Apple Expected to Demo Leopard Successor Next Week 432
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.'"
Not a surprise (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:2, Informative)
It was - it was almost as buggy as one of the betas, or perhaps 10.0.
I highly doubt it'll be called 'Snow Leopard' - Apple has registered the trademarks 'Cougar' and 'Lynx'. I have doubts about Lynx, because there is already LynxOS, and Lynx deodorant.
I also highly doubt they'll be abandoning PowerPC entirely yet. We'll probably see G4 support being dropped, but I highly doubt Apple would make such a rushed transition.
Re:Apple may or may not do something next week (Score:4, Informative)
Re:MacOS for PC's (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think we've ever gotten an actual answer from Apple, the the usual answers from Apple fans are:
Some say it's only a matter of time before they release it for PCs, others say it will never happen. Personally I wouldn't be surprised either way.
Re:Slow down, Apple... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple may or may not do something next week (Score:3, Informative)
I'll go read mac rumor sites when I want to see that kind of stuff.
10.5.0 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not a surprise (Score:4, Informative)
People seem to have quite varied experiences with Leopard, for me it has been much better than Tiger in the sense that with Tiger my iMac 24" managed to completely crash a couple of times under heavy load when using some not always stable apps but with Leopard the closest I've come to anything like that has been Finder crashing a couple of times.
In fact, the only real problem I've had with Leopard was with the incompatibility with Tiger FileVault images, I only had one user account (which was using FileVault) and after installing Leopard and then rebooting it was unable to mount the disk image which forced me to do some trickery in the console to convert it to a sparse disk image so I could rescue my files before doing an Archive and install installation.
/Mikael
BOO, Apple! (Score:2, Informative)
Run Linux, you will probably never have to worry about the next version being unavailable for your preferred hardware platform!
Re:Slow down, Apple... (Score:5, Informative)
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:BOO, Apple! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A dying breed: (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:10.5.0 (Score:5, Informative)
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:Lots of PPC in EDU... (Score:3, Informative)
No, you can explain to your boss how you don't have to touch your paid-for, stable and presumably useful machines for a couple of years except for the odd security patch and hardware glitch.
Next: justifying your own existence!
Re:Apple may or may not do something next week (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not a surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No, I'm New Here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BOO, Apple! (Score:4, Informative)
Hell, I'm still running 10.3 on my home computer and 10.4 on my work laptop. Somehow a lack of 10.5 has not hurt me at all, I doubt a lack of 10.6 will have any more of an effect.
Re:MacOS for PC's (Score:4, Informative)
The real reason is that Apple is a hardware company.
Everybody say this out loud over and over until you die:
APPLE IS A HARDWARE COMPANY.
Yes, they produce some great software but they make their money (which is the thing that really matters) on hardware.
--Richard
Re:PA Semi? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why would you have to re-buy? (Score:3, Informative)
This makes me very uneasy, especially in the area of media players. Code gets frozen, denying you access to/compatibility with newer revisions of formats like matroska.
If they drop ppc support, i'm one power user who will feel slapped in the face. While leopard is not as zippy as tiger was, my twin 2.7 g5 has retained suitable responsiveness through X.5, and only fails at rendering 1080p h.264 streams, something I won't be needing for at least another couple years.
I'm becoming jaded though and believe they are capable of doing this. After all, i've been noticing marked declines in hardware quality since i bought this g5 rig. The macbook I bought recently is collecting dust, for instance, because the display is absolute (explative deleted) more suitable for the reject bins in the QA department at M$ or e-machines than for machines bearing a top of the market brand name.
It seems though that apple may be moving away from their "consumer friendly but professional grade equipment and operating system" niche into the "watch american idol on your iphone, and btw we slapped together a computer that makes an excellent accessory" niche.
If more signs point in that direction, I'm not sure what I will do, because nobody is stepping up to take apple's place in that market.
If their os retains or improves upon its current quality while their hardware quality slips, I suppose i'll go beige box + osx86.
If both slip... I guess i'm out of luck. Kde has noticeably rough edges for me, and gnome doesn't integrate true document-based navigation.
Re:You have a bad install (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MacOS for PC's (Score:4, Informative)
I'd note you're missing a major reason. Currently Apple competes in the computer system market against Dell and Sony and HP, largely on the strength of OS X, a desktop OS. Selling OS X for generic hardware would put them in the desktop OS market directly, a market monopolized by MS. No businessman in their right mind wants to be competing against a monopoly in the market they have monopolized. It costs significantly more than a normal market with higher risk and less return. Quite likely, Apple would fail in that market, regardless of the relative quality of OS X and Windows.
It would be economic suicide to unbundle OS X and Apple computers until the market is at least somewhat competitive, maybe 70% dominated by Windows. That's still quite a ways off, so Apple is focused on slowly chipping away at Windows market share and hoping they can get there some day.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apple may or may not do something next week (Score:3, Informative)
Not just pay for it, but actually pass the tests. Which are pretty intensive, from what I gather -- there's a pretty good chance the BSDs wouldn't pass. But mainly because they aren't compatible with every single header file, command line utility, and API since V7 and on :).
One can certainly debate that particular point, but I've not looked at the conformance test suite, so all I can do is speculate based on comments I've heard from others.
Re:OS Codename (Score:2, Informative)