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Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), iLife '07, and iWork '07 in March?
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a fully 64-bit operating system is reason enough for me. anything else is gravy.
Not to rain on everyone's parade, but I'm highly skeptical. I've got the latest seed of Leopard, and it's still not even close to ready for prime time.
That's not in any way an insult to Apple or Leopard -- it's a beta, it's not supposed to be ready for prime time yet. It's going to be a fantastic OS when it's done, but I just don't see it getting patched up to release quality in the next month. I'm under NDA, so I can't go down the list of all the things that aren't working yet, but trust me there are some pretty simple and fundamental things which just don't work at all.
Also, we're still in the dark on the "top secret" features. One of them is assuredly ZFS -- I suppose I can talk about this since it has been so thoroughly leaked -- but that doesn't work at all right now either. The hooks are obviously there, you can attempt to format a volume as ZFS, but after scores of attempts I have never managed to create a working ZFS volume. In the current seed it doesn't even try, it just errors out immediately.
Now, consider a March release which includes ZFS. Even if they finished the ZFS implementation today, they've got four or five weeks to test it. ZFS is an incredibly complex beast and errors in the implementation would be catastrophic -- at worst, complete loss of all of your data. And when do developers get their hands on it? The current seed has a non-working implementation. If Apple is going to give us the chance to make sure that the new filesystem doesn't cause any compatibility problems between now and March, we're going to need to see a new seed with ZFS support really soon.
Then, what about resolution independence? We know it's coming, Quartz Debug lets us test it, but there is no "real" UI in the system to access it and many of Apple's own applications don't work properly with it. As a programmer myself, I'll be highly impressed if they get resolution independence working properly in the next few weeks.
A March release is possible -- I would be thrilled to have to eat my words on this -- but I am skeptical.
That's not in any way an insult to Apple or Leopard -- it's a beta, it's not supposed to be ready for prime time yet. It's going to be a fantastic OS when it's done, but I just don't see it getting patched up to release quality in the next month. I'm under NDA, so I can't go down the list of all the things that aren't working yet, but trust me there are some pretty simple and fundamental things which just don't work at all.
Also, we're still in the dark on the "top secret" features. One of them is assuredly ZFS -- I suppose I can talk about this since it has been so thoroughly leaked -- but that doesn't work at all right now either. The hooks are obviously there, you can attempt to format a volume as ZFS, but after scores of attempts I have never managed to create a working ZFS volume. In the current seed it doesn't even try, it just errors out immediately.
Now, consider a March release which includes ZFS. Even if they finished the ZFS implementation today, they've got four or five weeks to test it. ZFS is an incredibly complex beast and errors in the implementation would be catastrophic -- at worst, complete loss of all of your data. And when do developers get their hands on it? The current seed has a non-working implementation. If Apple is going to give us the chance to make sure that the new filesystem doesn't cause any compatibility problems between now and March, we're going to need to see a new seed with ZFS support really soon.
Then, what about resolution independence? We know it's coming, Quartz Debug lets us test it, but there is no "real" UI in the system to access it and many of Apple's own applications don't work properly with it. As a programmer myself, I'll be highly impressed if they get resolution independence working properly in the next few weeks.
A March release is possible -- I would be thrilled to have to eat my words on this -- but I am skeptical.
Don't Forget the Spreadsheet
Can't wait... iLife 07 is rumored to have a spreadsheet application. That completes Apple's one-to-one competition with the MS Office Suite.
Except for Access, which isn't part of iWork. Wouldn't it be nice if they made FileMaker a full part of the iWork suite, instead of having it sit in limbo over there in the FileMaker division? It hardly seems like an Apple product at all right now...
Can't wait... iLife 07 is rumored to have a spreadsheet application. That completes Apple's one-to-one competition with the MS Office Suite.
Except for Access, which isn't part of iWork. Wouldn't it be nice if they made FileMaker a full part of the iWork suite, instead of having it sit in limbo over there in the FileMaker division? It hardly seems like an Apple product at all right now...
I hope they package iLife with the OS, they go together, that is what is shown to bring the switchers so they should come together.
Bring it on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bring it on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I agree with everything else you said, but OS X from the beginning was developed as a cross platform OS to support both Intel & PPC. That does not change in Leopard, it's not like they are going to drop support for PPC macs. There may be some more optimization for SSE3 etc, and there may also be more 64-bit optimizations since for the first time all but one of their computers are 64-bit (which will likely change before Leopard release), but it will still support 32 machines.
They will integrate with Leopard, but Apple would never alienate MOST of its users by making iLife require an OS upgrade.
More likely, there will just be particular features (such as ones dependent on Core Animation) which only work in Leopard.
Can't come soon enough.
Want to upgrade from 10.3.9. Tiger wasn't really all that exciting for me regarding features that I use often so I didn't bother. I think this one is going to be big enough for me to go for it. Built in virtual desktops. Yes. I'll use that all the time. Time Machine. Absolutely.
Hopefully we'll get new MBPs with this too.
Want to upgrade from 10.3.9. Tiger wasn't really all that exciting for me regarding features that I use often so I didn't bother. I think this one is going to be big enough for me to go for it. Built in virtual desktops. Yes. I'll use that all the time. Time Machine. Absolutely.
Hopefully we'll get new MBPs with this too.
I didn't mean to say that Leopard would exclude PPC... only that Tiger is at its heart a PPC OS, and Leopard will be fundamentally an Intel OS.
Either will run on either, but I fully expect Leopard to be significantly more optimized for Intel than Tiger could hope to be. PPC is now a legacy platform, and all development is primarily focused on Intel.
Weird ...
Even if 10.5 doesn't come out until April or May - or even June - something has certainly changed with the way Apple seeds test releases to the development community. There have been very few developer seeds of 10.5, compared to 10.3 and 10.4. With the last OS X releases, you could track the progress of the new release by observing the seed build numbers and the frequency of the seeds. This time around, the seed releases have been few and far between. I suppose this has something to do with the seeds being leaked in the past, with very complete and functional betas readily available on the 'net. Apple must have really tightened up on who sees the *real* beta seeds, otherwise the seeding activity would point to a much delayed 10.5 release.
Even if 10.5 doesn't come out until April or May - or even June - something has certainly changed with the way Apple seeds test releases to the development community. There have been very few developer seeds of 10.5, compared to 10.3 and 10.4. With the last OS X releases, you could track the progress of the new release by observing the seed build numbers and the frequency of the seeds. This time around, the seed releases have been few and far between. I suppose this has something to do with the seeds being leaked in the past, with very complete and functional betas readily available on the 'net. Apple must have really tightened up on who sees the *real* beta seeds, otherwise the seeding activity would point to a much delayed 10.5 release.
I am with Egomaniac
There are a couple of things that worry me if March is the release date:
- the latest 9A343 seed is nowhere near stable
- developer builds usually become more frequently available as the GM comes nearer
- where the **** are the top-secret features Jobs was bragging about @ the WWDC last year.
Unless there is some "top-secret enabled" version of Leopard which has never been seeded to the developers which is far more reliable, I can't see this OS being released next month.
iLife '07 and iWork '07 I can see happening.
It wouldn't surprise me to see some "media event" where the launch of iLife and iWork '07 are celebrated, where a new dev build of the "top-secret enabled" Leopard is demoed, where the real release date will be called.
I agree. Email templates - Wow!
Really disheartened with Apple recently. Hopefully there will be something simply awesome in Leopard that they have held back until the last moment.
I really really want to see an interface refresh, I'm not saying overhaul, that brings OS X up to Vista's eye-candy - I agree with the Wired Mac guy, OS X looks slightly dated in comparison.
I don't care if it's right, but half the attraction of an Apple Mac for me was its attractive design, both on screen and off. I don't want a £399 Dell running Vista making my Mac look less attractive - So c'mon Apple, satisfy my vanity.
die!
vista is a piece of crap that was stolen from apple...I'm a switcher and I'm never going back to windows
that's why i won't upgrade before 10.5.3 (maybe 10.5.2 if the reports are good) and i leave it to you guy's to be the lab rat's
but i can't imagine that they hold back iwork for another 3 month just it uses some shiny new button under leopard. it has to run under tiger as well.
There's classy-nice and there's tacky-nice. Just randomly adding some interface features always results in the second. Heck, Apple is moving away from the brushed metal because it is bulky and crowds out useful content.
That said... when comparing looks, no Dell can come close to comparing to my BlackBook in cool-lookingness. No way. Not even a contest.
Then what's with the WWDC invitation? It implies Leopard will be released then... unless they're just using Time Machine's interface to make the invite fancy. In any case, I need iLife '07 now! The same goes for Leopard, but part of me wants iLife more.
No they have not. However one of the posters in the forums has, she was spot on about the iPhone (in detail) weeks before it was announced. She also said the release date for OSX, what TS is now reporting. I think TS may have gotten this right because of the poster in the forums that obviously has a great source. (I looked for the post but it appears to be gone now... sorry)
