Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, may only be six months old, but rumours are already abound as to the next update to Apple’s operating system. According to several sources, it’s going to be called Snow Leopard, it won’t contain any major new features, and is planned to go gold master December 2008, available a month later. The big rumour: it’s going to be available for 64bit Intel machines only.The Unoffical Apple Weblog had the scoop this morning, stating several sources claim Apple will supposedly show the new operating system to the public for the first time at the coming Worldwide Developers’ Conference, including a developers’ seeding. It won’t contain any major new features, but instead it will focus on speed and stability, while also dropping support for anything but 64bit Intel machines. That’s going to be rough if you bought a PowerMac G5 Quad.
Lending some credibility to the rumours, Ars’ sources confirmed TUAW’s findings.
People familiar with the situation have confirmed to us that TUAW’s details are true – Snow Leopard is currently on track to come out during next January’s Macworld, and it will not contain major OS changes. Instead, the release is heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability.
A possibility is that Snow Leopard will be Cocoa-only, but this is apparently not yet set in stone, and what exactly “Cocoa-only” means is up for debate. Fact is that Carbon is not available in 64bit flavour.
Despite Ars’ confirmation, this is still a rumour.
Mac OS X major releases always have significant new features. That’s what differentiates them from the minor releases, which tend to include speed, stability and security updates or the odd minor features.
Particularly the 64bit Intel rumour. Intel only maybe, but the last 32bit only Intels were sold until late 2006, around WWDC. That’s less than 2 years ago. I know Apple like pushing new stuff but I doubt they’d deprecate hardware that new.
I can’t see anyone paying $100 for updates without any new features.
Don’t underestimate us,
We Mac users *love* updates.
We even blog about them everytime a minor update appears in Software Update.
If it makes our computer cleaner, easier, simpler and more stable we will pay for it because on a Mac, the more transparent the computer, the better and we can get on with work. This mindset doesn’t exist on Windows where you have to battle with your OS constantly, trying to overpower the machine’s will. “Hi, I just sent your personal details and bios hash to Microsoft, do you want to restart? No? Okay, I’ll just remind you every fifteen minutes with a popup that will catch you out as you type and cause your app to terminate, losing your work”
Edited 2008-06-04 19:58 UTC
Don’t be so smug, Kroc.
A LOT of Mac users battle with OS updates just as much as Windows users do – in fact, the recent 10.5.3 update caused quite some problems for people. The major upgrades cause enough problems too. They’re all just less visible because, well, 90% or 5%, it’s a major difference. I’d love to see the Mac OS do as well as Windows when it comes to upgrades on all those different configurations out there. The Mac OS will curl up in foetal position and cry in the corner at the mere thought of it.
I’m a Mac user most of the time, but I don’t want to share in your smugness.
And yes, this news DOES piss Mac users off- like me. I have a 2004 PowerBook that won’t be able to run this new operating system. I won’t benefit from all the optimisations, even though my machine is only 4 years old.
The funny thing? My 2001 x86 desktop runs Vista blazing fast, thanks to a 60 USD memory upgrade. It uses a processor and motherboard from 2001 (Athlon XP 1600+ at 1400Mhz, 1.2GB of mem). If Apple axes PPC and early Intel Mac support with this new release, Apple is going to be a million times worse than Microsoft and Vista.
Assuming this rumour is true, of course.
Edited 2008-06-04 20:01 UTC
And I’ve got a Mac Mini that wouldn’t be able to run an intel-only OS; but that doesn’t make it any less of an already capable machine with an excellent OS. Tiger is still awesome, and Leopard more so – so I don’t see the massive worry about some machines not getting the latest (with no new features) OS.
That is, if any of this is true
I’m hard pushed to imagine what new features they could introduce until there’s some more shift in the hardware at least another year or two away. This year might be the right year to fit in a maintenance release.
Wasn’t there also an iTunes update from a few years back that was known to accidentally “rm -rf” entire volumes?
I am a long term Windows user and a not so long term Mac OS X user. While I certainly agree that there are problems with Mac OS X updates (and more than previous verions it seems?) I have still found updating less errorprone than in Windows. I think updates to Mac OS X are more incremental than they are in Windows, and this makes them less suspectible to problems.
My personal experience is that there is a huge difference from WinXP SP2 to Vista, whereas the jump from Tiger to Leopard was smaller (despite the much hyped 300+ new features).
Thanks for the ridiculous broad generalization about Windows and its users. We’ll continue to hold our broad generalizations and stereotypes about Mac users as well. How do you like your overpriced hardware, anyway?
*salute*
I’ve been both a Windows user, and a Mac user. I know the crap I went through, and the difficulty my customers live with every day using Windows as a non-geek.
The broad-generalisation is as broad as the thousands of customers I’ve helped; Windows is a battle.
Perhaps the “crap” you went through is due more to your skill level than Windows? Perhaps you spent your time surfing for porn and clicking on dodgy links in your mail? It’s a poor mechanic that blames his tools….
False generalizations can go both ways.
I also have been supporting Windows for a long time, I started working full time in 1993, and most of the people whose computers I have fixed stayed fixed. I always take the time to explain to my clients what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what could be done to keep it from happening again. Most of the time it is malware or hardware issues.
Windows NT based OS’s have never tended to self destruct like Win9x, and the situation has only gotten better with each release.
I’ve been using NT based systems since NT4 came out. I’ve had NT4, windows 2k, and XP systems all “self destruct”. Not very often, but they have. I’ve also had machines that ran forever. Like my brothers 2k pro machine that has a 7 year old installation and is running perfectly smooth (I’m typing on it now). I had an nt4sp6a server than ran 24/7 for over 2 years before a hardware failure killed it (ran internal software, wasn’t accessible from outside the network, so I never bothered to do updates. heh).
It all depends on how well you keep up with it and what you do on it. I’ve seen 2 week old towers riddled with viruses and spyware/malware because of users that don’t have a clue. I’ve also seen REALLY flaky OSX installations. How users manage to do that, I don’t know. I’ve never had issues with OSX
Windows /can/ be a battle. We have over 60 machines at work that are running imaging software that reload themselves after every reboot. Windows STILL, somehow, has issues from time to time. :/
Right now, I’m looking after about 100 XP boxes, and almost all of the problems we have with them is hardware or driver related. XP itself rarely causes any issues, and working for a University, we rarely have top of the line machines to work with.
While I have yet to see a recent production-quality OS going hara-kiri for absolutely no reason, software update systems are a new threat to system health. It’s getting even worse since updates are done automatically or strongly suggested by an user-friendly window. You could argue that such systems are not self-destructing alone, but it’s still a core functionality going wrong after a while.
Perhaps I have offended some computer god, but practically every OS I have used for a while went FUBAR at least once by an update. Fortunately, I can fix things up by my own, but it made me quite cynic when I hear claim on system robustness.
Anyway, there are so many variables in computer systems that most claims are really a matter of anecdotes based on personal experiences. Hey, I know users who were genuinely happy with Windows Me, yet it’s the worst crap I have ever used! Well, actually, it’s Solaris, but that’s another story based on anecdotes…
It may be true that a poor mechanic blames his tools, but there comes a time when a good mechanic realizes that his tool really is broken and moves on to a better one.
Thank you! Here’s a cookie.
I’ve already pointed out that I fix Windows for a living; I know my way through the registry – and I finally worked out that for my home use, Windows was no good anymore.
Out of curiosity, what do you do in the registry and why?
Cleaning out viruses mostly, ones that hide in safeboot, and the odd problem with CD drive filters getting broken by Nero, and fun with undoing Group Policy changes in XP Home.
Sounds pretty legit to me. How the heck to Group Policy changes get applied to Home editions, though? That sounds a bit strange.
Viruses and malware love to change group policy settings to disable many features. (Like task manager, the desktop, msconfig, control panel and more) It’s very annoying that XP Home applies these settings, yet doesn’t let you change them without going to the registry.
I wouldn’t call XP or Vista broken, any more than I would call BSD or Linux broken, I use them all, and I have to say, they all have issues.
Agreed. When people use XP to make money every single day without issue, I would say it’s far from broken.
For every “IT guy” or whatever it is you are that says stuff like that, there’s another, like myself, that doesn’t quite see the battles and struggles you do. Between XP and Ubuntu at work supporting over a thousand users currently, the systems are so stable that it frees me to worry about other things like growth, infrastructure and other things, instead of little issues.
So I don’t see the “battle” you do. Having done this for quite some time now and going through 98SE, NT4, 2000, and XP support, I really have to wonder what you and/or your customers are doing to these computers.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Macs too. And with Ubuntu I’ve really grown to like Linux again. But they’re all just tools to meet an end, not a religion.
Try supporting home users, it’s a different battlefront entirely than your corporate desktops. Regular users struggle with endless needless hurdles from poorly written and unnecessary third party software, problems with IE, and problems with Windows in general. I bring back a level of sanity back to their computers and reduce the annoyances they have to live through.
I do support home users too, as extra income. I still don’t see the dramatic issues you do, and I’ve been supporting home users probably longer than corporate.
That’s the funny thing though. I’m having some trouble with some “non-geeks” with their Macs but I haven’t run into any trouble with mine. In my experience it’s been the same as life on Windows.
I stopped paying attention to much of the Mac versus Windows discussions but occasionally don the my asbestos gear. Both Mac and Windows have been a battle.
I use all three operating systems daily as a developer.
I am certainly an expert with all of them.
Easily, Windows is the most troublesome, frustrating, and difficult to work with. I can’t help but feel people like you, who claim Windows is somehow acceptable, have no real experience with the alternatives.
“This mindset doesn’t exist on Windows where you have to battle with your OS constantly, trying to overpower the machine’s will”
I have never battled with my OS constantly since Windows 98. Stop spouting 10 year old, outdated, false and useless facts. It’s just annoying. Most of the reasons that Windows users have problems these days is malware, and that problem is receding into the past since XP SP2.
I primarily use Debian at this point, but it’s not because of stability or security, but mostly boredom. Your type of rhetoric is getting just as boring
Not that I agree at all with the OP, but the issues any OSnews reader has are miles apart from what *most* people have. An average user who thinks their Operating System is Internet Explorer and who thinks turning off their monitor is the same as powering down their “Hard Drive” is much more prone to the kinds of issues hinted at by the OP. That said, I’ve met people who could destroy a Macintosh in days, too – they just work a little harder at it.
Users that think IE is their OS shouldn’t be using OSX or Linux any more than they should be using Windows then, because they’ll do just as much damage to the system, as you said in your last sentence, though I don’t think you have to work that much harder to do it.
You’re right, but you have to remember that I said I spend a fair amount of time on educating my clients on proper surfing habits, and I try to be very patient. I usually succeed, and most of my clients and users ask my advice before buying hardware.
I find it helps, plus it usually gets me free swag.
At least MS keeps the hardware upgrade mill moderate…
Either way, upgrade policies of MS or Apple don’t affect me…
I am a Mac user, and I am writing this from my MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5.3 installed. While they might download an update like this 10.6 is rumoured to be, I can’t imagine many people buy it. A lot of people I know are still using Tiger because it’s fine for their purposes and Leopard doesn’t offer them much.
Only significant new feature in 10.5 was timemachine, everything else was just unintresting.
This genuinely very exciting.
Any new OS release is a balance of new features, fixing old problems, and not breaking other old things.
For good or bad, Apple have shown a real driving force for keeping legacy only as far as is sane, and as such the software writers for the Mac are generally very up to date and willing to be on the latest thing (barring just Adobe & Microsoft, but that would be no surprise there).
If they drop 32-bit & PPC, it won’t be as bad as people make out. I have no doubt that they will keep compatibility with Leopard so that developers can easily target both- I see Snow Leopard as an “eventually” product that comes out early, but there’s no need to upgrade old machines because there’s no new features, and therefore no SnowLeopard-Only software.
New computers will be sold with it, those who want to will upgrade. You have to look at this from a [potential] benefits point of view:
* Finder rewritten in Cocoa?
* iTunes rewritten in Cocoa?
* As close to no bugs on launch as is humanely possible
* Code completely recompiled and tweaked for security system-wide? (a bit like XP-SP2 / win2003)
* 64-bit Kernel / drivers? (Major speed gains?)
* The speed and solidarity would make Windows / Linux look laughable? (This would set the press ablaze if a whole release was set aside just for “Doing things right” and it came out awesome)
Who wouldn’t want all of these? Mac users have bitched about all these points for years and years. What if Apple solves all of them? (We can move onto bitching about something else
)
It would given them an even greater *psychological* edge with the public and press, and for profit that matters more than pleasing the geeks all the time. (Like not dropping PPC – what is a buyer walking into an Apple store to buy a machine going to care about that?)
I think you are grossly over estimating the impact 32-bit and PPC support has on OSX…
yeah right…. try actually benchmarking creating threads/processes and stuff on osx, its the slowest shit around, beaten alot by windows, and ALOT more on linux..
to put it simple, osx is a piece of shit.
Not really… OS X is pretty good in the things that matter. It’s fine for a workstation that spends most of its time either doing intense calculation (e.g. rendering, photoshop, etc) or waiting for the user to poke it. Neither of these things require a great kernel because the calculation relies on the hardware alone and the waiting is just waiting (I think OS X has a pretty good power management story).
OS X won’t make a great server… that’s where a good kernel really comes in handy. I also think that XNU isn’t a particularly clean architecture, so it might be hard to make it much better in the long run. On the other hand, they don’t have the compatibility burden that NT has.
64 bit intel only would exclude the first generation Intel laptops and mac minis. The G5’s are also fairly recent. As I understand, the Finder is still carbon.
I don’t know about iTunes and Final Cut Pro.
10.6 Cocoa Only. 32bit/64bit supported.
For iTunes to be Cocoa then that means Yellow Box will exist on Windows.
10.0 even ran on Intel secretly, so we never know; YellowBox may have been waiting in the wings all this time. It would be a pleasant surprise.
Didn’t Safari bring a little bit of the old Yellow Box to Windows? I seem to remember somebody using Safari to build simple Cocoa apps on Windows.
Dude… Wasn’t Yellow Box for Windows (Dharma) confirmed like forever ago?
<a href=”http://www.osnews.com/story/12906/Dharma:_Cocoa_on_Windows…_Again…
Yellow Box was Openstep for NT during the Rhapsody transition. Don’t blame me for them pulling it. I supported it but didn’t have say in whether it got yanked or not.
I doubt the 64-bit only. Not only were the first Intel machines 32-bit, but they also spent a lot of time rewriting Aperture for the G4. G3 support lasted up through Tiger, so they don’t drop processors willy-nilly. Also, 64-bit only means no Carbon, which means no Adobe. Apple may not like Adobe all that well, but they aren’t dumb enough to cut their own foot off.
The processor cut off from Leopard probably only occurred so that the lowest video card was the GeForce FX 5200, which they needed for a lot of their graphics upgrades.
I will admit that this will probably be the last release for the PowerPC architecture. It seems like the bigger graphics / video shops are dropping the PowerPC’s because the performance is so noticeable.
No, the CPU cut-off wasn’t to exclude hardware with less video prowess than the GeForce FX 5200. It works fine with Intel integrated video, which is less impressive than the ATI 9500 hardware that came with some older PPC Macs. Incidentally, the CoreAnimation graphics of Leopard as-implemented in the OS and the typical app work fine on less than a FX 5200.
I somehow doubt it because Apple will probably not ship any 64-bit iPhone and/or iPod anytime soon…
OS X for the iPhone/iPod touch isn’t the same as the latest Mac OS X.
If it’s truly called “Snow Leopard” I’d bet my left shoe it’s a small price service pack type update. But that doesn’t feel right, so I think it’s all fake. I think 10.6 will be Lion or more likely Cougar, and I think we’ll see it in Fall 09.
I do NOT think it will be 64-bit only or deprecate the Carbon UI elements, because that will put a nice wedge between Mobile OS X on non-64-bit iPhones and the core OS.
I don’t see them dropping all 32-bit hardware support. I could very easily see them dropping PPC support, as Adobe CS3 is finally a universal binary.
However, the biggest apps on the Mac platform are made by Adobe, which aren’t fully Cocoa, let alone 64-bit, yet. Unless Adobe’s CEO comes out and announces that the impossible has happened and that the Apple version of CS4 will have full 64-bit support and has been rewritten in Cocoa, they’ll keep the 32/64-bit support.
Remember also that they are targeting 3 processor platforms now as well, which are ARM, Intel, and PPC. PPC64 is grudgingly supported at best. ARM is what’s behind the iPhone (and I suspect that nVidia’s new chips will be behind them too), and Intel is for everything else (AppleTV and the first Intel Macs run on 32-bit x86).
There’s no way they could drop 32-bit support without screwing with the iPhone, AppleTV, and Photoshop, let alone anything else they have in the pipeline.
This is a probably false rumor. Apple may have made some bad decisions in the past, but this one goes past bad to outright suicidal from multiple perspectives.
P.S. Thom, those Athlon XP chips just keep running, don’t they?
. It’s no surprise that Vista runs well on them, especially with enough RAM.
While they’ve been experimenting on such things for quite a while, they won’t bring this to market by January. They can’t even get Leopard right and it took them over 2 years to get Leopard to where it is today.
I can appreciate that someone is speculating on the future of Mac OS X, but that’s a bit different than reality. Even if Apple drop PowerPC support, and that’s easily more than a rumour, they’re not going to drop the pre-Santa Rosa chipset machines any time soon.
Building good press has been difficult, amid all the little lawsuits and patent assaults, and they’re not going to throw it all away by throwing out a majority of machines in one, very bold stroke. They can’t afford to do that.
being axed for 64 bit Leopard.
That was a strategic maneuver.
Cocoa has been 32 bit through and through from it’s inception.
Would Adobe have a complaint that suddenly 32 bit Cocoa/64 bit Cocoa are available but not Carbon? No.
They’ve had 10 years to get off of Carbon.
Carbon is about the same age as Cocoa, so Adobe had to “get on” Carbon (and that took some time) from the age old Mac OS that came with the original 128 KB Mac. Even as far as the NeXTStep APIs go, they’re not that much younger than those of Mac OS.
I’m sure Adobe would complain that Carbon wasn’t available since they probably are still using it in part or there wouldn’t have been such a stink about the lack of 64-bit-ness in Photoshop CS4 for Mac OS X.
I would love to get Leopard with PowerPC binaries dropped out of the Universal Binary application bundles. Smaller applications and system libraries. I do not need PowerPC support on my Intel Mac. I want a lean and mean leopard machine with nearly half the disk footprint on all executable files.
Isn’t Universal Binary support in the applications, and not the OS?
In theory, applications can be PPC, Intel or Universal Binaries and as such the OS can be one of either as well.
Every Leopard Install DVD contains Universal Binaries to make it run on either of Apple’s two supported platforms. This means that Applications will take up more space than actually needed, no matter the hardware platform.
At work I have images of a 10.4.11 installation, complete with all security updates and every needed application; one for PPC and one for Intel.
The Intel image – primarily made of Universal Binaries – take up at least 80% more space than the PPC image containing the same set of everything, but with less Universal Binaries to fill up its belly …
Think about it. Who runs the applications? The operating system, right?
Pick any program in the application’s folder or any binary inside an OS provided framework (/Library), right-click and get info. Universal binary format. So, every single “program” in Leopard has two binaries inside, a compiled PowerPC binary, and a compiled Intel binary.
All I am saying is that “I” would be better off not having the PowerPC portion in my hard disk copy of Leopard. Most programs/libraries would be half the size! It would be even better if third parties dropped PowerPC too and started releasing Intel only binaries. Smaller, more disk efficient.
We could still run legacy PowerPC apps through Rosetta and 3rd party UB programs natively.
I’m not so sure. I think a lot of libraries/programs are not composed entirely of compiled code, there are things like nibs, string tables, graphics etc. They get shared by both PPC and Intel binaries.
There will definitely be a drop in size, but I don’t think it will be half.
True enough, but Xslimmer does it to all UBs (apps as well as OS stuff) and shrinks applications a great deal – if not by half then nearly.
Awesome! I did not know about Xslimmer I just gave it a try and it reports that “3.57G” (PowerPC and non-English languages) can be slimmed out of the 11.9G of executables on my Leopard install.
I wish Leopard did this by default. Trimming away architectures and languages that are not my preference as I install applications.
Heck, the Leopard install image may even fit in a single layer DVD if it was custom made for Intel “only.”
but being able to start an intel-mac or a ppc-mac from the same partition can be quite useful. a few gigabytes are worth it.
You can drop PowerPC code from UBs by running Xslimmer: http://www.xslimmer.com/
Just be happy we’re not getting Quad-binaries like on Next/OpenStep.
in some cases you are (ppc, ppc64, x86, x86-64).
Okay, I’m kinda new with the Mac platform, so what’s the deal with Carbon? Does it mean that I’ll have to cope with Obj-C crap or some interpreted language?
That said, I believe it a good to break with the past once in a while. Since backward compatibility is draining lots of resources, it might lead to newer, better software. With virtualisation, running your old applications is getting easier (although I must admit there are some limitations).
I’m pretty sure Vista would be an even better OS if it didn’t had to cope with 20 years of backward compatibility. Like Win16 emulation was really important…
Anyway, it’s not like Leopard is going to suck once its northern brother is out.
OBJ-C isn’t an interpreted language. It’s the language Cocoa-based applications are written in. The Carbon API can be written to in C++ and other popular languages.
This is Raymond Chen’s legacy at Microsoft. Business customers are to be kept happy no matter what and their 3rd party vendors are never to be blamed for writing shitty code.
Vista is reaping what this policy sowed.
Yeah, I know that Obj-C isn’t interpreted. However, I read somewhere that Cocoa API can be accessed by interpreted languages like Perl, Ruby and Python. Didn’t read anything on compiled languages other than Obj-C, though.
Not sure it would be wise to ditch Carbon if you cannot use Cocoa with C++… Perhaps it’s getting loathed by software engineers, but at least it’s not taking heaps of CPU cycles/RAM or practically restricted to a sole platform.
And how is this a bad thing? More power to the developer.
C++ does NOT make Carbon apps cross-platform!
The libraries and API are what determine portability, and AFAIK Cocoa and Carbon are both on equal footing in this respect (both being non-portable).
Can’t comment on the performance between the two.
Somebody correct me if I’m talking out my ass.
You are correct about Carbon, it is non-portable. Cocoa, however, is portable. There’s GNUstep and Cocoatron, attempts (and quite useful attempts) at porting the Cocoa/OpenStep framework to other platforms. Objective-C is a portable language, it is part of GNU C on *many* platforms.
Never said it’s a bad thing, although I never understood why someone would bother to use them for anything else than prototyping or tiny applications. But I digress…
Of course… My main concern is that Obj-C isn’t really used outside the Apple world. Given it takes hours and hours of programming to master a language and its particularities (forget those “learn language X in 24 hours books”), I would just personally find counterproductive to develop apps I need on the Mac.
No Cocoa/Objective-C outside of the Mac? That would change if Apple released Cocoa for Windows.
Edited 2008-06-06 11:19 UTC
There are bridge interfaces between Ruby, etc. to Cocoa. You can use Cocoa through an Apple hack called Objective-C++, where you can combine C, C++, and Objective-C in a single source file. It’s a bit tricky moving data back and forth, so good planning is helpful but it can be done.
Carbon is a decent set of APIs but since they’re not object-oriented, you end up writing all the behaviours yourself. Since Adobe and others have source code from the 1980s and 1990s, they can use a lot of it untouched with Carbon.
There does seem to be a performance degradation using Objective-C but since the compilers (how do I put it diplomatically?) don’t output commercial quality code, the differences between Objective-C and C++ are minimal from my experience. (Didn’t we use to care so much about compiler output code quality that we would buy a new compiler to get speed?)
You can use Cocoa with C++.
…made it clear that “G” branded equipment (PPC) has been deprecated. I remember telling people for some time that Leopard would be the final OS X release for PPC, and it looks like I was right.
If they are in fact going 64 bit, this makes sense for a few reasons:
1. It obsoletes 32-bit Hackintoshes even faster.
2. Research geeks who were promised 64-bit computing when the G5 came out are finally getting it back.
And completely kills software upgrades for hardware that is less than 3 years old. My 1st generation macbook is not 64bit and will be left in the cold if they choose to not release 32bit versions of Mac OSX updates in the future.
This would definitely make me a sad panda.
While I understood the reason for Apple to go Intel on desktop machines and portables I never understood their move away from PowerPC for their server kit.
IBM has been busy all along making the fastest server chips in the world and Apple could easily take advantage of it- dropping PPC support obviously takes them on a single path.
Historically, Apple has had love-hate relationships with their CPU vendors. Motorola repeatedly screwed the pooch on deliveries, and IBM thumbed their noses on developing the G5s the moment they found larger customers than Apple.
PPC smoked early Pentiums. It did. But Intel caught up and started showing signs of developing things that Big Blue had no interest in following (like efficient power consumption) because fabwise, IBM is all about niche markets now.
Would there be a benefit in continuing to develop for multiple architectures? Absolutely. Is IBM interested in being a part of that path? Absolutely not. As far as IBM is concerned, Cell is their future and Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are their customers. Realistically I have doubts their commitment to Big Iron is any stronger than their commitment to making PCs was.
Edited 2008-06-05 15:50 UTC
…then it won’t be 10.6.
If Apple do rewrite a lot of the apps in Cocoa, there is no reason that the PPC or intel 32bit chips can’t run it. They make this very plain in their Cocoa docs. For instance “NSInteger” compiles for 32 and 64 bit machines for instance, using “int” however does not, well, it does, but it only allows 32 bits on either platform.
If I had to guess what Snow Leopard is, I would say
* internal name for the project to get away from Carbon
* will run on all current machines that support Leopard
* will have optimised binaries for the various platforms, including 64bit Intel…
* will still run ALL your carbon apps (and everything else)…
Edited 2008-06-05 00:19 UTC
I’d like to point out what I see is a common misunderstanding here.
If an OS only runs on 64-bit hardware that does not mean that it can only run 64-bit software. It can still run 32-bit code. It could even run PPC code in Rosetta.
Dropping support for old hardware platforms wouldn’t necessarily hurt the software environment at all.
Do you consider the intel macs that were originally announced old hardware platforms? They are barely three years old.
Your post makes a lot of sense but what work does Apple need to do to make 10.6, 10.6?
My understanding is that the frameworks used by OS X are available for developers. If I am correct, does that mean Apple will leave all the frameworks as they are so developers can use them, but they will rip out the code in the OS that is needed to run on 32-bit and PPC hardware?
It is the kernel that talks to the hardware, and the APIs (or frameworks) that talk to the kernel, so from that point of view there is no real difference (except in a few edge cases)
Now the difference between 32 and 64 bit has to do with the size of the registers (think of it as super-ram inside the cpu). It’s not a big deal to run 32bit apps inside 64bit registers, it just means you aren’t using them to their fullest. You can’t run something compiled for 64bit in a 32bit space though, because there isn’t enough room.
32bit support getting dropped from the kernel means that you will only be able to install it on 64bit machines, it has nothing to do with what apps you can run.
That sucks! I always felt that my 1st gen macbookpro is going to take a hit soon. I wasn’t expecting Apple to hit it though! I am still waiting for Java 6. I guess I should keep dreaming…
Why would they drop 32bit support? That isn’t the kind of thing that drastically changes from release to release, and its not like having it there slows stuff down at all. If not for perf or maintenance reasons, why would this be a good idea?
To sell hardware. I think dropping 32 bit support is a rumor though, but dropping PPC is not.
What? They ran out of felines?
I vote for lolcats. Mac OS X Lolcats. Cocoa-only.
I’m waiting for Feral Tabby, myself.
I work at an organization with over 10,000 employees where I’m a Computer Systems Analyst.
We have images (ghost) for XP and (carbon copy cloner) for our Macs. Our Mac people tend to be higher end computer users.
Comparing higher end XP users and higher end Mac users (forget about low to medium users for now), we have 85% less calls from Mac users than XP users per 100 users. This is not a guess but running reports in our call tracking software.
Why? The biggest problems we have are with Microsoft updates. Of those, the security updates are the biggest problems.
It’s not that we have very many problems. It’s just that we do and we make automated pushes, once we realize more than 10 people are having problems with program a, b, y or z.
We did use to have problems with people installing things they shouldn’t have and causing problems. Now we have all computers set to basic user rights and they have to go through a process to prove that they need power user or admin rights. The latter one for in house software developers and service desk and desktop techs who need to fix their computers.
The main issues we’ve had with Macs were a few Macs that had known physical issues. Basically lemon computers which, after we found out that it wasn’t just us we went to Apple and worked with them and got replacement computers (with discounts since it usually meant us buying an older model that wasn’t “normally” available anymore.
Other than that, Macs users have created 85% less calls per 100 people using XP. The number of calls for pre OS X was probably 70% Windows and 30% Macs. OS X has dropped it in about half. The 30% is a guesstimate.
The number one OS that had the far fewest calls with at least 500 people using it, was OS/2 which is now known as eComStation. Apps would crash once in awhile but it was far more resistant to the OS crashing or having problems than even XP or OS X now.
As for home use, I have probably a couple hundred friends with Windows computers. I could literally have a full time business just keeping their computers running. If I did I would literally change their rights and install a parental program on them to limit what types of sites they went to and make it so that they couldn’t stop the anti-virus software from automatically updating and upgrading. It’s amazing how many of this keep turning this off. Arrrg.
I have 50 some friends that use Macs. I rarely have to fix their Macs. Mostly I train them iMovie and things like that. Mostly because they had nightmare experiences with Windows MovieMaker and think iMovie is going to be bad too and it’s not.
I don’t like working on computers after work though and friends expect you to do everything for free. When you have 250 friends and “once in awhile” you end up helping them, that ends up being a lot more time than they realize and I’m tired of working on computers at the end of my 10 hour days.
Once I get home I want to create things, not fix things. So I work on family home movies (plays, soccer games, etc.) for my family and extended family and my friends. I’m also trying to spend some quality time learning how to play a half dozen musical instruments that spend way too much time gathering dust. Too many honey-dos.
As for Snow Panther. The cat and rabbit and everything else is still in the bag. DO YOU REALLY think that Steve Jobs is going to let you know much of anything until the KeyNote? Even then he isn’t going to let you know everything.
Look at history people. History will give you an idea of how much Steve Jobs and Apple holds back on what is really in the new version of the OS.
As for the 300+ new things in Leopard. Most of those were back end things that let developers do things easier which lets them make cooler looking apps or lets them develop things a lot faster so they can make their app more like they envisioned in the beginning before reality set in as to how much time it would take to do “everything”.
Most likely PPC and 32 Macs will still be supported. Most likely SOME Carbon APIs will be dropped/replaced by Cocoa ones. Most likely ones that developers have been warned about for quite awhile. I’m guessing there will be something in XCode that will help them move these parts to cocoa.
As for dropping supported computers. My iMac “lamp” was supported up until Leopard so that was several versions of OS X. I’m guessing it will be the same for computers after that.
It wasn’t very hard to guess new name of OSX.
Snow Leopard = iRbis
Bring it on Apple!
I look forward to each successive release of Mac OS X. Leopard is incredible IMHO. Snow Leopard will be even better.