications or other features to add value from the consumer's point of view, there is no reason why they would disclose it at this time, and give the competition a head start on matching them.
Re:Where is Adam Smith when we need him? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:4, Insightful)
In recent times, there has been no end to proposed tools and languages to help express parallelism. These are made by extremely bright people, and many have some neat and interesting features. However, so far, few people can really take advantage of them. Experts can design programs on them and use them, but these experts are a far cry from your run of the mill people. These are not the programmers you can hire for $40k or even $80k oftentimes.
New technologies are needed to take advantage of parallel computing. However these technologies must be as easy to use as Visual C++ is (really it needs to be as easy as VB, but that's another story). So far they all have problems, and a programmer cannot have a serial mindset when programming these architectures. Unfortunately, the brain does not seem to be very good at expressing parallelism, and the tools we currently have do not do enough to prevent developers from shooting off their legs.
Will these new technologies be useful in snow leopard? Possibly, they will probably be used in Quicktime, and some of Apple's video software. It's possible that open source video codecs might take advantage of them, but that depends on whether people make research projects out of them. Photoshop might make use of it for some of their operations, but don't expect everything to be done that way, as it's expensive to rewrite complex algorithms in parallel.
I just laugh when I read everyone clamoring about how this technology will change the world... It is a step in the right direction, but there is no panacea to make parallel programming easy. The first step involves making libraries of many of the compute intensive functions available to programmers. Joe programmer can call library routines. . . at least if they fit into normal programming paradigms. Expect these libraries to be expensive though. Writing highly parallel optimized code to do the compute intensive operations people need is expensive. The experts capable of doing it are extremely expensive, and it isn't like they can do this work overnight, or in a week sometimes. Also, expect HDL coders to be in demand. They understand parallelism and might be capable of using these new tools.
Phil
Re:End of PowerPC Support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's why I'm going to buy it. (Score:1, Insightful)
They can add all the reflections they want, I don't really care. But claiming the upgrade is just a new theme is just ignorant.
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Insightful)
And if Microsoft took some time off from releasing half-baked features and put some time into kernel stability and overall security, I might buy one of their products again.
I'm not trying to flame bait here, but IMHO Windows isn't getting fixed because it's not broken to MS. Broken to them is "it stopped making money," not "there's a new 0-day vulnerability."
Re:Streamline It Simple Again (Score:4, Insightful)
The success of the Wii owes much to Nintendo's brave (but wise) decision to persue a completely new customer base and leave the adolescent male (of all ages) market to MS and Sony.
The problem with the established PC/Mac market is that a big chunk of it have established skills and don't want (or don't think they want) a radical new GUI - they want a better way of running MS Office.
Its also worth wondering why the original Apple (after Xerox) GUI caught on. Now, I'm not going to dismiss all the psychology about desktop metaphors, but the big obvious factor that seems to get overlooked is simply this:
Before MacOS and Win3.1, if you wanted to (say) quit an application, it might be :q! or Ctrl-X-C or Ctrl-K-Q or Esc-X or /Q or /X or /E or QUIT or EXIT or BYE or. ESC and 9 from the menu or... Every fricking program was different. The IP wars of the time were not over software patents, they were over "look and feel" copyright of the basic menu structures.
After MacOS/Win3.1 it was File -> Exit. Ditto for Open, Save, Print... and the resulting dialogue boxes were all common, too. Instead of having to RTFM simply to find out how to open a file, everything worked the same way. It didn't matter if it was logically inconsistent to have "Exit" on the "File" menu you only had to find out once!
One problem now is we've drifted back to the application-specific GUI, as everybody invents their own system of dockable palettes, customizable tool bars, drawers, panes and other guff...
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.
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:One wonders... (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you think that anyone is going to force people to buy Snow Leopard? It's not like Apple is instantly dropping support for Leopard. So, you're right. The average Safari/iTunes/Word user won't buy Snow Leopard. They don't need to and nobody is going to rough them up.
Actually, you bring up an interesting point. Do you run OS X? I'm curious how many "end users" are the ones complaining. I run Tiger, no one made me buy Leopard and I haven't. I don't mind that Apple decided to focus that next release on new core technologies Grand Central, OpenCL, performance, reduced foot print, stability and MS Exchange interoperability. We don't even know what Snow Leopard will cost or what the upgrade policy will be. Somehow I can't bring myself to be outraged quite yet. Must be the tasty Kool-Aid.
And without the perpetual tribalism, overreactions and histrionics, this would not be Slashdot.
Re:Jubeezus Folks get a grip (Score:3, Insightful)
DirectX 9. In a few years, if Vista is successful as past incarnations of Windows, DirectX 10.
I'll assume what you are saying is that everyone wraps the various APIs via internal or platform agnostic middleware. Because DirectX and OpenGL are both important, and neither can be done away with if you want to work on all platforms.
Re:One wonders... (Score:4, Insightful)
Numerous people claimed Apple was fixing problems with OS X's stability and performance, although this is not what Apple's information released so far says. That's a failure to understand what Apple did say.
They should pay? Says who? Apple hasn't even said if they're charging for this and if they are, does that force people to buy it? If you don't like it, vote with your wallet and don't buy it, just like many people aren't buying Vista. At least for people buying new computers this one will be an improvement in speed and stability and presumably will not introduce and anti-features like Vista has. I can see complaining because you're buying a new computer and can only get it with Vista, which is inferior for your needs. What's the complaint if you can only get a new Mac with snow leopard?
Everyone has a use for faster response times and better multitasking and use of resources. Still, if people don't think it is worth $X.XX, they can just not pay for it. Where's the problem?
Maybe, maybe not. MS is an interesting case because they have a monopoly and a lot of people have no viable alternatives to paying them to run applications they need as the result of certain illegal acts. That said, so long as the majority of critical programs still run on XP, who cares what MS releases and suggests we pay for?
Congrats. You combined a straw man argument with an argument by association. It takes skill to wedge two logical fallacies into one sentence. If you look at my posting history, I call out Apple for all sorts of things they do that I feel are improper. This just isn't on of them. Heck, before they announced snow leopard I read people complaining of forums that Apple should stop adding features and focus on optimizing and refactoring code. Personally, I wish they'd focus on certain new features instead, but we don't all get what we want. When snow leopard comes out I'll decide if it is worth whatever Apple charges for it. It's not like people have to buy something just because Apple makes it you know.
Re:One wonders... (Score:1, Insightful)
Apple can get Mac OS X into corporate environment (Score:2, Insightful)
As the person responsible for a 4,400 desktop environment and as someone who deeply, deeply dislikes Microsoft, I can tell Apple in one sentence how to get Mac OS X into my environment....
Let me run it on non-Apple hardware.
I have a collection of Dell Optiplexes, HP dc7700 desktops, and a bunch of MPC 4x4 all-in-one systems. I would gladly, and with executive support I believe, pilot a Windows to OS X project on a few hundred systems within a quarter of that ability coming available.
Re:Apple can get Mac OS X into corporate environme (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone has that one thing that keeps them from buying Apple products. ("real" video card in iMac, video camera on iPhone, etc.)
You already have an option. What's wrong with:
I have a collection of Dell Optiplexes, HP dc7700 desktops, and a bunch of MPC 4x4 all-in-one systems. I would gladly, and with executive support I believe, pilot a Windows to Linux project on a few hundred systems within a quarter of that ability coming available.
Re:Apple can get Mac OS X into corporate environme (Score:1, Insightful)
Your problem is, like most people, you fail to realize that Apple is a hardware company.
Yes, they make OS X, and that's why people buy their hardware, but that's not where they make their profits. If they let people run OS X on non-Apple hardware, they'd go belly up very quickly.
Re:first post (Score:3, Insightful)
Pshaw. Means they're just done screwing with the interface for a while. They have a stable and useful user experience in 10.5.3. It'll get a few tweaks along the line, 10.5.3 changed Spaces considerably. They're also talking about major architectural changes to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the hardware. You may not care about optimizing for multiple cores or offloading processing to the GPU, but the bioinformatics people who run racks full of Xservs in a compute farm were dancing in the aisles at WWDC.
>most likely will help get Macs into corporate environments
Licensing full Exchange support sure as hell will. The return of VB support in MS Office a year or so after 10.6 comes out will also help enormously. The Active Directory support keeps getting better and better every release too. With, again, more stuff licensed from Microsoft Apple will be able to play in the enterprise.
It's easier to be funny when you have a clue.
I'll give you the bug fixes though. Adding a new hardware platform did disrupt 10.5 and increased their bug rate as Apple tries to manage a common codebase for two very different platforms. Arguably, 10.5.3 represents where Leopard should have been at release, and could have been but for the iPhone. They're late, but catching up.
10.5.3 is full ready for use if you haven't switched yet, Check the remaining issues before committing though, there are (always) some bugs left.
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.
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.)
Re:One wonders... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because 10.4 introduced a whole pile of core services that made developer's jobs easier and apps more powerful. A lot of developers decided they wanted to use the services so the new versions are not backwards compatible.
Not many, actually. Just ones that use CoreAnimation or Time Machine (the new bits in 10.5).
Mostly I think they just want developers to take advantage of new tech, where appropriate, so users get better apps and OS X's reputation and overall experience increase (getting them more Mac sales). Apple doesn't make much selling OS X upgrades.
No. Application developers, in practice, make you pay for it, if you want to run the latest version of something they're offering (as of 10.5). For 10.6, it sounds like most of the new technologies they're adding will work for older applications, even if the developer does nothing (and thus won't break backwards compatibility). We'll have to wait and see.