Mac OS X 10.6 Called 'Snow Leopard', All Cocoa?

[Chef Medeski]

Speed and stability are really what's needed. I applaud Apple for focusing on the bread and butter of the OS instead of trying to tack on more flashy features to sell the sizzle.

I concur, a speedy/stable OS is just as important as those talking points.

But the name and the lack of major feature seems to indiciate it may not be full price which would make sense. $130 for speed and stability no matter how good is kinda steep. I think a half-price update would make more sense. Especially since Snow Leopard doesn't seem like much of a difference form Leopard.

 

[amac4me]

It makes sense for Apple to drop PowerPC support on Mac OS X eventually. The PowerPC Mac era died the day the transition to Intel was announced (Summer 2005). We're now 2.5 years into the Intel Mac era (since the MacBook Pro announcement at Macworld 2006) so the timetable of dropping PowerPC support on the "next" version of the operating system makes sense to me. By the time it's out we'll be at least 3 years into the Intel era.

 

[Decrepit]

Nope. But it borders on insanity to think that Apple would move through 8 successive 10.x upgrades and then inexplicably jump to 11.x.

Clearly for branding reasons Apple loves the Roman Numeral "X" "XI" isn't bad but isn't quite as clean IMO.

The stuck mental process for some here is the old world thinking that the bigger the advance in number the more "special" the application is.

Microsoft jumped from 2.0 to 6.0 with Word so they could have a similar versioning number to Word Perfect.

Apple killed the Apple II line which was fantastic and replaced it with a completely incompatible computer line.

Companies do weird things all the time.

 

[Cabbit]

Personally i welcome a feature frozen 10.6 launch. Give me the full cocoa full Intel 64 bit slim line and fully refined Snow leopard that gives very rapid performance and a simple elegant development platform.

What new features do we really need, we already have everything linux has and more in terms of features just not all of them are user accessible. OSX is the same in linux in a lot of ways.
There big, bloated and 90% of the code is irrelevant. I bet you there is still parallel and serial drivers and all the code related to them lying about somewhere.

I personally feel what we need is a full code cleanup and a little further ui tidy up, such as iTunes scroll bars thought and the buttons and other interface elements to be a little less gum drop looking.

 

[Loge]

I appreciate that an Intel only release would take up less disk space, but I am not convinced that it would be noticeably faster. If the PPC code is not called, there is no reason why it should be slowing down the OS.

 

[macFanDave]

Snow Leopard and Mobile Me in the same week?

Does Apple have a Department of Crappy Naming that's been working overtime?

I can hear the PC douchebags hassling us, "Heh-heh, is that Leopard that freezes a lot? <picks nose> Heh-heh. <fart>"

I think Apple ought to reuse the Cougar name for 10.6 but this time around, use Demi Moore as the mascot, gggrrrrrrrwwwwwlllll!

When they get ready to end it with the cat names, I still say they should name that version for the biggest cat of all: GARFIELD!

 

[sunfast]

Are all the people who've been whining about too much iPhone news happy we're talking about OS X again?

Still, news of the next release is always interesting. It'll be fascinating to see what WWDC brings.

 

[Krevnik]

What new features do we really need, we already have everything linux has and more in terms of features just not all of them are user accessible. OSX is the same in linux in a lot of ways.
There big, bloated and 90% of the code is irrelevant. I bet you there is still parallel and serial drivers and all the code related to them lying about somewhere.

There better still be serial driver code floating around. I have RS232 devices that were built in the last couple years that I interface with. Embedded developers still use RS232 to talk to their dev boards (when Ethernet isn't available or not feasible for a console), or server consoles.

While I agree that the RS232 port should die on machines (and it did), the driver stack needs to stick around for those of us still using it for various reasons, so that someone providing me with my next USB->RS232 cable doesn't have to write the whole stack themselves.

I appreciate that an Intel only release would take up less disk space, but I am not convinced that it would be noticeably faster. If the PPC code is not called, there is no reason why it should be slowing down the OS.

With how universal binaries are designed, and Rosetta... PPC code will only slow down the PPC process. Nothing else will be affected (or even /able/ to call PPC code). Plus with how little PPC/Intel specific code there is in the platform (mostly in the HAL, and the vector libraries)... they aren't spending a huge amount of time maintaining cross-platform support.

 

[Eric S.]

How long was it before Apple dropped support for 68K when PPC came out?

That might be what we are looking at.

How about Leopard, when they abandoned Classic mode?

Under 10.4.11, I could still run my 1987 copy of MacPaint that came with the first Mac I ever bought, a Mac Plus.

 

[Azurael]

They also dropped Disk Mode. It's not on the Touch (nor the iPhone).

Forgiveable. At least far less annoying than dropping FW support. They're not really iPods really - they're fully functional computers which run a 'proper' version of OS X...

Mind you, Macs have got target disk mode. I would imagine the only reason they didn't implement it is to hinder hackers.

However, it really irks me that I can't just drag 'n drop music to my iPhone like I can to the 'Pods...

 

[milo]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/448431/

I guess there's a good reason that never made it to page one. I'm surprised anyone believed that.

i'd love to see the adobe developers faces when this is official! lol
say bye bye to ancient code!

Hell, I'd love to see the faces of the apple teams that develop Logic and FCS. Are there any major apps in cocoa, ones from Apple itself included?

HAHAHA don't get ahead of yourself there buddy. They're awesome, no doubt, but saying they're faster than current machines? Like what? The Mac mini?

What makes you think the imacs and laptops are faster? A quick google search found benchmark testing showing the G5 quads beating all but the Mac Pros on a number of benchmarks like cinebench. If you found different results, link them.

Face it, the grave for PPC was already being dug when Apple announced the move to Intel. PPC was placed in the grave with Leopards system requirements. It's been a long time, and the time has come to throw the flowers on the grave. Did you really think they were going to be supported forever?

What do the leopard requirements have to do with PPC? And it hasn't been a long time, the intel transition was only announced about three years ago. Generally macs have been supported longer than that. It's not about being supported "forever", it's being supported as long as the hardware can handle the software. In the case of G5s, particularly the quads, they can handle it with no problem - there's a big difference between a machine losing support because it's not fast enough to run the latest and a machine that *could* run the software just fine getting dumped just because the company doesn't feel like supporting it any more.

 

[blackcrayon]

There better still be serial driver code floating around. I have RS232 devices that were built in the last couple years that I interface with. Embedded developers still use RS232 to talk to their dev boards (when Ethernet isn't available or not feasible for a console), or server consoles.

While I agree that the RS232 port should die on machines (and it did), the driver stack needs to stick around for those of us still using it for various reasons, so that someone providing me with my next USB->RS232 cable doesn't have to write the whole stack themselves.

The serial driver will be around for a while. All Xserves have an rs-232 serial port.

 

[KindredMAC]

If Apple wants to make a stable and faster version of Leopard just work harder on a 10.5.x update.

This is starting to turn into the old days where people didn't jump from 8.0 to 8.5 but waited for 8.6.

 

[arkmannj]

Unix = RISC
Linux = x86

Neither Operating System type is tied to an architecture

You have Linux for PPC (RISC), X86 (CISC), and so on...
Yellow Dog Linux, Ubuntu just to name a couple are available for PPC
Ubuntu is also on x86 as is Fedora, and many others.

Unix like Linux has flavors on various architectures, of which Mac OS X (darwin) is just one such unix flavor.

 

[milo]

I thought leopard was the new full 64 bit re-write? What the heck?

It is.

G4 & G5 are both Power PC, so if they support one, they're supporting both.

Nope. While they are both PPC, G5 has unique features not supported by G4. They could easily drop support for G4, you notice they don't support G3 (also PPC) anymore, right? They can even drop support for various models and configurations when they want to.

 

[Luzzio]

It looks like Apple wants to match Windows 7 with their own version 7 of OS X i.e., 10.7, from a marketing perspective. So they will get out 10.6 fast to have enough gap in between and time it to Win7 release.

That's a horrible marketing strategy

 

[iPoodOverZune]

Snow Leopard and Mobile Me in the same week?



When they get ready to end it with the cat names, I still say they should name that version for the biggest cat of all: GARFIELD!

I second that. That was in my thoughts too - to take the last version and name it Garfield.

 

[milo]

i think it's about time that Apple gives the axe to carbon. wasn't the purpose of carbon to make the transition from os 9 to os 10 seamless? that was nearly 7 years ago... so why are people still writting carbon applications?

Because carbon allows writing in C++ while cocoa requires Objective C (oversimplification, but that's the general gist of it).

Working in carbon makes it MUCH easier to write code that is portable for both mac and windows. Using cocoa makes the two much less similar, and makes supporting two codebases MUCH more work.

 

[blackcrayon]

That's a horrible marketing strategy

Like when Microsoft named it "XP" after Apple announced "OS X"?
"The P means it's even BETTER!"

 

[babyj]

Neither MS or Adobe can magic out a Cocoa version of their programs in time, they can't just add programmers to the project as it doesn't actually work. See the OS/360 and read the Mythical Man Month for why.

Times have changed since OS/360 was in development. Back then development was performed on dumb terminals connected to computers dumber than your iPhone and the programming languages didn't lend themselves to larger teams each working on smaller chunks of code. Whilst re-usable code meant printing out some old code and manually copying it in to your latest project (no copy and paste back then).

Sure Adobe and MS couldn't produce a completely re-written version of a major application over night, but they could easily throw resources at it to get it done a lot quicker than you might think.

 

[Krevnik]

Nope. While they are both PPC, G5 has unique features not supported by G4. They could easily drop support for G4, you notice they don't support G3 (also PPC) anymore, right? They can even drop support for various models and configurations when they want to.

The G3 lacked a VMX/Altivec unit. It made sense to drop support for it because vectorized code simply could not run on it at all. The line between the G4/G5 is a lot thinner.

The serial driver will be around for a while. All Xserves have an rs-232 serial port.

Oh yeah, I know. I hinted at that with the 'server consoles' bit in my semi-rant. I just wanted to make the point that because it seems obvious that something is obsolete, it doesn't mean that it is.

 

[HyperZboy]

Thats exactly what Leopard is like at the moment. The 10.5.3 update was excellent in my opinion. Leopard has been brilliant on my end on 2 different Macs. The recent update just solidified that.

So what are you going on about? You tried using Vista recently. Everyone who has a Mac on here should be thankful and the ones that complain should stop, give Vista a whirl.

While I don't intend to give Vista a whirl anytime soon, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't say what you just said about Leopard or even 10.5.3 if you owned a technically supported Powermac G4 or low end G5 where Leopard is pretty much a disaster in my opinion. 10.5.3 has even pretty much bricked my Quicksilver G4 and its hardly snappy or stable even on my Dual 1.8 G5 and I've got 3GB RAM! Sure, some of these Macs are getting long in the tooth, but they are SUPPORTED MACS for Leopard, so Apple should have done a much better job on these supposedly supported PowerPC Macs than they did with Leopard in my opinion.

Anyone who owns lower end Macs probably bristles every time John Hodgeman lauds how stable Leopard is in those I'm a Mac commercials because stable it is not and snappy, well, we won't even go there! HAha!

Ultimately, Steve Jobs will get whatever he wants and if putting PPC in a coffin at this WWDC is his wish, he'll get it. But he'll also alienate once again some very long-time Mac users like myself.

 

[volfreak]

It's not insanity...

Nope. But it borders on insanity to think that Apple would move through 8 successive 10.x upgrades and then inexplicably jump to 11.x.

Clearly for branding reasons Apple loves the Roman Numeral "X" "XI" isn't bad but isn't quite as clean IMO.

The stuck mental process for some here is the old world thinking that the bigger the advance in number the more "special" the application is.

When the major version number changes, it usually means there's a major change in the product. If Apple were to go 64-bit Intel only with a completely new file system (say, ZFS), got rid of Carbon and went solely Cocoa, that's a major revision which would likely get the 11. version number.

There is logic to the numbering system and as it's been noted many times here, the releases don't get a new major number when the digits are x.x.9 (it just goes to x.x.10). First number change, major version differences. Second digit in the string are revisions/updates to the major version. Last digit in the string are updates, patches and things like bug fixes (no new features).

So, it's perfectly logical for there to have a jump from 10 to 11 if the major revision warrants it.

Cheers

 

[iZac]

Are all the people who've been whining about too much iPhone news happy we're talking about OS X again?

Yes, very!

Still, news of the next release is always interesting. It'll be fascinating to see what WWDC brings.

Its quite exciting now that we have lots of varied things to conjecture about, as opposed to a million rumors pointing toward the iPhone getting 2 mm fatter / thinner / wider / more awesome.

Although it sounds a little like the start of a Rhapsody song, i like the name "snow leopard". and who knows, maybe it is just a significant point upgrade like 10.5.5, just with more fanfare?

and as for bad naming schemes, "mighty mouse" is an absolutely ridiculous name, but i still say it with a straight face.

 

[babyj]

Totally disagree here. Keeping around legacy crap is what got Microsoft into trouble. They still have very bad legacy APIs laying around. Developers are lazy, I am a developer so I know how it is trust me.

<snip>

I think you nailed it spot on there.

Windows was built on top of DOS for a long time and included far too much legacy stuff for far too long. Sure you upset some people by dropping legacy support but it makes for better software for the majority in the long run.

With (I believe) other Apple products (Apple TV, iPhone, maybe some new devices coming soon) sharing at least some of the code base with OS X, having a tidy up and dropping some legacy stuff from OS X makes a lot of sense.

If they do then jumping to 10.6 makes sense as well. Adding a lot of new features on the user side of software is one reason for a new point release, making major internal changes which break compatibility is another. They could easily carry on with updates to 10.5, with 10.6 being for recent hardware and everything else released going forward.

I've got one of the early 32 bit Core Due MacBooks, it will be a few years old by the time 10.6 comes out and if I can't run it then I'm not going to get too upset. Sh*t happens and it will be time for me to get a new Mac anyway.