Apple Expected to Demo Leopard Successor Next Week

4roddas writes "Reports circulated Wednesday that Apple may demo the next iteration of Mac OS X next week or even release code to developers in preparation for an early-2009 launch. According to an account on Mac enthusiast site TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), Apple may provide early copies of Mac OS X 10.6 at next week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which opens Monday and runs through next Friday in San Francisco. Mac OS X 10.6 will run on Intel-based hardware only, said TUAW, and so will mark the ditching of support for the older PowerPC processor-equipped Macs. Apple announced it would shift to Intel processors three years ago, and unveiled the first systems in January 2006; most analysts have said that move is largely behind the reason for Apple's renewed success selling personal computers. It has never disclosed how long it would support the PowerPC with OS upgrades, however. Ars Technica also weighed in Wednesday on Mac OS X 10.6; its sources pegged with OS with the code name 'Snow Leopard.'"

PA Semi?

OK, maybe Apple is coming out with a preview of a 10.6 next week, but I can't imagine them dropping PowerPC support. Why? They just bought a company that specializes in PPC chips for several hundred million dollars. So why in the world would they put the OS X ecosystem on a course to only support Intel? I doubt this is the plan. 1. Buy PowerPC design company. 2. Stop making your software compatible with PPC 3. Profit!

OS Code Names

Why do people insist on referring to their Mac OS with a code name instead of a number? I have no clue what version of the Mac OS Tiger was versus Puma but I can easily figure out if 10.4 is newer than 10.2.

Re:Hmm

Apparently, they may be going to Y. They may even go to Z. And, according to a non-authoritative source, they may even bypass Y and Z and go to AA.

In other news, it may rain tomorrow. Or, it may not. And I may be having sex with your sister. But then, maybe I'm not.

That's it... I'm going into journalism. This is just way too easy!

Re:Hmm

Have fun with the clap!

Only kidding. My sisters are actually men though. Seriously. Even the married one.

Re:Not a surprise

Explain this "Fiasco". Every feature they said would be there has worked for me.

This isn't XP vs Vista, sounds more like "Waiter my soup was at 121F when I specifically asked for it at 120.4F. (49.4444444C and 49.1666667C to our international readers)

Re:Not a surprise

It's the same "fiasco" that the Tiger release was, according to people on the Internet. For every major Mac OS release, some people have problems, some of them quite serious, and these dominate Mac discussion forums for months. Nobody ever collects any statistics from the general user population that would allow us to determine whether one release was better or worse than another, and the general user population is not well-represented in Mac discussion forums.

On a side note, I have personally found it very interesting to watch the way people on Mac forums approach problems versus Windows or Linux users. Often there is an implicit assumption that any problem encountered is an OS bug (sometimes even if nobody else can be found who is experiencing the same problem) and you see demands that it be fixed in the next release. Possibly this is because a high proportion of the problems experienced by Mac users are indeed OS bugs.

Re:Not a surprise

Ditching PowerPC is an interesting choice though - it basically means that third-party developers won't be able to use any of the new features in 10.6 without abandoning a big chunk of their potential market.

Which is precisely why the PPC ditch for 10.6 is unlikely and simply a rumor to fuel hits to websites. Like the abandoning of 32-bit altogether.... Apple's not in the habit of abandoning platforms sold less than 3 years ago. Why would they all of a sudden start now? I don't doubt there's going to be a new OS on the horizon (for perhaps 2009 or so), but the "facts" associated with this 10.6 rumor are way beyond the usual... And Apple's predictable when it comes to keeping as much of their market in tow as they possibly can...

10.5.0

I didn't have any real problems with 10.5.0. I got my copy on release day, backed up my data, wiped the partition on my MacBook, and installed from scratch instead of upgrading from Tiger. Ask the ones who had problems if they upgraded or did a fresh install.

Re:10.5.0

Agreed. I wasn't paying attention when I installed Leopard at first, and it was installed as an upgrade, and I had a buggy, machine-freezing mess. Graphics glitches, everything. I imagine it also had to do with the fact that the update didn't disable Parallels (which was, judging by their track record, probably wholly incompatible with Leopard upon launch.)

Removed that, reinstalled as "Archive and Install," and the experience has been much better. And since 10.5.3 the appearance of the beachball has been much, much less frequent. Oh, and this is completely off topic: to anyone wondering whether to ditch Parallels in favor of VMWare Fusion. Yes. Go for it. Especially if you're using it with Boot Camp. Like night and day.

Re:Not a surprise

Okay some people were affected by a handful of real nasties, but I bought it the day it came out, was working 18 hours a day at the time on a product release on both a G4 and and Intel machine, and only noticed very minor issues.

To compare it to 10.0 is hyperbole.

Re:Apple may or may not do something next week

A new release of the largest commercial Unix OS isn't geek news? I mean, it's not Linux but at least it's not Windows...

No, I'm New Here

No, I'm New Here

Re:No, I'm New Here

Wow, -1 Funny. You've invented anti-funny which I think that can trigger outbursts of straight-faced ness. That's quite an achievement.

Re:Apple may or may not do something next week

I didn't know pretentious teenagers were "normal people."

I know you were trying to be funny, but think about that for a sec...

Re:Apple may or may not do something next week

I was a windows and IE loving Web Developer when I first saw a Beta of OS X. I finally gave into my employers insistence that I use a Mac cause I liked the idea of improving my Unix skills which were barely adequate for deploying code releases. Within 2 years I had strong Unix/Linux skills and had quadrupled my salary. I have continued to expand my knowledge and reap the benefits of it. Does that make me pretentious?

Re:MacOS for PC's

BeOS tried that. NeXT tried that. IBM (OS/2) tried that. It doesn't work.

Re:MacOS for PC's

Well at least one person on Slashdot gets it. There is more than one business model in the world - not everything has to be done like Microsoft, nor like Linux. Apple does it their way, for good or bad, it makes a shit load of money for their shareholders.

Re:MacOS for PC's

"They release MacOS X only for Macs. Is there a reason why they don't release it for regular PC's?"

1) It avoids treading on Microsoft's toes. Mac versions of MS Office help to sell lot of Apple machines, so pissing the Redmond Gorilla off by competing with them in the commodity OS market wouldn't be a particularly good idea.

2) Apple tried it in the past, and ended up losing far more from lost sales revenue to clone makers than they were earning by licensing the OS. This was therefore one of the first things Jobs killed off when he took over at Apple, so it's unlikely he'd want to risk the same thing happening again.

Re:MacOS for PC's

Yes.

No really, the answer to all your questions are "yes". You seem to understand the situation so I'm not sure why you're asking.

Q:Is there a reason why they don't release it for regular PC's?
A:Yes, there are a couple reasons, at least. You give two of them later on.

Q:Is it because they'd like people to buy Mac hardware along with the OS?
A:Yes. Apple makes most of its money selling hardware. That's the business they're in. OSX and iLife are largely built to be enticements to buy their hardware, just as the iTMS was created to encourage people to buy iPods.

Q:But maybe there would be more Mac OS's sold if they also made a version for regular PC's?
A:Yes, there would most surely be more sales of OSX. The question is, would the increased profits from OSX be enough to make up for the lost hardware sales? The answer is "probably not".

Q:Or maybe they do it because there are less possible compatibility problems if they only make it for their own Mac hardware, because PC's are too customizable?
A:Yes, that's another problem with supporting generic PCs-- you're going to have to support every little piece of crappy hardware anyone wants to buy. Worse yet, you're going to have to deal with the fact that a lot of that hardware comes with poorly-written drivers that will crash your system. The fact is that a *lot* of instability that people see on Windows is driver-related. By being both the OS developer and the systems integrator, Apple gets a level of stability that would otherwise be much more difficult to reach.

Re:Slow down, Apple...

Either get Leopard solid, stable, and most importantly, *fast* before you move onto the next OS (unless Snow Leopard addresses a lot of these issues).

RTF arstechnica A : "it will not contain major OS changes. Instead, the release is heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability."

I'm too cheap

I don't need another paid release so soon. I don't care to spend $100 a year for my OS. If Microsoft tried that stunt people would be eating them for lunch

Re:Slow down, Apple...

Either get Leopard solid, stable, and most importantly, *fast* before you move onto the next OS (unless Snow Leopard addresses a lot of these issues).

Actually, according to all rumors about "Snow Leopard", those are exactly the issues that it's supposed to address. That's the entire rumor about Snow Leopard, that it's going to be a quick release that won't add much in the way of features, but it will be cleaning out legacy code, squashing bugs, and making the whole thing run fast. Some people have also noted that the last time Apple did this (10.1) the upgrade was free.

Re:Linux

Not yet, but it will. The Cocoa/Linux Integration Framework (CLIF) is a project (currently in alpha) based on GNUStep, but with a goal of source *and* binary compatability with OS X/Cocoa. There's a lot of work and some kernel modules may be needed, but we're optimistic at the current progress.

Re:BOO, Apple!

So this leaves a great number of PowerPC hardware owners with a bunch of very nice bookends?

Yes, because, as we all know, when 10.6 is released, everything else just suddenly stops working. Completely.

It may (rumors, remember) leave PowerPCs unsupported. But that is an inevtiability, anyway.

Re:BOO, Apple!

Run Linux, you will probably never have to worry about the next version being unavailable for your preferred hardware platform!

And instead, you can worry about drivers never being available for your cards, peripherals, etc.