Apple Ships OS X 10.7 Lion 'Gold Master' For July Push

An anonymous reader writes "Apple released to developers the 'gold master' version of Mac OS 10.7, known as Lion, in a move that positions the company for a July roll-out. 'With Snow Leopard, Apple's previous Mac OS release, the time between going from gold master status to hitting store shelves was approximately two weeks. However that release required Apple to stamp and produce boxed discs to send out to retail stores. Lion will be the first by Apple to be released only through its Mac App Store as a digital download.'"

That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[JohnG]

I am stuck with Hughesnet, due to living in the boonies. They impose a 425 megabyte limit on my downloads even at the $100 a month plan. The only time it is unlimited is between 2am-7am, which I'm betting isn't enough time to grab an entire OSX distribution. Just getting XCode and the iOS SDK became a race against time once the file hit the 4gb range. I guess I can stay up until 2, then set an alarm for 7 to pause the Mac App Store download until 2 am the next morning. But still, I'd really like to just pay a few extra bucks and have them ship me a DVD. It doesn't even have to come in a fancy box.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[RedBear]

XCode is a 4GB download all by itself and is only used by a tiny fraction of Mac users. Why on Earth would Apple want to add that to the already 4GB Lion download? That would be a ludicrous waste of bandwidth, time, and disk space.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Raenex]

Wrecking havoc on the English language.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[node 3]

Hopefully it is.

They'll probably still charge you $4.99 for Xcode. Not terrible, but not great. Finding out gcc4 was not included in the paid version of Xcode... now that was terrible.

Apple is moving away from GCC and to Clang and LLVM. This is due partially to the GPLv3 (and the patent issues involved, and this is why Apple will never use the current version of GCC), and partly due to LLVM+Clang being quite an improvement over GCC (although it's presently a mixed bag, looking forward this is a good way to go).

As for the pricing of Xcode 4, it will be kind of disappointing if a license isn't included with Lion. $4.99 is a steal though, so it's difficult to complain too much, but one of the nice aspects of Mac OS X has always been the bundled developer tools.

Re:Not "download only"

[Anonymous Coward]

>Apple will still offer the disk in stores, Google it. You'll find that Apple employees have confirmed that users with bandwidth restrictions or users without an internet connection can still update by buying a disk in store.

Hopefully you also mean they will sell to people who just want a nice shiny factory pressed DVD, want to pay using good old American cash, or just don't want to hassle with a huge download even over a "fast" connection.

So the only time 10.7 will "only" be available on the App Store will be a few weeks until the DVDs are printed and shipped to the stores.

Putting it on their app store is great for those who want it that way, but making that the absolute only way would be dumb.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Shin-LaC]

Apple contributed a lot of changes upstream, but they were not merged. At some point, they stopped and decided to focus on LLVM instead.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

Apple is unable to ship the version of GCC benchmarked there, because of GPLv3. LLVM produces much better code than GCC 4.2.1, which is the last GPLv2 version, and the version that Apple ships.

Also, be aware that none of those benchmarks were for Objective-C, which is the language that Apple cares the most about. In terms of features, GCC now lags there. It doesn't support automatic reference counting, for example, and this gives a nice performance boost when coupled with the optimisations in LLVM (fewer autoreleased objects, faster reference count modifications, complete elision of some operations where it can prove that retains and releases are not needed).

Clang is also pretty modular. If you use XCode, the IDE is doing syntax highlighting using the same front end that it uses for compiling with clang. It's displaying error messages as you type via the same mechanism. The integrated static analysis and ARC migration tools are also implemented as Clang libraries and just called from XCode.

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[slyborg]

It's really more than "a bit silly" it's Apple's move to make the computer a consumer device like the iPod. Apple's vision is that the non-mobile devices become, essentially, static iPhone/iPad with large screens and storage, with Apple getting its 30% cut of every revenue stream that transits the device.

However, I didn't sign up with Apple computers 25 years ago because it was "Computers for Dummies". Windows is the corporate computer, and Linux is and always will be for guys with lots of free time and a burning desire to swear like a sailor any time you need to attach hardware. Where have you gone, Computer for the Rest of Us??