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.'"
Re:Not a surprise (Score:2, Interesting)
Slow down, Apple... (Score:3, Interesting)
Typically with an OSX release, the early point versions go through some growing pains, and it's not until the mid point releases that things get rock solid and fast. When I first tried leopard (10.5.0), it broke a number of things; it offered enough extra that I put up with what it broke, but I wouldn't recommend it to others especially for mission critical business stuff. It seems to be getting better with each point release that rolls in, and 10.5.3 just came in the other day (and things actually seem a bit peppier), but I get the impression it has a little way to go yet.
I think Leopard's early problems has hurt Apple a bit, and I'd hate to see a 10.6.0 come out too soon, with a lot of the same issues as Leopard's first release. I want a fast and stable OSX! (Even at its worst, Leopard was head and shoulders above XP in terms of speed and stability and usability, of course; but when I first jumped ship to Mac when Tiger was mature, things were even better stability-wise.)
While the Windows release cycle is painfully slow and buggy, I worry that Apple's is almost a little too fast with this announcement (although the wait for Leopard seemed to take forever.)
Now who knows, maybe Snow Leopard isn't too revolutionary; maybe in losing some of the backwards compatibility hassles of PPC to move Leopard forward it will improve its speed and stability. Keeping my fingers crossed.
Re:Apple may or may not do something next week (Score:4, Interesting)
Effectively Kill CPU Upgrade Market (Score:4, Interesting)
I would definitely reconsider my position if they went thru with this.
iPhone info (Score:1, Interesting)
From a third-hand source, take with a grain of salt:
iPhone 2.0 goes on sale next week. Initial roll-out in NYC and LAX, not sure why it is staged.
iPhone 1.0 sales were suspended by Apple, to avoid the debacle when they lowered the price shortly after release (and subsequently gave rebates to people who had just bought one).
Apple still has plenty of iPhone 1.0's. After iPhone 2.0 is released, iPhone 1.0's will be offered at deep discounts.
As reported earlier, AT&T employees have been prohibited from taking vacation for a month, starting 2008-06-15.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
It's way too early to ditch PPC (Score:4, Interesting)
PA Semi? (Score:5, Interesting)
OS Code Names (Score:5, Interesting)
OSX (Score:1, Interesting)
Dr. D
Re:Apple may or may not do something next week (Score:5, Interesting)
My prediction on the record here.... YellowBox (Score:5, Interesting)
- Drop the Mac branding, eg "OS X Leopard"
- Drop or minimise Carbon favor of Cocoa
- PC version of Leopard, or 10.6
- Apple Software Update can push/strongly advise major new apple software features to Windows users
In my mind, these add up to the old YELLOW BOX - i.e., the ability to run Mac (Cocoa) Apps on Windows. Yellow box is a compatibility layer. This feature was advertised initially with Rhapsody, but wisely withdrawn. We are now in a very different place. There are many desirable Mac Apps, and OS X is a desirable place for developers. Businesses begin to want Mac Apps and maybe eventually the full MacOS but need a transition path.
There is now every reason to release the Yellow Box and no reason not to.
- It provides the transition path
- It provides for stealth killer apps to seep onto Windows users' radar
- It will no longer dilute Mac Sales - because Microsoft's lustre and safety have gone
You'll all see that I'm right
Re:MacOS for PC's (Score:5, Interesting)
Develop drivers for a VM like Virtualbox and you automatically support a wide range of diverse hardware, without the development costs of running native, the Mac experience within a VM machine would be consistent.
However It wouldn't be as good as a real mac and the natuaral upgrade path would be to a real Mac. The problem with the clones was superior performance at a better price. Of course people would buy a clone over the apple product when it was faster and cheaper than apple were offering.
The VM route doesn't compete against Apple hardware, real Apple hardware will result in a better eXperience than the VM resulting in improved Apple hardware sales.
It would be so easy to sell
Taste the Apple eXperience, one bite will have you wanting more.
The VM experience would be a tool for apple to sell more mac's a completely different proposition to selling clones.
Which would suck for me, since I'm nearly 100% PPC (Score:3, Interesting)
1) None of my major applications were going to be out in Universial for at least 12 - 18 months (Final Cut Pro, Adobe et. al.)
2) I had no idea how this transition was going to go. It was either going to be smooth as could be or an unmitagated disaster. So I played it safe.
I bought an intel iMac for my Dad about a year and a half ago for christmas. It was absolutely amazing how well things went, but I did spend close $7k all said and done on my Quad-Core G5. It's still a powerful machine, with 8GB of Ram, for video editing and compositing using Shake as well as the limited 3D work I do in Lightwave.
That being said, I'm still on OSX 10.4 as well. My laptop is the last 12.1" powerbook G4 and I still love this machine for traveling as it fits on any airplane tray table. (I just shoved out another $80 for a new battery).
Now I have plans to get a MacBook Pro by the end of the year, but still i plan to keep this little machine for traveling as well I have no plans to upgrade my PowerMac to a Mac Pro for another couple years.
You have a bad install (Score:4, Interesting)
Another thing I would suggest is to never plug/unplug anything (other than power) with the lid shut. That behavior had a convert friend of mine complaining, "this thing crashes 80% of the time when I try to wake it or shut it down." Once I told him to stop that, he said it hasn't crashed once.
I will say that the Intel portables are no where near as stable as the PPC portables. I could swap peripherals anytime. I could shut the lid, remove the battery, replace it, and open it back up and keep working. I would have windows users in airports and on planes absolutely freak out at the sight of that. The PowerBooks were awsome!
It's too soon to drop PPC and way to soon 32 bit.. (Score:2, Interesting)
May then can keep G5 ppc.
There are still a lot of PPC uses out there some of them can't do want want to pay $2200 to replace there PPC towers that costed $1200 to $2100+.
Schools are a other place that uses alot of PPC as well and they also have g4 and g5 severs as well.
If apple does this then they will need to have a $700 - $2100 single cpu x86 mid-tower. The $600 to $800 mini is way to weak for it's cost and the imacs have poor build in screen and only has 1gb of ram + 128 video card in the $1200 system wtf?
Also may big apps are still 32 bit like CS3 and CS4 + M$ office.
There is lot of talk about this on appleinsider.com
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=87548 [appleinsider.com]
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/04/apples_mac_os_x_10_6_code_named_snow_leopard_report.html [appleinsider.com]
Re:Not a surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
That will make me very happy as that means I can start building my FCP render farm far cheaper as PowerMAC towers with dual G5's will drop in price like stones.
Please Apple, tell the PPC people to pound sand. I need cheaper hardware!
Re:Not a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
> I have doubts about Lynx, because there is already LynxOS
That's not anything that would stop Apple. They encountered a bigger legal challenge when they released OS 9.
> I also highly doubt they'll be abandoning PowerPC entirely yet.
I suspect that they may very well remove PowerPC support, however, as always, they'll keep PowerPC-based versions of OS X up to date, just as they always had OS X 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 running in the labs on Intel-based hardware. They like to keep their options open.
--Richard
Re:It's way too early to ditch PPC (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:PA Semi? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not a surprise (Score:1, Interesting)
I would be surprised to see Apple ditch PowerPC support so soon though.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Possibly, I guess, but probably not. An awful lot of the code that makes up OSX is the same code in FreeBSD/NetBSD and Linux. Where it differs-- well, I've never heard anyone claim that the Mach kernel is particularly buggy. All you have left is Aqua and the APIs, which are the parts that everyone seems to want to be open sourced and/or sold for their platform of choice.
So from all that (and personal experience with a Windows/Linux/OSX) I wouldn't be inclined to think the problem is that OSX has more OS bugs than other platforms. But I guess we could take your hypothesis another way-- that programs written for OSX are more bug-free than other platforms. That doesn't seem too terribly unlikely, but my personal guess would be that it's actually a combination of a few things:
Re:Not a surprise (Score:2, Interesting)
This is more likely... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bear in mind that v10.5 requires at least an 867 MHz G4 to install. By the time v10.6 rolls out, the minimum requirements will probably be in the area of a 2.0 GHz G5, which will leave comparatively few PPC machines extant that can even run the beast, so Apple may think, "Why bother?". That would mean no PPC laptops, as no G5 laptops were ever released, leaving only iMacs, Power Macs, and XServes able to run it. After all, my own Dual 2.0 GHz G5 Power Mac is already over three years old, and will be four-and-a-half by next summer. There's no reason to expect that Apple will support these machines indefinitely. A still more likely explanation is that only faster G5's (as described above) will run v10.6 PPC, and PPC support will be removed in v10.7, as this will avoid pissing off the punters too much. Not that Apple is any stranger to pissing off their customers, but they seem to know we'll eventually forgive them if they deliver the goods with the new candy.
The biggest clue is that the banners rolling out at the Moscone Center all read "OS X Leopard", rather than "Mac OS X Leopard". While this may indicate Apple finally moving on from the old Macintosh OS code, it is also possible that it means nothing more than that Apple is rebranding "OS X" in conjunction with the release of the 3G iPhone (or 2G, if you prefer iPod terms instead of cell network terms), something which has been intimated with every discussion of the iPhone's current OS as "running OS X", rather than running "Mac OS X". It may also have something to do with these "electric computers" that are streaming into the country at an astounding rate (which are likely the new iPhones, but who knows? Apple is very, very sneaky.).
Re:Slow down, Apple... (Score:3, Interesting)
That changed with the latest iMac update. The more expensive model is now a pretty good mid-range machine with a reasonable video card.
Do you really need a tower machine?
Re:Slow down, Apple... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm not sure what this WWDC is going to be about. There's going to be the iPhone 2 (and firmware upgrade), which will be huge. There are rumors of another device, halfway between an iPhone and a laptop. There are rumors of an OS upgrade. There are rumors of their Pro laptop line getting a redesign. Some other things to boot. If all that happens, it seems like a little too much for one event.
So that's why I think it may actually be true that Snow Leopard, if real, won't have many new features. They might just say, "Hey, we're coming up with an update, all Cocoa, faster, bla bla bla." and leave it at that. Incidentally, I predict that there may be a "all-Cocoa" move coming, but not in the form of dropping support for 3rd party Carbon apps. It may be instead that the "all-Cocoa" rumors are about Apple turning all of it's apps over to Cocoa and warning other developers, "We're making the move, and you should too. Only a couple more years before we stop supporting Carbon".
Anwyay, it may also be that (assuming "Snow Leopard" is for real) there won't be any new major OS features (FileVault, Time Machine, etc), but there will be new application features. If the iPhone is getting better Exchange support, I would expect that Mail, iCal, and Address Book will also be getting improved Exchange support. Also it may be that their server-side analogues (mail, calendar, and directory services) will be getting more features to be on-par with Exchange. I'd love to see OSX Server support push-email, better webmail, and get everything a little bit better integrated so that they can compete with Exchange.
There are also a lot of loose ends that Apple could try to tie up without offering something that stands out as a "new feature". For example, if they finally offered ZFS support, most users wouldn't see it as a "feature"-- they just wouldn't know it was there. But if Apple made enough changes/upgrades of that sort, they'd have to increment the version number so people would know that things might not be compatible. But for most users, it they wouldn't be "features" exactly, but more like "under the hood improvements".
I actually think there are lots of ways this could go. I can imagine Jobs saying, "look, we want to clean things up and offer some new technologies, but since these things won't be 'features' to most users, we're going to make a semi-new version. It'll be called almost the same thing ('Snow Leopard' instead of 'Leopard'), and it'll be a free upgrade to anyone using Leopard, but we'll call it a full new version." Or something along those lines-- I'm not claiming this is what will happen, but only that it wouldn't completely shock me.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:3, Interesting)