Finally, some good news, eff Siri and the rest of the piss poor gimmicks, and let's put the train wreck that were the lions behind.
And hire some people too to work on os x. I can't stomach that os x is still one darwin version behind ios.
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OS X 10.9 to Bring Enhancements to Finder, Safari, Multiple Monitor Support, and Multitasking
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Finally, some good news, eff Siri and the rest of the piss poor gimmicks, and let's put the train wreck that were the lions behind.
And hire some people too to work on os x. I can't stomach that os x is still one darwin version behind ios.
I don't quite get the argument with the power-saving of the pausing-feature. I don't know anybody who has problems with idle apps using too much power, both power-users and home-users, laptops or desktops. I remember this problem arising on windows machines but never on macs.
Yes, there are some applications which need background-resources: XCode, Safari, Finder, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto... Well look at that, who programmed these? But aside from that, it's about 0.1 Percent which they use. Compare these savings to the amount of power consumed by developers just to include such an upcoming feature into their application and you get quite an inequality.
The only third-party-application I know which uses a considerable amount of CPU-time even when not used is Photoshop. And Adobe will most probably not do anything. And I think, that's for several very good reasons, for example because of drivers which simply can not be accessed reliably without background tasks constantly running. Photoshop is a Power-App. It shall get the power and I want it not to be restricted.
I bet the ability to turn off notification center and sandboxing completely would save more power.
Yes, there are some applications which need background-resources: XCode, Safari, Finder, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto... Well look at that, who programmed these? But aside from that, it's about 0.1 Percent which they use. Compare these savings to the amount of power consumed by developers just to include such an upcoming feature into their application and you get quite an inequality.
The only third-party-application I know which uses a considerable amount of CPU-time even when not used is Photoshop. And Adobe will most probably not do anything. And I think, that's for several very good reasons, for example because of drivers which simply can not be accessed reliably without background tasks constantly running. Photoshop is a Power-App. It shall get the power and I want it not to be restricted.
I bet the ability to turn off notification center and sandboxing completely would save more power.
Wow, talk about back to the future!
I have an idea-- why don't we just let each application indicate that it's done working and that another application is free to start. You'd still have multitasking, but it would more cooperative...
It seems to me that with most of the applications still being single threaded, multitasking is the only way to make use of more than one CPU core.
I do hope they make full screen more useful.
I'm not quite agreed on your premise, but regardless, I prefer incremental improvement at this stage versus trying to cram in more headline features to justify a higher price tag. I think OS X would be much better, for example, if they hadn't thrown in Dashboard a few revs back. I keep waiting for that to evolve away.
We have an excellent OS, without much need for massive improvements. I say keep incrementally improving the UI as they learn more and put the heavy resources into the developer side making it easier to develop for.
We're still looking for someone to show a way to use an 8 or 12 core machine with overdeveloped GPU power efficiently. Apple has taken some steps in what I think is the right direction on that, but I'd like to see them really excel in this area.
It's not so much that multitasking is completely necessary on these simple communication and media consumption devices, but when Apple advertises it as being proper multitasking, it's a bit annoying when what they actually deliver is not at all multitasking.
I understand that what the tasking switching Apple does deliver is best for battery life and performance, and I accept and like that. I just wish they were more honest about it.
Here are a few use cases that I used to often do when I had a Palm Pre with true and beautiful multitasking:
- Loading a big website in the browser in the background while checking my email. When I come back to the browser, the page is loaded. Safari stops loading the page when you switch to another app.
- Playing a game with a timer delay in it while replying to a text message. If the game has an artificial wait time (for viewing an ad, or for promoting a freemium in-app purchase, etc), I can go do something else for a few seconds and the game is not frozen in time.
On my iPad, these are a few things that it takes a minute or two to do (like load a large a PDF from dropbox) that it stops doing if I switch away from the dropbox app. So instead of letting it load in the background while I do something useful like email, I have to stare at the spinning wheel.
I agree - this rumor is ridiculous. When will the rumor mongers realize iOS is not OS X. They don't understand what "multi-tasking" in iOS really is and why it seems different than OS X.
There is no reason this will ever be done. There is a crazy amount of processor resources available these days. The whole point of cooperative multi-tasking (OS X actually has many levels of priority for processes) is so users don't have to worry about what happens when. And that's for a single core system! If a user wants to save on battery - don't start processor intensive apps in the first place. Yikes. I better stop before I really start a rant
(note: I designed and implemented an RTOS for an embedded processor, so this rumor really made me see red.
Someone earlier replied to me and said, if it happens at all, this will most likely be an opt-in feature for developers to choose to implement; similar to the auto-close feature of some apps. I cannot fathom why a developer would choose to have their app frozen for the benefit of other apps.
Also, I agree that the fact that people seem to have no clue what multitasking truly is sometimes makes me furious.
Hah, that would be nice, but I think those days are behind us for good. I think Apple sees OS X and iOS features as ways to sell us more Apple hardware, services, and content. I think they have entirely abandoned the idea of making money from the OS itself. My guess the $20 or so they charge for the update is maybe for accounting purposes, or to offset server cost or something.
You should get your numbers right, based on their install base, no of people having upgraded, and the price of the lions, apple are making many hundreds of millions off of os x. That's turning a profit, a really good profit for that matter. When you think at the 129 dollars they used to charge, remember the user base then that is dwarfed at what apple's user base is today. Also nothing points to the fact that 've actually hired anyone over the past few years for os x.
I'm pretty sure Apple finds some nonsense excuse to drop support for Nvidia-based chipsets ("the graphics/chipset drivers are bloating the operating system, so no more support for you!"). They pretty much already did this one for the Bootcamp 5 drivers since Windows 8 and Windows 7 64bit are not supported with Nvidia-based Macs. This would mean that even the quite recent 2010 13" MBP would be unsupported with 10.9. But hey, this shouldn't be a problem for anyone since we are all upgrading once every year, right?
Maybe they want a test bed for multi-tasking improvements to be rolled in to iOS8 and beyond (maybe it'll be in 7 as well).
I read this as not a replacement to multi-tasking but a quality of service system to manage demand in a multi-tasking system. That to me would be a valuable addition to Mac OS X but would seem like the sort of thing that would be needed to expand multi-tasking on a tight system like iOS.
I wonder how process aware the system could be?
I mean if one process suspends, say the UI thread, could an active background process queue up operations for that thread to run as the thread comes back active. So neither thread needs to care if the other is active. Which would seem to be a good model for communication between sandboxed app and processes.
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There is no data on exact user base, except where Apple occasionally chooses to release it. We can estimate based on two different sets of data though: (1) percent market share, and (2) total PC sales.
OS X market share % globally has steadfast been under 10%. Today, it is about 7% (source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ope...=8&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2012&qpnp=1&qptimeframe=Y). Back in SL's hay-day, it was about 5% (source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ope...=8&qpcustomd=0&qpsp=2008&qpnp=3&qptimeframe=Y). In the US, this marketshare increase has been more substantial, but we're talking about profits so the global scale is more appropriate. Computer sales in general increases from approx 300 million in 2008/9 to approx 350 million in 2012. Source: Gartner.
Thus, Apple sold about 15million copies of SL, and about 25million copies of L/ML (taking into account the same 1 or 2 year period of time. It's worth mentioning that Apple has toutes themselves that their install base was close to 60million recently. However, I think this counts every OS X machine ever sold that is still alive. While this number is impressive, it's not accurate for purposes of this study because not every user upgrades; in fact, most are not even eligible to upgrade. There is a shocking amount of PowerPC users still out there.
Therefore, in terms of profits: 15mil x $129 per copy = almost $2billion in SLs heyday. 25mil x $20 = $500mil today. It is also worth noting that not every copy sold comes from a software upgrade sale. A large percent probable comes bundled with hardware sales, but we can assume that is part of the cost of the hardware.
Conclusion: Apple is making WAY less money selling OSX. However, they more than make up for it by selling songs, movies, tv shows, apps, and icloud services which tie together certain apple apps and content. All in all, itunes is their cashcow for the foreseeable future. In this era of Apple, they have not ever been shy about canibilizing their own sales. This is very clear from the data above, where they chose to sacrifice OS X profits to get more people into iCloud and more iOS-based hardware.
TL;DR - I do have my numbers strait. I'm right. You're wrong.
Meant to say "preemptive" - not "cooperative". Fixed. Guess I really was seeing red!
Speaking of "preemptive", "co-operative" multi-tasking...
Anyone else remember the multiple times Mac OS 8 was previewed, each completely new with a new version of multi-tasking, and a new candy coloured UI(and by a new CEO)?
OMG YES! ZFS would be an awesome choice. I know they talked about it a while back but I'm not sure if any work is being done at Apple with ZFS currently or not.
Apple "stopped" development/supporting it quite a while ago.
Reason unknown AFAIK but I think the reason might be the following, I installed ZFS several years ago, uninstalled it shortly after after finding out that if you eject an external the OS crashes, if that is still the case I don't want ZFS, simple as that.
Maybe you should stop reading rumours and start reading iOS developer documentation
Then we wouldn't have this discussion.
Click and drag is a lot faster. Everyone worried about clutter, I can't imagine how small your screens must be.
Maybe you should stop reading rumours and start reading iOS developer documentation
So you are saying that in iOS apps don't go to pause when you switch to another app? Just to be clear.
Just PLEASE fix basic multiple file selection within a finder window when scrolling. I constantly need to make multiple file selections and unless I first drag the finder window open large enough to see all the files in one window you cannot easily select all the files as the bottom of the window (horizontal scroller) gets in the way. Annoying and shows Apple's declining ability to focus on and get the BASICS right.
Also, still missing the four finger app selector swipe...
Also, still missing the four finger app selector swipe...
Yes, this is what I am saying. Please inform yourself: http://developer.apple.com/library/....html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007072-CH4-SW20
Agreed. HFS+ is held together with duct tape and prayer at this point.
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ocelot!
