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Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August 519

Posted by samzenpus from the new-kitty dept.
Max Fomitchev writes "Looks like Apple is going to reveal its new cool and fast Mac OS code-named 'Leopard' in the upcoming World Developer's Conference in August. Good news for Apple! And terrible news for Microsoft. If 'Leopard' is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
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Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August More

Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August

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  • More Speculation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Thursday July 06, 2006 @07:52AM (#15666017) Journal
    There's not a lot of meat to this article other than "here comes Leopard!" This tech blog seems to state the obvious and then say perhaps five times ... so I'll throw down some speculation as this article [osopinion.com] points out.

    Way back in the day, Apple code named their boxes by color. From the aforementioned article:
    Red Box (for those that don't remember), was said to be a compatibility environment where Windows apps ran on the Macintosh but did so within a separate Windows installation. Apple doesn't have to reverse engineer the Windows API (like WINE) to get this functionality and theoretically upset Microsoft. Rather, it could simply be based on a standard copy of Windows. Red Box would override Windows native interface when run on OS X and would incorporate OS X's Aqua user Interface in the place of the Windows UI. The software would then make the two environments (Mac and Windows) functionally seamless with one another. Unlike a virtual environment, the end result would be full compatibility while retaining both visual as well as functional usability for the Mac user.
    So we can speculate that Leopard might not only be fast but also encourage a partitioned Windows installation using boot camp so that it can reference everything within Windows and run Windows apps flawlessly without having to reboot or (more importantly) reverse engineer Windows.

    Again, this is just speculation, I've been expecting them to put 'red box' functionality in a release of OS X soon.

    • Re:More Speculation (Score:2, Insightful)

      by vought ( 160908 )
      There's not a lot of meat to this article other than "here comes Leopard!"

      There's nothing at all in the article on Fomitchev's site that wasn't common knowledge weeks ago. Apple itself announced Leopard's unveiling over a week ago.

      Another self-promoting Slashdot submission! Submitted by Fomitchev, about Fmoitchev's blurb on Fomitchev's blog, which links to a short article that is hardly newsworthy.

      Someone tell me why I should pony up to be a subscriber again? Even at the low, low price of free, Slashdot's n

      • Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Funny)

        by ZachPruckowski ( 918562 ) <zachary.pruckowski@gmail.com> on Thursday July 06, 2006 @10:10AM (#15666721)
        I've known this for weeks as well, but when you get down to it, it's the discussion that matters. Sites like macrumors or digg (which had this story a week ago) have discussion ranging from "OMG!!1!! Teh Steveness!!" to "It'll have 4D graphics and ship two days after WWDC!!". On /. there will be discussion based on more reasonable features, and identify technical hurdles.

        • Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Insightful)

          by anethema ( 99553 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @10:51AM (#15667002) Homepage
          I'd say mod parent up here because this is important.

          Slashdot stories are almost always links to blogs which links to reprints of stories. Half of them are uninterestingly written or contain nearly no information. BUT

          Even if there was no link, if it was just a headline: Apple to soon release OSX Leopard!...without even an article..it wouldnt matter because slashdot is about the discussion. I want to see what people think about leopard..i want to see people uncovering cool features that arent mentioned in most stories..i want beta testers to come forward and tell about their experiances...THIS is why slashdot is great. Much more interesting than sites with many stories, but no usable forum to speak of. (digg,etc)

          That beeing said, I have no idea why anyone would subscribe. I just block ads and get the stories ad-free anyways. And as for seeing them early...who to discuss with..yourself?

    • Re:More Speculation (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:01AM (#15666051)
      It certainly makes a lot more sense for them to just use a Windows installation. If they do that, Microsoft is likely to be okay with it since it means they'll sell more copies of Windows. If Apple reverse engineered the Windows API, Microsoft would probably make "improvements" to it out of spite, to cause things to break when run on the Mac's reverse-engineered API.

      That's probably also why Apple didn't reverse engineer MAPI so Mail.app could talk to Exchange, choosing instead to screen-scrape Outlook Web Access.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:17AM (#15666111)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • IBM tried this already with OS/2, it failed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by AHumbleOpinion ( 546848 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @11:08AM (#15667144) Homepage
          Actually, I'd say that implementing Win32 on Mac OS X would be a way that Apple could screw Microsoft, but good. A second implementation would freeze it: "Why aren't you using the normal win32? I want to use your app on my Mac!"

          This was already tried with IBM OS/2 and it failed, and IBM was even requiring that users have a real copy of Windows. The future is vitualization and being able to run any version or patch of Windows. BootCamp is cool but it is temporary.
      • I don't really see Microsoft's updating of the API to be much of a problem for Apple. For one thing, a change that important would only come in as part of a new Windows version, something that Microsoft is not going to do overnight. Furthermore, it's going to take a lot more work for them to change the API than it would to change Red Box itself. It's the difference between a whole OS release and an update patch to a piece of software. Finally... The software makers will actually have to utilize the new

      • Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Insightful)

        by drsmithy ( 35869 )
        If Apple reverse engineered the Windows API, Microsoft would probably make "improvements" to it out of spite, to cause things to break when run on the Mac's reverse-engineered API.

        Did you even stop for a second to think how idiotic - not to mention unlikely, bordering on impossible - this idea is ?

        • Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Informative)

          by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @09:33AM (#15666502) Homepage
          Obviously written by someone who never used OS/2. Microsoft went out of their way to sabotage OS/2 by "enhancing" Windows in ways that would be difficult or impossible for IBM to emulate.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
            Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Informative)

            by drsmithy ( 35869 )
            Obviously written by someone who never used OS/2.

            I used OS/2 extensively. Indeed, I've still got my original media for several versions at home.

            Microsoft went out of their way to sabotage OS/2 by "enhancing" Windows in ways that would be difficult or impossible for IBM to emulate.

            No, they didn't. You have no idea what you're talking about (or think you are).

            IBM didn't "emulate" Windows in OS/2, they used their licensed source code for the Win16 API. Later releases (when the code licensing no longer

      • Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Informative)

        by macshome ( 818789 )
        Mail.app uses IMAP for it's Exchange connectivity.

        • Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Interesting)

          by NixLuver ( 693391 )
          Heh... Entourage uses OWA in the event your Exchange admins block IMAP. So even MICROSOFT won't reverse engineer MAPI for the Mac. Perhaps that's because the Mac versions of office already 'feel' much nicer than their Windows counterparts; Entourage would be a 'hands-down' Outlook killer if it wasn't for the connection issues that it imposes on one. Gotta wonder what kinda politics go on between the Mac development crew at MS and the Windows crew.

      • Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06, 2006 @09:55AM (#15666611)
        "It certainly makes a lot more sense for them to just use a Windows installation."

        I have to post anonymously on this one...

        But speaking to a well known Oh-Ess Ecks programmer, I asked him about the possibility of Wine noting that he would be the one to ask. He is very collegial with Microsoft and I've hung with him and one of M$'s top programmers as they have both bitched and moaned about the other's OSs (and the Microsoft guy actually made a few points I never thought about before that were on the money...I program Windows for a living but own a niche Mac support company that grew out of a mailing list I use to moderate...I can almost give up the Windows programming these days as my organization is starting to look like it needs centralized day to day leadership, but beyond that, I could care less what OS anyone else uses. I know how to use both and my Vaio is as much a part of me as my new Intelbook).

        Getting to the point, talking to the guy and asking him about the possibility of using my Windows skills to port applications using WINE but with a translated front end on the Mac side. Pretty much, simply run the APIs of the apps I have created or have access to, and create new native front ends. Best of both worlds I thought (sorta like when I would create C++ backends and use VB to build the front end on the PC and Hypercard for the Mac -- I got pretty proficient at making certain DLLs could be recompiled as a XCMD simply by dropping it in the right compiler and letting the headers decide what to do with it).

        His response was one of the most direct responses I've ever gotten about future plans without him saying anything. Claimed to have looked into WINE, had it running internally (this was a year back, when I was still planning on having to use an X86 emulator to do most of the work as I didn't think the Intel switchover was going to happen so quickly) and he said that while it was a good product, they weren't going to use 'compromised' APIs to do this. When asked if they had any plans to license or develop any of their own non-compromised APIs, he responded that there was no plans to license anything. It was a pretty strongly worded statement, especially when looking into the point by point claims and what was missing from my original query. And considering the last statement I received in this manner was positively prophetic looking back upon the email.

        With Bootcamp and the new emphasis on Parallels and my knowledge of their staff, my best bet is that Apple is planning on leveraging Windows to their own needs, making it usable but a pain. Sort of like how their Bluetooth products refuse to work with the Windows side of the Intelbook and simple features that could have been added were ignored to ensure that you only got exactly what you needed to run Windows solidly in Bootcamp, but not with the trademark Apple Ease of Use.
      • Apple has a contract with Microsoft, signed way back in 1997, that gave them rights to use the Windows API through 2002 (see here [pbs.org] about two-thirds of the way down). Windows XP came out just before that contract ended, so theoretically Apple has access to the XP API.

        Despite that, you're probably right that it would be easier and safer to require a real Windows install underneath. Apple has always been about things Just Working, and using the real Windows code is the surest path to that.

    • Re:More Speculation (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Rewind the clock back to circa 1993. IBM had a Red Box and a Blue box OS/2. You guessed it. Red Box ran Windoze 3.1 better than those guys that had the Micro-soft Red-Manhoods.

      Where did that get IBM with OS/2???

      Nathan

    • Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Funny)

      by ElephanTS ( 624421 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:44AM (#15666239)
      There's not a lot of meat to this article

      No, but it's Leopard Meat! They go mad for it!

    • This "red box" you speak of isn't exactly going to put an end to windows. It definitely gives Mac a strong foothold when it comes to readily available programs, but the question has been asked numerous times before, "Why develop programs for a Mac if you can just run windows programs on it anyway?" People would develop to hit the widest audience, which would mean using the same, flawed windows API. There would undoubtedly be some people who would still develop for Macs, but I'm guessing it would be even few

  • Stock Tip (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sv-Manowar ( 772313 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @07:53AM (#15666020) Homepage Journal
    Seems like a great time to buy Apple shares right now as they are in a dip at around $57. Peaking at around $85 earlier this month with news of this and the new powermacs expected it will definitely be an easy jump if you are looking for a short term investment.

    • Re:Stock Tip (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BigDogCH ( 760290 )
      So, what your saying is that you purchased apple at around $85, and now you are hoping us fellow nerds will help bail you out? No way, I am too busy saving up my $ for Vista! :)

      In all seriousness, why doesn't Apple sell Leopard for like $99 to PC users? Would drivers be the limiting force? If it comes out before Vista, is better than Vista, and cheaper, and has less system requirements....it could really sway people over to their camp. Or is it because then nobody would need to buy their hardware? En
      • Because if OS-X ran on PCs, it would have every single one of XP's problems within minutes.

        Driver issues would cause stability isssues, it would suddenly be more attractive to spyware and virus makers.

        Basically it would be windows. Only probably worse because MS have a lot more practice at dealing with those issues which is why XP is by and large, so much better than 9x in these ways.

      • Re:Stock Tip (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jmp_nyc ( 895404 ) * on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:43AM (#15666228)
        One of the reasons that MacOS can provide a relatively consistent stable experience is that there is a limited range of hardware on which it is expected to run. Sure, Macs don't always have the very fastest of graphics chipsets (although we'll see what comes with the new PowerMac replacements), but the Apple engineers working on drivers can know exactly what chipsets are out there.

        If Microsoft could seriously limit and control the hardware on which Windows would run, they could probably do a lot better with drivers, too.

        These days, now that Apple is using more standardized Intel chipsets, they are able to pick a few configurations that are identical to perfectly good PCs out there and develop for those machines. As technology advances, they'll still have a limited group of configurations to develop for. (And yes, they aren't putting out high powered gaming configurations right now, but they will have high powered graphics workstations when the high end desktops come out.) If they had to start supporting everything, they would be opening a Pandora's Box of compatability issues. Dealing with the required driver variants would eat up the same resources they're using to innovate.

        Besides, the reason Apple sells OS updates for $99 is that they know that everyone buying a copy has already bought a machine they produced.
        -JMP

      • Re:Stock Tip (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gantos ( 580678 )
        Because Apple is a HARDWARE company. They want to sell BOXES. To make OS X available for other hardware would mean the inclusion of countless drivers, support for vitually limitless hardware configurations, and the hiring of a huge support staff to manage the problems associated with a market that is far from manageable (among other things). These are just some of the problems Microsoft must deal with on a daily basis. But because Apple is a HARDWARE company, they can keep a short leash on the hardware they

      • Re:Stock Tip (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ZachPruckowski ( 918562 )
        Because they'll go out of business? Apple would have to sell 5-6 OS X copies for every mac sale it loses, just to break even. And there'd be a lot more piracy.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) *
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Stock Tip (Score:4, Funny)

      by abscissa ( 136568 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:13AM (#15666097)
      Are you the guy who sent me the e-mails that shares of APPL are predicted by experts to go up 500% in the next 90 days and that APPL was a great buy right now?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • No. The Macmaniacs are far too happy and cheerful. The time to buy, the only time to buy, is when the Mac newsgroups are full of gloom, and your mac using friends walk around with long faces and say diffidently about the latest Windows catastrophe that of course Macs don't suffer from it, but there again no-one cares. The headlines are about possible takeovers or chapter 11. Wait for it, then buy.

      Then wait until the enthusiasts are euphoric, talking (as now) about competing with MS, raising share dramat

  • Who writes this junk? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vought ( 160908 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @07:55AM (#15666027)
    I mean c'mon. A day's worth of submissions, and you can't do any better than information that's been on the street for over a week, rewritten by a fifth-grader?

    If "Leopard" is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."

    Maybe the reason fewer people are taking Slashdot seriously is because Slashdot doesn't seem to take itself seriously.

    Hire a f-ing editor to check out and rewrite the most egregious but still post-worthy submissions. No, a real editor, not one of your friends.

    • Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:5, Informative)

      by kjart ( 941720 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:14AM (#15666104)

      Agreed. It's not even like you'd need to edit a whole article - you're editing the summary of an article.

      we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year
      (emphasis mine)

      I found that pretty amusing. Since when is a 10% (plus or minus; feel free to correct me with solid info) marketshare remarkable?

      Also, from the actual article itself:

      The upcoming "Leopard" OS is expected to be even slicker and faster than its predecessor OS X.

      Is this actually a new OS like the article suggests, or just a new revision of OSX (10.5 or what have you)? If it's not supposed to be completely brand new, I find this article somewhat questionable.

    • Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Rosyna ( 80334 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:23AM (#15666134) Homepage
      I mean c'mon. A day's worth of submissions, and you can't do any better than information that's been on the street for over a week, rewritten by a fifth-grader?

      By week, I think you mean year. The fact leopard would be announced at WWDC was pre-announced at last year's WWDC. I'm not sure how this is news.

    • Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Shaper_pmp ( 825142 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:45AM (#15666247)
      Seconded. This is rubbish in every sense - writing, grammar, analysis... it's all crap.

      While Microsoft was battling with Vista that is a dog slow and resource-hungry Apple it would seem was focusing on speed, performance and elegance.

      Since when have Microsoft OSs not been slow and resource-hungry? And when did Apple ever not prioritize elegance and performance?

      The upcoming "Leopard" OS is expected to be even slicker and faster than its predecessor OS X.

      Careful - your fanboyism's showing.

      And with Macs running on Intel hardware, how long will it be before Mac OS "Leopard" or its successor spreads out into the PC realm?

      Erm, a long time. Apple needs to differentiate itself from Microsoft to retain its market share. Moving to an Intel architecture was a risky step, as it deprived them of one of their major differentiating factors, PPC architecture.

      The minute Apple runs on commodity PC hardware no-one has any reason to buy expensive Mac hardware, so they won't. This takes Apple out of the hardware game, and makes them entirely reliant on software and iPods. Mac OS/X will then compete directly with Windows, and though it's faster, more stable and more secure, Windows has that whole 90%+ market share thing going for it. Apple would be squished in short order.

      Some think this would never happen, but I have a feeling that it will. When Microsoft attributes a bunch of its Vista problems to backwards compatibility issues Apple would not suffer the same when expanding to PC platform.

      Sorry? If Apple wants to make OS/X run on commodity PC hardware it's going to have exactly the same problems. Sure, it could arbitrarily draw a line in the sand and refuse to support hardware older than X years, but that's not going to impress anyone used to Windows' (at least passable) support for legacy PC peripherals.

      And even if the problems weren't as severe as MS's in the short term, by giving up control over the hardware OS/X runs on, Apple will be ensuring it only gets worse in the future, until within a few years they'll be just as stuffed as MS.

      Perhaps transition to Intel's hardware was the first step for Apple. Perhaps Jobs wants to strike Microsoft when it is the weakest and not as paranoid as ever (due to stepping down of Gates).

      Riiiiight, because Ballmer et al are reknowned industry-wide as cuddly, fluffy-wuffy teddy-bears.

      Certainly MS is looking shakier than it has for a long time, but I doubt the paranoia level's decreased much since Bill left.

      Perhaps a mouse will overcome a dinosaur repeating the course of natural history in the IT arena.

      Very poetic.

      Except, of course, the dinosaurs actually kept the "mice" down for millions of years, and it was only once the dinosaurs had already naturally gone extinct on their own that the mice even had a chance. There's nothing like a bad analogy to really demonstrate you don't know what you're talking about...

      Who knows. But I think that the departure of Gates and Vista debacle proves that the time is ripe for someone to seriously take on Microsoft's monopoly.

      This is probably the only mildly sensible thing in the entire article.

      And can anybody name a better candidate than Apple?

      What, you mean the guys who failed to put a dent in it for the last twenty years? Sorry Mac guys and girls, but when a cash-poor FOSS operating system written by a bunch of hobbyists frightens MS more than a long-term competitor, you obviously aren't competing quite as hard as you think.

      A better candidate than Apple?

      Linux (free, doesn't have to worry about profits or budgets, has been eating MS's lunch for years on the server-side

      • Mac OS/X will then compete directly with Windows, and though it's faster, more stable and more secure, Windows has that whole 90%+ market share thing going for it.

        I wonder where people get the idea that OSX is fast. Apple marketing?
        Most benchmarks that i've seen seem to indicate the opposite.
        http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/ [berkeley.edu]

        Even my X41 Thinkpad with it's Pentium M 1.6GHz running debian testing with stock kernel does time echo "scale=5000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l faster (1m9s) than MacBook Pro 2GHz running
        • Memory allocation is very expensive on OS X. Anything that uses mmap will crawl due to the slow VM subsystem. I wrote some code with both POSIX aio and mmap backends. On FreeBSD, the performance of both was within 10% of each other. On OS X, the mmap backend was an entire order of magnitude slower. The FreeBSD aio backend was about 20% faster on a 1.4GHz Athlon than the same code on a 2GHz G5.

          System calls are similarly expensive, especially ones that require interaction with the Mach layer. Guess whe

    • Maybe it was a typo, and the OS will be called lepard, as in the disease and the stigma that follows those who have it?

  • This is just NOT news. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GrahamCox ( 741991 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:01AM (#15666047) Homepage
    Even if it weren't for the fact that this was announced, what, a week ago, it doesn't take a genius to realise that Apple will talk about their next OS at the forthcoming WWDC. It's what they've always done. Duh, that's what it's FOR. And those who care will know about it, and those who don't will ignore it. Just like THEY'VE always done. Fuck me, Slashdot gets lamer every day with shit "stories" like this. And I speak as a nominal Mac fan.
    • Just like THEY'VE always done. Fuck me, Slashdot gets lamer every day with shit "stories" like this. And I speak as a nominal Mac fan.

      No shit. I used to come here in 1998 for interesting stories about relevant tech stories and people. And posts like this story are the reason that after being a Slashdot newbie, then a junkie, I'm now visiting less and less.

      I don't know whether Slashdot's audience matured right out of reading it, or if the quality of posts simply decreased. I don't know who "samzenpus" is, bu
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • This is absolutely true. This is not news. It is not so much that it was reannounced a week back, but Steve Jobs announced it almost a year ago at WWDC 2005. I thought he had, so I checked the video of his keynote to make sure I did not spread incorrect information on /. At about 57.5 minutes into his keynote, he says that they will be telling us about Leopard at WWDC 2006. Now, I understand that some in the Windoze community may be used to being told that something will be ready at a certain time....and th

  • Yet another Apple commercial (Score:4, Insightful)

    by boaz112358 ( 947978 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:01AM (#15666054)
    Neither the submission nor the article actually says anything about the OS, yet we're told the Leopard is "cool and fast" without any evidence whatsoever. Yet somehow this magic OS, which we know nothing about, is going to cause "remarkable market share gain next year." Nope, never heard that before.

  • Year of the Mac? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by i_should_be_working ( 720372 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:03AM (#15666058)
    It seems as if journalists (or Apple proponents in general) have caught whatever afflicted the Linux fan-boys. Every release or change in Apple software/hardware is seen as something that could trigger a whole bunch of Windows users to switch.

    Seems a bit out of character..

  • Big Cat Names (Score:3, Funny)

    by Infernal Device ( 865066 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:17AM (#15666113)
    I'm waiting for the release called "Pete Puma"!

    Yeeeeeeeeeeee.
  • Quote: The upcoming "Leopard" OS is expected to be even slicker and faster than its predecessor OS X.

  • Wake me when.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cvd6262 ( 180823 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:20AM (#15666123)
    ...they release OS X Liger.

  • Remarkable Market Share? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by whisper_jeff ( 680366 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:28AM (#15666157)
    "...we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year." Remarkable market share? Ok, I'm a Mac guy - have been for ... too long, but are you kidding? 3-5% is remarkable? Well, maybe in so much as how small it is given how good it is, but I don't think that's what you meant when you used "remarkable market share..."

  • who said vista was slow? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by buddyglass ( 925859 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:30AM (#15666165)
    Yes, it requires a (somewhat) beefy 3d graphics card to make full use of Aero Glass. But that's just the UI. Rarely is the UI a system's bottleneck. I imagine that with the revamped TCP/IP stack and memory manager, Vista should yield performance improvements over XP/2003 for a wide range of apps.
  • Sure it might have some bearing on upgrade OS sales, but does it really sell computers? I mean if you go into a store and try out a new computer, it's always going to be feel much faster than even a 2 year old computer. No matter how bloated an OS is, a new computer with a fresh OS installed on it will always seem fast. I don't see how it's a differentiating factor.

  • 2.2% is remarkable? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SEE ( 7681 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:33AM (#15666177) Homepage
    In calendar year 2005 (Q2-4 FY2005, Q1 FY2006), Apple unit sales were 4.7 million.
    In calendar year 2005, total PC unit sales were 208.6 million.

    Apple's selling plenty to survive as a profitable niche product, sure. But they are competition for Microsoft in the same sense mainframes are.

  • Wow, Slashdot is really falling apart. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NYTrojan ( 682560 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:37AM (#15666202)
    Did the submitter even READ what he wrote?

    If "Leopard" is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."

    WTF is that? First off, it's wrong. It's very very wrong. Tiger is better than XP now, but did we see 'Apple's remarkable market share gain this year'? No. There is nothing certain about Apple and 'market share gain' no matter how superior their products. Forget 'remarkable'. Second off, it's written so badly I had to go over it three times to make sure it really said what it said.

  • Apple (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bigkahunafish ( 708759 )

    If "Leopard" is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year.

    This makes the assumption that the masses want "fast and efficient." I think quite the opposite. If the masses wanted fast and efficient, they would turn off the fancy stuff in XP and turn it back to looking like 2000. Sorry, but the masses are not interested in speed or efficiency, they are looking for e

  • Once again, the Slashdot editors did a great job, not. This news was released by Apple last month, and the writing quality of this news segment is terrible. Leopard's expected features are built-in virtualization, related with Boot Camp, a new file system (possibly, unsure on this one myself), new finder (hopefully finally not carbon anymore), improved spotlight, dashboard widget editor, improved mail.app, ichat 4.0 with tabbed chatting, safari 3.0, and of course a ton of security fixes, bug fixes, etc. I

    • Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard (Score:5, Informative)

      by saddino ( 183491 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:55AM (#15666293)
      new finder (hopefully finally not carbon anymore)

      One should note that it's not Carbon that makes the Finder suck. Any decent, full-featured OS X application can be written in Carbon if the developer takes care to implement things correctly. And even more importantly, some things in OS X can still only be done in Carbon, hence the Framework's inclusion in many Cocoa applications as well. Unfortunately, most users associate Carbon with all those ported ("carbonized") OS 9 C++ applications written on top of Metrowerks' PowerPlant, so it makes sense Carbon has a bad rap, but the fact is: Carbon is not the issue here. Carbon's fine.

      • Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard (Score:5, Interesting)

        by GrahamCox ( 741991 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @11:02AM (#15667092) Homepage
        Unfortunately, most users associate Carbon with all those ported ("carbonized") OS 9 C++ applications written on top of Metrowerks' PowerPlant, so it makes sense Carbon has a bad rap, but the fact is: Carbon is not the issue here. Carbon's fine.

        Carbon's fine, until you actually bother to learn Cocoa. The fact is, religion about this aside, Cocoa is just better. As in 10,000% more productive better. The fact that apps also tend to look better is not a reflection of Carbon per se, but it is a reflection of just how much work you have to do in Carbon to makes things come out right. I'd rather spend time on making the app functional rather than endlessly tweaking the widgets. I came from the Toolbox, then Carbon, and now Cocoa, so I know of what I speak.

        However, I disagree that PowerPlant is the cause of a lot of problems, because in many ways PP was the Cocoa of its day, Mac-wise (ignoring the fact that Cocoa has existed in some form since 1987, just not on the Mac). Using a framework on top of Carbon is the only sensible way to program with Carbon - anything other than a small app is unmanageable in Carbon if you don't have a framework there. What may be a source of this perception is that between System 8.0 and 10.0, Apple changed a lot about the organisation of the Toolbox/Carbon and PP may have struggled to keep up with that. It was a tough period all round.

        I'd like to see the Finder written in Cocoa, because it would likely be a lot more functional since getting functionality together in a Cocoa app just takes much less effort than the same functionality in Carbon. Given that Apple seems to want to throw a Finder together I'm sure it would be a lot more polished in the same timeframe if constructed in Cocoa.
        • I completely agree, in fact I'm a developer that's made the Toolbox to Carbon to Cocoa transition myself, and I'll never go back to writing a Carbon app. The point of my original post was to point out Carbon is not the factor that determines whether an application runs well on OS X or not.

          Furthermore, I did not mean to malign Powerplant (it clearly replaced MacApp as the only framework to use, and hell, only way to really write an application pre OS X), but in IMHO it is indeed the source of all these Carb

  • Microsoft way ahead (Score:5, Funny)

    by KrunZ ( 247479 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:52AM (#15666275)
    Microsoft released their Leper OS years ago
  • People talk about Apple taking MS market share, about OS X getting viruses, about the Steve releasing OS X for generic Intel boxes.

    None of those things will EVER happen. Apple has come to understand you can run quite a profitible biz by having 7-10% marketshare. It even helps them because the evil virus authors don't write viruses due to it's market share compared to windows(one of the reasons). The OS runs well (one of the main reasons) because Apple controls the hardware it runs on, as opposed to MS havin

  • Empty Article (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kichigai Mentat ( 588759 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @08:53AM (#15666282) Journal
    Did anyone else notice that the article was practically empty? That it was maybe, at most, five hundred words? Sorry, correct that, I just ran it through a word processor: 240 words in the article, not counting title, byline, or advertising.

    The article had NO MEANING. It was one of those things you say to your buddies while hanging around. "You know, if Leopard is as fast as Apple says so, MS could be in deep [insert colorful adjective here]." Then you're promptly shot down by your friends, reminding you that the masses have a "Crapple" frame of mind because their last experience with Mac OS was with the pizza-box LC IIs running System 7 from back when they were in high school, and they don't care any more.

    Not only does this bode poorly for Slashdot's credibility as having important and accurate information, but what does this say about journalism in general, when this passes for a good article. Oh, wait, it's not even an article! It's a blog posting! Do we even know who this Max Fomitchev is? I've never heard of him. This place is slowly becoming a rumor mill full of dupes.

    Come back when you've got an article from a credible source, no less than 500 words, with some real analysis, facts to back it up, and maybe a cool graphic or charts or something. Until then, stop wasting my time.

  • You are all too negative about this idiotic little piece. Its value is enormous, not in what it says, but that it appears at all. What it is telling you is: it is too early to buy, and not too late to sell. As long as pieces like this are coming out and being linked to, we know that sentiment is absurdly optimistic. Don't worry, it will change.

    So, Editors, pay not attention, keep linking to them as long as there are any to be found. When there are none, that's the interesting time. The rest of us wil

  • Bloody naming! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kopretinka ( 97408 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @09:30AM (#15666486) Homepage

    With Windows, I know that the step from 2000 to XP is significant because the names are way different. Similar with XP and Vista. But seriously, how can I expect something significant going from Tiger to Leopard?

    BTW, I guess I can blame my ignorance, because as a long-time Linux user, I only view Windows and MacOS/X from afar.

  • I Suspect... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @09:35AM (#15666512) Homepage Journal
    ...that Apple moved to Intel to take advantage of Intel's new virtualization support in hardware. In nearly every case when using a hypervisor on top of such hardware (where there is a ring -1 for the hypervisor) the performance has beat native performance. Or put another way; using a hypervisor for virtualization provides you with virtualization with NO performance hit at all. If anything you get a performance boost. Apple, typically being quite a few steps ahead of the reast of the industry, is very likely going to use this so that you can run Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista, and any Linux distro simultaneously with the full performance of running natively. This is the first time in history when you really CAN get something for nothing!!! Not to mention they will likely make it so that you can set up ways to exchange data in a live fashion between VMs. No more incompatibility between OSes ever again. Leave it to Apple to come up with something like this.

  • List of OS X Code Names (Score:3, Informative)

    by joelsanda ( 619660 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @10:00AM (#15666642) Homepage

    Here's the list of OS X code names:

  • Not sure Vista is the slow resource hungry one (Score:3, Insightful)

    by XMilkProject ( 935232 ) on Thursday July 06, 2006 @11:55AM (#15667487) Homepage
    I know we are trying to assume the new MacOS will be much lighter/faster, but as someone who has Vista running on one machine and MacOS (The new intel core duo mac mini) on another, my impression has been that MacOS is the slow resource hungry operating system, and by comparison Vista is quite snappy.

    The Windows machine is more than twice the clock speed of the economy mac mini, but even with this in mind I can't help but get the impression the MacOS is abnormally sluggish.

    I am not traditionally a mac user (or a windows user for that matter) and people who are more familiar with Apples history tell me that the lack of a 'snappy' feeling in the GUI is just something you get used to, and not representative of the efficiency of the O/S... but i'm not sure that I buy into that.

    Anyway, Let me go ahead and make my points very clear:

    1) Vista is really not sluggish in the sense we are talking about here. Especially if you get the new RTM (post beta2) builds from MSDN. In fact it is much snappier than any Mac/Gnome/KDE desktop I have worked in on similar hardware. (Perhaps this is becuase the windows GUI is so ugly ;))

    2) Current MacOS IS sluggish, maybe its becuase of all that silly anti-aliasing and frequent x86 emulation, I really don't know, but if they make a new O/S which solves this problem there would be ALOT of people more willing to use it, especially if they can get some damn native applications available for x86.

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