Apple Seeds Snow Leopard 10A190 (Mac OX 10.6) to Developers

Wow, from the Seed Notes, it sounds like this it the real deal--the original alpha build of 10.6 was just Leopard with some new version numbers for applications and so forth. This build sounds like the first one with the new kernel, new features, changed under-the-hood components, loss of Carbon API support, etc...

It is interesting that this is the first version of OS X that is 64bit, offering an option to boot with an experimental 100% 64bit-clean kernel. I wonder how this will be handled in end--will the pure 64bit kernel be the only option with all 32bit code stripped out? I have a MBP penryn chip, so technically it is 64bit, but I've never actually used all 64 of those bits, as I run leopard and Windows 2008 x32. I have heard so many different opinions and assessments of the impact of switching the entire OS to x64--some saying that performance increases dramatically, others saying that the x64 version of NT6 is often slower than the x32 version--that I have no idea what the actual truth is. I assume that for most applications (which are still 100% 32bit), there would be zero advantage, but would they actually be slower?
 
AppleInsider said:
While many of these changes are significant, the new Snow Leopard build reveals a definite work in progress that reflects the several months to go before Apple's publicly planned mid-2009 release of the new software: several features are either suspended or exhibit quirky behavior.
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http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ard_seed_leak_confirms_cocoa_finder_more.html

So Apple has publicly confirmed that they are having a mid-2009 release for Snow Leopard? The early assumptions were for a January 2009 Macworld launch which I always thought was too soon. I wonder if they'll release before WWDC 2009 so that development sessions will be available at WWDC or will they release a near-final build to developers at WWDC for a final round of testing and then ship in time for back-to-school. They would want to get it in with a decent gap before Windows 7 since Microsoft seems to be rushing it in time for a late 2009 release.

And besides general multicore enhancements, hopefully Apple is making some enhancements to recognize and optimize for Hyperthreading in Nehalem. At the time of the Pentium 4, HT sometimes reduced performance because applications just assumed the two logical HT cores per one physical core were both full cores without taking into account they shared resources. This meant that HT could sometimes reduce overall performance. Apple should make Grand Central smart enough to recognize which logical cores are actually sharing the same resources of one physical core and which ones are actually on another physical core and schedule processes to avoid resource conflicts.
 
kbmb said:
One word.....Vista.

Ok....maybe a few more words.....You at least got 4 years out of your machine. My PC was a little over 2 years old, custom built, and cannot run Vista. This was my main reason to switching to the Mac.

So I guess you could always switch to Microsoft :D

-Kevin

edit: Let me add to what I said above......it's not that your machine will turn into mush when Snow Leopard is released....it just won't be able to use it. Similar to my XP machine, it's still chugging away to this day.
Click to expand...

The very last G5 discontinued a little over 2 years go.

The last iMac G5 was about a little over 2 1/2 years ago.

All of these Macs are still listed as supported by LEOPARD on the box in stores TODAY, but will NOT be supported by SNOW JOBS LEOPARD, the BIG BUG FIX LEOPARD.

I'll use Apple's OWN words again... Snow Leopard will not provide new features but be more about stability and performance. Apple is going to end up eating those words as they come back to haunt them.

Don't you think those people want that SERVICE PACK TOO ?

And these WWDC people need to just go away, put up or shut up I say.
I'm quoting facts, you're all quoting nothing and discussing WWDC hypotheticals & presentations about stuff not even coded yet. Cocoa is PowerPC compatible, G5s are 64 bit, etc etc etc, blah blah blah. Excuses excuses for lil ole BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in the BANK APPLE. PuhLEASE!

Thank you Micro, errrr, Apple, NOT! :mad:
 
I'm the proud owner of the first Intel iMac, from Jan 2006. We're going on 3 years now and I couldn't be happier.

Given that you usually buy a new computer every 3-4 years, I think I know when I'll get a new one. The next iMac I buy will be quad-core and come with Snow Leopard pre-installed.
 
Riemann Zeta said:
Wow, from the Seed Notes, it sounds like this it the real deal--the original alpha build of 10.6 was just Leopard with some new version numbers for applications and so forth. This build sounds like the first one with the new kernel, new features, changed under-the-hood components, loss of Carbon API support, etc...

It is interesting that this is the first version of OS X that is 64bit, offering an option to boot with an experimental 100% 64bit-clean kernel. I wonder how this will be handled in end--will the pure 64bit kernel be the only option with all 32bit code stripped out? I have a MBP penryn chip, so technically it is 64bit, but I've never actually used all 64 of those bits, as I run leopard and Windows 2008 x32. I have heard so many different opinions and assessments of the impact of switching the entire OS to x64--some saying that performance increases dramatically, others saying that the x64 version of NT6 is often slower than the x32 version--that I have no idea what the actual truth is. I assume that for most applications (which are still 100% 32bit), there would be zero advantage, but would they actually be slower?
Click to expand...
What do you mean 64-bit clean? And never running 64-bit in Leopard?

Both Tiger and Leopard could run 64-bit applications, but the kernel remained 32-bit. The 32-bit kernel uses PAE to address 64GB (36-bit) of RAM. From the perspective of applications, I don't think there are any disadvantages in the way Leopard does 64-bit, since when 64-bit applications are run the core switches to 64-bit mode and the applications has all the benefits of more registers and additional address space, etc. Examples for 64-bit applications for Leopard include Mathematica, CINEMA 4D 11, Chess, XCode 3, etc. Mathematica actually runs in 64-bit mode in Tiger too since it uses 64-bit worker threads with a 32-bit UI.

Snow Leopard includes a 64-bit kernel but does not remove compatibility with 32-bit applications. All 32-bit frameworks will still be in place including Carbon, Rosetta will still exist, etc. There is no way Apple is dropping Carbon when so many applications still use it including Adobe CS4 released this month and Office 2008. Carbon and 32-bit programs will run as they always have, in 32-bit mode. 64-bit frameworks already existed in Leopard for 64-bit application development and 64-bit programs for Mac already exist so they'll just move over. The only real change is the kernel with new drivers being required.

In terms of speed, Snow Leopard with a 64-bit kernel will speed things up. For one, 64-bit allows 16 registers instead of 8 which means less swapping speeding up the kernel. The other benefit is currently OS X uses a model where the kernel and applications each get exclusive access to their own 4GB address space in 32-bit mode. This is in contrast to 32-bit Windows where the 4GB address space is split with 2GB going to a persistent kernel and 2GB going to the active application. The advantage of Windows way is less swapping since the kernel is in memory all the time, while OS X gives the kernel and each application more memory. With 64-bit, 32-bit applications will still have to share the lower 4GB and swap each other out when you switch the active program. However, the kernel being 64-bit, means that it can permanently live above the lower 4GB range of 32-bit programs and no longer needs to be swapped out, increasing speed. Potential performance impediments come from code being larger when things are 64-bit which could put more pressure on memory and cache.
 
HyperZboy said:
All of these Macs are still listed as supported by LEOPARD on the box in stores TODAY, but will NOT be supported by SNOW JOBS LEOPARD, the BIG BUG FIX LEOPARD.

I'll use Apple's OWN words again... Snow Leopard will not provide new features but be more about stability and performance.
Click to expand...

Oooh! Vitriol!

1) AFAIK, Apple has not made any public statements regarding the target architecture. You're assuming (based on the developer seeds) that Snow Leopard will be x86-only.

2) Apple hasn't stopped releasing fixes for Leopard -- they're not gonna save all the patches for Snow Leopard. If that were the case, Apple wouldn't have released 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 -- nor would they have begun seeding 10.5.6.

3) You seem to think that stability is an all-or-nothing deal. As someone who has developed software professionally for quite a few years on 5+ platforms, I assure you, that is not the case. Sometimes the design of a piece of software is such that you cannot make substantial gains in the areas of performance and stability without ripping out some subsystem/library and starting anew. You may have a stable, fast product -- but it might not be possible to see any more gains in those areas without making major changes. In that case, it's better to hold off the changes for a major release, as complete replacement of critical libraries is the sort of thing that requires a hell of a lot of testing.

4) Snow Leopard is not just bug fixes. There are several _very large_ under-the-hood changes. They're making the kernel 64-bit clean. They're rewriting the Finder in Cocoa (as opposed to Carbon.) They're adding at least two major, brand new libraries. That's not the sort of thing that you can release as a patch -- that's the sort of fundamental overhaul that requires a new release.

5) Those weren't Apple's own words.

In short, you've extrapolated, misconstrued, and all-in-all provided an excellent example of why so many computer users view Apple fans as idiotic, foaming-at-the-mouth zealots.
 
HyperZboy said:
The very last G5 discontinued a little over 2 years go.

The last iMac G5 was about a little over 2 1/2 years ago.
Click to expand...

I'd say the useful life of a modern PC is about 3-4 years. Not only is that an eternity in technology time, AppleCare runs out at the 3 year mark. By the time Snow Leopard is released those machines will either be out of warranty or close to it. You might as well buy a new Mac rather than try to repair one that has had a catastrophic hardware failure.

My PowerMac G5 just went out of AppleCare. It still runs perfectly fine but I required the abilities of a MacBook Pro for work and school purposes. If you require the features of Snow Leopard, then you'll need to pay the price of admission.
 
ppc750fx said:
Oooh! Vitriol!

1) AFAIK, Apple has not made any public statements regarding the target architecture. You're assuming (based on the developer seeds) that Snow Leopard will be x86-only.

2) Apple hasn't stopped releasing fixes for Leopard -- they're not gonna save all the patches for Snow Leopard. If that were the case, Apple wouldn't have released 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 -- nor would they have begun seeding 10.5.6.

3) You seem to think that stability is an all-or-nothing deal. As someone who has developed software professionally for quite a few years on 5+ platforms, I assure you, that is not the case. Sometimes the design of a piece of software is such that you cannot make substantial gains in the areas of performance and stability without ripping out some subsystem/library and starting anew. You may have a stable, fast product -- but it might not be possible to see any more gains in those areas without making major changes. In that case, it's better to hold off the changes for a major release, as complete replacement of critical libraries is the sort of thing that requires a hell of a lot of testing.

4) Snow Leopard is not just bug fixes. There are several _very large_ under-the-hood changes. They're making the kernel 64-bit clean. They're rewriting the Finder in Cocoa (as opposed to Carbon.) They're adding at least two major, brand new libraries. That's not the sort of thing that you can release as a patch -- that's the sort of fundamental overhaul that requires a new release.

5) Those weren't Apple's own words.

In short, you've extrapolated, misconstrued, and all-in-all provided an excellent example of why so many computer users view Apple fans as idiotic, foaming-at-the-mouth zealots.
Click to expand...

#1: Apple has made it clear and public that there would not be PowerPC support with Snow Leopard and the WWDC attendees have attested to that here, even those that disagree with me. Apple isn't even testing a PPC version.

#2: Yes, those were Apple's OWN words, "increased stability and performance."

#3: All of the improvements you mentioned are PowerPC compatible ones, even 64 bit & Cocoa, not INTEL specific, nor new features, just under the hood fixes for "increased stability and performance".

#4: Now please clean up all the egg from your face.

Thank you and I'd recommend to you not posting vitriolic AFAIK statements as point of fact yourself since you're far more guilty of your own criticism of me. :D
 
All I care about is that I hope they don't make iLife and Mobile Me features that require Snow Leopard. I need to get at least one more year out of my PowerMac G5 as the power house of my home office. My MacBooks can upgrade to Snow Leopard but that PMG5 is like the Hive that runs all the major apps and serves as the keeper of all media and files while the MacBooks are the Drones that buzz around the house and go on business trips and do light design work when I can't sit at the main unit for heavy design, web and video in CS3.
 
To what extent will Snow Leopard rely on the third party developers writing software which takes advantage of Grand Central etc, for us to see any really strong performance benefits?

If it does rely on the third parties to write snow leopard optimised versions, that would takes ages
 
junker said:
I understand the argument of slimming down the rest of the OS's by not having to develop for PPC's, but for those of us who purchased a machine within 4 years of it being "effectively stranded", I say they should have a trade up policy. I know they give discounts if you purchased computers within a period of time to an OS release. I know this will never happen.
Click to expand...

Sell your 4 year machine and still get a great price. That is your trade up policy. People still like the old PPC stuff. Leopard will still be the same as the new one. Just better for the Intel folks and cleaning house for future versions. Your machine will be 7 years old when the real update comes out.
 
HyperZboy said:
Seems to me bad RAM would cause a similar problem in Tiger or Panther, wouldn't you think ?

Never had issues with these 2 Macs (MDD & G5) until Leopard & yes, they are RAM maxed out. I'm not an expert, but I suspect that the constant Spotlight indexing of changed files is the culprit as these machines are workhorses that are intensely used with lots of disk activity & RAID setups unlike some other Macs I have which run Leopard without crashing but still slowly & more minor bugginess.

Oddly enough, I also have an unsupported SAWTOOTH G4 MAC that does not freeze or kernel panic in Leopard, but obviously its slow as molasses and virtually unusable for anything but email and generic tasks which is all its used for.

If Apple is admitting that new features is not the point of Snow Leopard, but just stability and performance enhancements, then it's like they're admitting Leopard is buggy from the start. Therefor denying PowerPC users these stability and performance enhancements is a mistake in my opinion.

PowerPC users are not complaining that they're not getting new Snow Leopard features or Intel-specific tech. No, to the contrary, we just want the same stability and performance enhancements wherever there is not Intel specific issues. Last I checked Cocoa is NOT Intel specific tech and there could easily be (and probably will be a secret) PowerPC build of Snow Leopard regardless of whether Apple releases it or not.

Apple is making a big mistake in both the requirements for Snow Leopard and the marketing of it and leaving a bad taste in the mouths of LOTS of people who spent $129 on Leopard not expecting that a year later, Apple would announced Leopard Part II, the Leopard that works and is stable and performance driven but NO YOU CANNOT HAVE IT!

That's sad and bad PR in my opinion.
But no, I won't be going out next year and buying Vista machines to cut off my hand to save a finger to spite myself either. Don't worry! :D
But I'm disappointed in Apple's handling of this BIGTIME. :(
Click to expand...
Interestingly enough - I see nothing in Apple's notes that Snow Leopard is for Intel only. A lot of pundits have said so - but nothing on Apple's page says so. Why not stop the whining until you know for sure?

And don't use the excuse that the WWDC seeds were Intel only. These brand new seeds don't run on my brand new MacBook. Does that mean that it never will? Using seeds like that as "proof" is stupid.
 
ppc750fx said:
Oooh! Vitriol!

1) AFAIK, Apple has not made any public statements regarding the target architecture. You're assuming (based on the developer seeds) that Snow Leopard will be x86-only.

2) Apple hasn't stopped releasing fixes for Leopard -- they're not gonna save all the patches for Snow Leopard. If that were the case, Apple wouldn't have released 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 -- nor would they have begun seeding 10.5.6.

3) You seem to think that stability is an all-or-nothing deal. As someone who has developed software professionally for quite a few years on 5+ platforms, I assure you, that is not the case. Sometimes the design of a piece of software is such that you cannot make substantial gains in the areas of performance and stability without ripping out some subsystem/library and starting anew. You may have a stable, fast product -- but it might not be possible to see any more gains in those areas without making major changes. In that case, it's better to hold off the changes for a major release, as complete replacement of critical libraries is the sort of thing that requires a hell of a lot of testing.

4) Snow Leopard is not just bug fixes. There are several _very large_ under-the-hood changes. They're making the kernel 64-bit clean. They're rewriting the Finder in Cocoa (as opposed to Carbon.) They're adding at least two major, brand new libraries. That's not the sort of thing that you can release as a patch -- that's the sort of fundamental overhaul that requires a new release.

5) Those weren't Apple's own words.

In short, you've extrapolated, misconstrued, and all-in-all provided an excellent example of why so many computer users view Apple fans as idiotic, foaming-at-the-mouth zealots.
Click to expand...

wow. a rational realistic emotionally stable well-reasoned response. bravo.
 
HyperZboy said:
The very last G5 discontinued a little over 2 years go.

The last iMac G5 was about a little over 2 1/2 years ago.

All of these Macs are still listed as supported by LEOPARD on the box in stores TODAY, but will NOT be supported by SNOW JOBS LEOPARD, the BIG BUG FIX LEOPARD.

I'll use Apple's OWN words again... Snow Leopard will not provide new features but be more about stability and performance. Apple is going to end up eating those words as they come back to haunt them.

Don't you think those people want that SERVICE PACK TOO ?

And these WWDC people need to just go away, put up or shut up I say.
I'm quoting facts, you're all quoting nothing and discussing WWDC hypotheticals & presentations about stuff not even coded yet. Cocoa is PowerPC compatible, G5s are 64 bit, etc etc etc, blah blah blah. Excuses excuses for lil ole BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in the BANK APPLE. PuhLEASE!

Thank you Micro, errrr, Apple, NOT! :mad:
Click to expand...

You aren't reading people's responses are you? SL is not a bug fix leopard. That's what 10.5.x are. By the time SL is released, you will have an extremely stable awesome Leopard. Just like 10.4.11 was the most stable OS X ever at that time.

SL is where the USER portion does not change much, but the underlying system is re-engineered for the future. So that OS X can handle the future of dozens of cores. Code that runs on SL runs at the same speed as on L. NEW apps written to take advantage of the new features of SL (yes, new developer-focused features) will run faster.

This isn't NDA stuff - its all on Apple's public pages.
 
The seed notes seem to indicate that 64-bit support is available for all early-2008 systems except the MacBook.

I really hope the early-08 MacBook gets 64-bit support. It'd be stupid not to support it, considering that the Penryn chip is capable of it and Apple still sells that model of MacBook.

It's probably just a temporary limitation. I don't see Apple actually leaving MacBook owners in the 32-bit world.
 
BornAgainMac said:
Sell your 4 year machine and still get a great price. That is your trade up policy. People still like the old PPC stuff. Leopard will still be the same as the new one. Just better for the Intel folks and cleaning house for future versions. Your machine will be 7 years old when the real update comes out.
Click to expand...

Exactly. I assume Leopard development will continue after Snow Leopard is released and they will proceed in parallel. Snow Leopard paves the way for future hardware while Leopard maintains legacy hardware.
 
fewture said:
To what extent will Snow Leopard rely on the third party developers writing software which takes advantage of Grand Central etc, for us to see any really strong performance benefits?

If it does rely on the third parties to write snow leopard optimised versions, that would takes ages
Click to expand...
https://www.macrumors.com/2008/10/24/apple-patent-provides-peek-at-snow-leopard-technologies/

If Apple's recent patent application is for Grand Central, which given the patent is about finding a way to divide tasks between multiple CPU cores and GPUs seems very likely, I think some developer involvement will be required. It's highly improbable that Grand Central and Snow Leopard will miraculously make existing single-threaded and dual-threaded apps multi-threaded.

Instead, given the intermediary layers in the patent between applications and CPU/GPUs, some degree of recompilation will be required. I believe the basis of this has already been distributed through XCode 3.1 and the new LLVM-GCC compiler. This compiler allows for JIT runtime compilation and will probably be leveraged so that code can be optimized at runtime depending on the user's system so that code can be distributed to the system's CPUs and GPUs. Hopefully Apple has been strongly encouraging developers to start moving their code over to XCode 3.1 and LLVM-GCC. Perhaps some benefit can be seen in Snow Leopard from just recompiling applications, but no doubt further intervention will be required to see the full potential of Grand Central and Snow Leopard.
 
Sky Blue said:
Link?
Click to expand...

Puhlease, Apple isn't even testing a PowerPC version of Snow Leopard, nor has there been any hint of such an animal and Snow Leopard testing has been underway for how many months now ???

And if Apple does have a PowerPC version of Snow Leopard (which I suspect they probably will have at some point anyway even if it's secretly held and never released to the public), that adds insult to injury to PowerPC users and developers who would never code any Snow Leopard specific features into any PowerPC version of an app this late in the game if it is ultimately released.

But, its not gonna be released for PowerPC, that's why I'm griping.

Leopard is buggy on PowerPC Macs and the Snow Leopard fixes don't seem to be coming our way, whether you paid $4000 or $1000 for your PowerPC Mac 2 - 2 1/2 years ago. :(
 
MShock said:
I highly disagree. ZFS for the end user means: 1.) speed (much faster I/O performance) 2.) efficiency with file storage to take up less hard drive space (only remembers the main file, and the changes, doesn't make multiple files with changes added like HFS+) 3.) Disk Compression - seems like HFS+ will have this too in 10.6.

I feel ZFS will be roled out like HFS+. It started in the Server edition, then trickled down to client 10.2.8 I think. Something like that anyway. I bet there will not be a GUI controls for ZFS until 10.7. ZFS will totally be an option though in 10.6, eventually if not at first.

I'm surprised with the Cocoa rewrite of the Finder, Apple isn't more gung-ho about integrating ZFS - after all a lot of the work that needs to be done is GUI level stuff according to the forge. I would love to have ZFS integration at the level OpenSolaris has... particularly the Nautilus version with its Time Capsule. Rewrite Time Machine to take advantage of snapshots... talk about efficiency and saving space.... TM is a huge waste of efficiency and space! As an end user, I want all that back!
Click to expand...

HFS+ was added back in the Pre-OSX days, I think in System 8.5 or 8.5.1.
 
HyperZboy said:
Puhlease, Apple isn't even testing a PowerPC version of Snow Leopard, nor has there been any hint of such an animal and Snow Leopard testing has been underway for how many months now ???

And if Apple does have a PowerPC version of Snow Leopard (which I suspect they probably will have at some point anyway even if it's secretly held and never released to the public), that adds insult to injury to PowerPC users and developers who would never code any Snow Leopard specific features into any PowerPC version of an app this late in the game if it is ultimately released.

But, its not gonna be released for PowerPC, that's why I'm griping.

Leopard is buggy on PowerPC Macs and the Snow Leopard fixes don't seem to be coming our way, whether you paid $4000 or $1000 for your PowerPC Mac 2 - 2 1/2 years ago. :(
Click to expand...

But you said Apple has publicly stated 10.6 will not be available for PPC Macs, so I would like the link to the page at apple.com that states this.
 
To the PowerPC people: I suspect that 10.5.9 (or something) will include Exchange support for Mail and Safari 4.0. This means Leopard will have all the same user features as Snow Leopard. It will look identical. The only difference will be performance.

Well, not the only difference, because 10.5 will be a lot more stable, having gone through 10 or so updates. So in some ways the 10.5 people will be better off.
 
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