Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Shipping in September: $29 for Leopard Users

[50548]

You really have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?

Whatever. You're entitled to your beliefs misguided as they are.

Well, read more about the fix that W7 represents before spitting MS-fanboy comments here...the driver structure remains the same with a little more visual crap, as is common for MS's overhyped efforts.

W7 is too little, too late; and Mac users couldn't care less anyway.

 

[ipedro]

I sure hope it doesn't work that way, for the simple reason that what you described is precisely how windows does it.

I wouldn't know. I don't use Windows

 

[Amdahl]

so far so good. Loving the price of SL and all the "refinements" but I was really hoping for a comparison using Grand Central. I wanted to see a non-multi-threaded app being used on an Octo-core MP running Leopard, and then the same running with SL and be blown away.

Because you believe in the Steve Jobs Fairy? You can't make an app run in parallel that wasn't designed for it, no matter how many body parts you remove and sprinkle. (Yes, in isolated cases you can do it, but as soon as you're calling libraries it all has to serialize.)

Looks like it will support the older 32-bit Intel Macs. I wonder if more fat could be cut from Leopard if that was done. Dropping PPC code was good.

PPC code isn't dropped. All PPC libraries are still there so that you can run PPC apps. The hate of PPC is simply irrational Apple fanboy 60s counter-culture kill-yesterday-on-the-altar-of-tomorrow BS.

 

[METOO999]

I'd rather not get iLife '09 and pay a lower price for SL only.

 

[Eidorian]

Well, read more about the fix that W7 represents before spitting MS-fanboy comments here...the driver structure remains the same with a little more visual crap, as is common for MS's overhyped efforts.

W7 is too little, too late; and Mac users couldn't care less anyway.

Please don't tell me you want to update the driver structure again after what happened with Vista.

"Visual crap" is entirely subjective.

That seems outright bogus. Windows users pay extra for a 64-bit version, and it's still not capable of the performance that Grand Central and OpenCL make possible. Even though most end users don't care about the technology, they will certainly notice the speed boost and the extra 6 GB of disk space — things that Windows users can't buy at any price. When's the last time Windows got smaller and/or faster from one release to the next?

Read up on ConcRT and Computex showed nVidia and Microsoft teaming up for GPGPU. As if it's not part of DirectX 11 either.

 

[cawesjmu]

Because you believe in the Steve Jobs Fairy?

Something like that. Would you care to elaborate on why this won't be the case? All I've heard about Grand Central is that it'll utilize more of the idle cores that were being left free by non-multithreaded apps. Different apps could already use other cores, but I was under the (mis-guided?) impression that present day apps would benefit. Is this really just for new apps being written today that will be multi-threaded?

I read quite a few threads talking about how the newest MPs could/would/might be faster with single-threaded apps after Grand Central was implemented. I'm always up for learning if you can provide some info.

 

[KALLT]

A shame that iChat doesn't get support for other IM clients. No one I know uses AIM, they use MSN instead. But I hate the client from Microsoft, and don't like the other clients either. iChat would be perfect, looks really great. Alas, AIM only, and that in times of Meebo and eBuddy!

29 Dollars for an upgrade is really great! Snow Leopard doesn't have any features I would spend 129 Dollars on, but 29 Dollars are worth it.

 

[DonSqueak]

I'm sorry for asking such a lame question, but if Snow Leopard ships in September, that means if I want to wait until it's preinstalled on my future MBP I should wait to purchase until Sept too? Ah, dumb question, I know.

I actually find it funny. You perfectly well explained why nothing else is even possible. Described your question as being dumb. Asked it anyway. Actually, this just gives me an opportunity to comment on a post that never should have existed to get closer to my avatar

 

[brop52]

Why is the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256MB not capable of OpenCL? It's has better graphics capabilities than the 9400M G. I'm not complaining I'm just curious.

 

[GoCubsGo]

I'm still wary of the upgrade game but $29 is an easy sell for current Leopard users.

How come?

$49 for the family pack. Giving it away. I was going to wait this time but now, who cares.

That is where I stood. I said F - SL, but really? $50 for all three of my machines or $29 a little less ... well legit? Yeah, I am there.

I actually find it funny. You perfectly well explained why nothing else is even possible. Described your question as being dumb. Asked it anyway. Actually, this just gives me an opportunity to comment on a post that never should have existed to get closer to my avatar

 

[Eidorian]

Why is the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO 256MB not capable of OpenCL? It's has better graphics capabilities than the 9400M G. I'm not complaining I'm just curious.

No clue. The hardware supports it but OpenCL doesn't.

How come?

Clean drives and other verification nonsense that was touched upon earlier in this thread.

 

[seb-opp]

Im glad that Core Duo is supported despite being 32bit, but I wonder if it would give me much benefit over Tiger?

 

[NoSmokingBandit]

OSX's gui is just going to hell. I was really hoping for Marble, but instead of trying to make everything more uniform and presentable Apple goes and adds the black titlebar to Quicktime alone. Now we have Aqua, the iTunes theme, the iLife black/gray theme, and the black Quicktime.

Really just sad for such an image conscious company.

Pricing is neato though. I suppose they couldnt sell it on looking new so they just lowered the price. Fine by me

 

[macuserx86]

OSX's gui is just going to hell. I was really hoping for Marble, but instead of trying to make everything more uniform and presentable Apple goes and adds the black titlebar to Quicktime alone. Now we have Aqua, the iTunes theme, the iLife black/gray theme, and the black Quicktime.

Really just sad for such an image conscious company.

Pricing is neato though. I suppose they couldnt sell it on looking new so they just lowered the price. Fine by me

Ya, it is getting kind of ridiculous. Plus, throw the pro apps in there and you're looking at 5 distinct UI themes

 

[sysiphus]

$29 upgrade price is awesome...reminds me of 10.2

How do you like them apples, Microsoft, with your 100+ upgrade costs?

 

[macrumorsMaster]

So i guess that means no need to wait till Sept to try to get SL for free, if you're buying the the edu store. I assume from the Dec 26 date, 90 days before that is during the end of Sept, at least a week and a half after the student special

 

[Eric S.]

According to the announcement:

For Tiger® users with an Intel-based Mac, the Mac Box Set includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife® ’09 and iWork® ’09 and will be available for a suggested price of $169 (US) and a Family Pack is available for a suggested price of $229 (US).

 

[Amdahl]

I read quite a few threads talking about how the newest MPs could/would/might be faster with single-threaded apps after Grand Central was implemented. I'm always up for learning if you can provide some info.

Well, first, you can't make a non-parallel app parallel at runtime, as a practical matter.

The only way an app would be sped up is because the libraries it uses are able to run faster. An OpenGL app might get faster if the graphics card gets faster, or the libraries get faster, or the libraries become multithreaded. You might recall this happened in 10.4.6 or thereabouts to OpenGL on Intel. (PPC got the same gain in 10.5.) Apple threaded their OpenGL code, and even a single-thread app that was calling those libraries was able to experience the gain, however, I do think the app technically had to request multi-threading in OpenGL to guarantee it wouldn't cause problems. The demo app was World of Warcraft. Frame rate basically doubled when you clicked the switch.

Another example is the Accelerate API that Apple introduced in 10.3 ( I think). If the programmer used the Accelerate API, their program would automatically make use of AltiVec, if it existed. Later, on Intel, it would automatically make use of SSE, if it existed. If it didn't exist, Accelerate would just use normal CPU instructions.

So, only libraries that are being called can possibly benefit from Grand Central without the app being rewritten. And there aren't really any libraries except the well-known ones above that are likely to see those kind of gains. And if they see those gains, there was no reason why they needed to wait for Grand Central.

Grand Central is generally understood to be like OpenMP (a compiler and runtime parallelization system), while OpenCL, which is somewhat like the Accelerate API, and will allow GPUs to be used to calculations by general apps.

 

[windywoo]

Well, read more about the fix that W7 represents before spitting MS-fanboy comments here...the driver structure remains the same with a little more visual crap, as is common for MS's overhyped efforts.

W7 is too little, too late; and Mac users couldn't care less anyway.

And you should use Windows 7 before you post ******** you have read on a Mac forum. You are so isolated in your little Mac world you forget that 90% of computer users are using Windows.

$29 + the cost of a Mac is the big difference here. Snow Leopard won't run on my iBook, Windows 7 will run on the 1.6Ghz laptop that I retired because even XP got bogged down.

If Vista users want to use Snow Leopard they are going to have to pay far more than $29 for it. By comparison, the cost of Windows 7 will look far sweeter.

 

[sysiphus]

Im glad that Core Duo is supported despite being 32bit, but I wonder if it would give me much benefit over Tiger?

Yes, it should still be an upgrade...all we don't get with a Core Duo/X1600 is OpenCL...which is a big loss, but I'll take my matte+expresscard equipped CD MBP over a new "Pro" missing those but with OpenCL support.

 

[jaw04005]

$29 is a remarkable price and I'll be at the Store with my money day one

Apple did its users right by this. I knew I wasn't going to fork over $129 for what's essentially a mostly framework/developer/strategic release. However, $29 is reasonable.

$29 upgrade price is awesome...reminds me of 10.2

You mean 10.1? 10.2 Jaguar was a full $129. I remember, considering it was the first stand-alone Mac OS X I purchased.

 

[iSee]

I can't believe that people are so stupid to compare OS upgrades to "Service Packs".

Well: What's the difference between a service pack and an OS upgrade?

There isn't one simple answer. You're drawing a line in a grey area. A lot of times it's just a marketing decision. However the OS vendor draws the line, they better make sure their customers agree!

Going on feel, I've got to agree with Apple on this one. It feels like more than a SP (mainly because of the new Finder, Grand Central, OpenCL, Dock/Expose integration) but less than a full update. $29 seems like a great price to me.

Windows Service Packs feel to me like cleanup--stuff they wanted to get done for the initial release but didn't have time to do, or didn't realise should be done, or to cleanup something ugly. I know they release new features in them, but it never seems like anything that interesting.

Of course, all types of releases include bug fixes.

 

[Amdahl]

Ya, it is getting kind of ridiculous. Plus, throw the pro apps in there and you're looking at 5 distinct UI themes

I hear this complaint a lot, but really, does it really bother anyone? Wouldn't we get tired of everything looking exactly the same? A little visual branding or distinctiveness isn't bad.

 

[Eidorian]

Something like that. Would you care to elaborate on why this won't be the case? All I've heard about Grand Central is that it'll utilize more of the idle cores that were being left free by non-multithreaded apps. Different apps could already use other cores, but I was under the (mis-guided?) impression that present day apps would benefit. Is this really just for new apps being written today that will be multi-threaded?

A lot of work as already done in Leopard bring components up to multi-threaded status. We're also looking at nearly every Mac being limited to two cores. It's a quad core desert for Apple.

I read quite a few threads talking about how the newest MPs could/would/might be faster with single-threaded apps after Grand Central was implemented. I'm always up for learning if you can provide some info.

Links? How are you going to parallelize a single threaded process without parallelizing it in the first place?

OSX's gui is just going to hell. I was really hoping for Marble, but instead of trying to make everything more uniform and presentable Apple goes and adds the black titlebar to Quicktime alone. Now we have Aqua, the iTunes theme, the iLife black/gray theme, and the black Quicktime.

Really just sad for such an image conscious company.

Dare we say we're almost to a Vista sized train wreck of variations?

I'm going to say no if you stick with the standard toolbar and Interface Builder. Your mileage may vary otherwise.

 

[Krafty]

Balls to your Macbook, my Mac Pro with its X1900 isn't even supported!

MEGA WOUND

Well, my GMA950 is...yeah.