Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mac OS X 'Snow Leopard' to Focus on Performance, Quality

BlizzardBomb said:
As I thought, January was a bit too early. Wanted to hear more, but still great to hear these little tidbits.
Click to expand...
Not just too early, but ridiculous.

June of '09 sounds much more realistic - gods willing Apple will spend time working out the bugs that need fixing in Leopard, first, and then move on to "Snow Job" in due time.

No new features I'm fine with, its the tacit acknowledgment that Leopard 10.5 is an "abandon ship" project that irks me.
 
Look, I love Mac OS X, but this "perfecting" statement is a joke to me, because there are so many neglected areas of the OS that I know aren't going to get the kind of treatment they deserve. In order for me to be able to accept 10.6 as a refinement-only release, I'd have to see:

- A Finder that isn't crap
- A version of QuickTime Player that is actually modern
- A version of iTunes that is actually modern
- A version of Mail.app that isn't crap
- Some actual user-usable metadata adding/searching support (for the file metadata support I understand to already be there)

I would absolutely love nothing more than to be proven wrong and have all of those things dealt with, but after getting the "new" Finder in 10.5 which is not at all a new Finder, I'm not going to hold my breath.
 
maxrobertson said:
How could you expect to be impressed when you barely know anything about it? It's tiring to see the same whining comment over and over about the pricing when we don't know the pricing. It seems obvious to me that it will have to be significantly lower than the normal $129, probably at least by half.

Also, this is not "service pack" type stuff since Apple doesn't do service packs. The things they are fixing aren't necessarily bugs, but performance issues and legacy stuff that is no longer necessary. Snow Leopard is very necessary, it's going to prevent a whole Mac OS 9 to X or XP to Vista transition happening all over again. The reason we even had that transition in the first place is because of people being unwilling to change, and Apple was too afraid to do anything drastic until they had no choice. Luckily, Apple is going to do it no matter what.



And why do you think that is? It's because they add new features that have bugs. How can you not understand that that's the whole point of this release? They are going to spend the amount of time they normally spend adding new features (and bugs) and instead they're going to increase performance and maximize stability. I've noticed that OS X isn't as stable as they tend to say, and I believe that this will give us a truly rock solid operating system.



Really? You Really think that Apple might have a trick up their sleeve or might, oh, I don't know, be withholding information that's under some sort of NDA-like thing in their Leopard developer sessions? What amazing insight you have. Also, NO. Apple will almost undoubtedly not allow OS X to run on PCs. They already tried that once and it almost killed them. Sorry for the sarcasm...



See, that's what I really think this update is about. They have a lot of features in there that are really buggy, but in a normal release they might fall under the radar. This is where they get to tie all of those features in properly. Here's a list of the ones that I know of:

• Resolution Independence
• Quartz GL (Quartz 2D Extreme)
• ZFS
• FTP

I'm sure there are a lot more. I really think they just aren't at the point where they can talk about it.
Click to expand...

As someone who enjoys reading intelligent responses; and who worked for NeXT and Apple the only way I can see them offering OS X for non-Apple hardware would be to sell it at a price that makes it unattractive to all but the Enterprise level customer. And even then Apple would want to make it so unattractive that they'd buy straight Apple hardware with OS X.

If someone wants Apple on a PC so bad they could easily introduce the old NeXT pricing model for User/Developer and charge $799 for a single copy.

That would virtually eliminate that need.

It's humorous to come up with What-ifs as you have pointed out, but pragmatically Apple is better served designing products that chip away at the cost/benefits against comparable hardware.

If Apple can take 10% of HPs market segment [10% of their say 30% == 3% total market share of PCs sold] that would be a huge step forward.

I'd be more impressed they did this and improved quality while maintaining margins. If they can improve manufacturing solutions resulting in reduced costs that they can pass onto the Consumer, no matter how marginal, all the better.
 
The most interesting feature of 10.6 will be seeing how they convince the average user to upgrade to something without a new feature set.
 
i agree i think if this is gonna be a spped bost and that kinda upgrade make it 99 bucks and 50 bucks for users who have bought leopard since the relase date.
 
macfan881 said:
i agree i think if this is gonna be a spped bost and that kinda upgrade make it 99 bucks and 50 bucks for users who have bought leopard since the relase date.
Click to expand...

Hmm, to be honest they'd be crazy not to release this for free. What a rip-off for people who bought Leopard and now have to upgrade just a year later.

This upgrade, as of now is based on performance tweaks.

-Stell
 
wallaby said:
Are you serious? It felt to me like each release since 10.0 to 10.4 had been cleaning up the previous release plus adding a few things...10.5 seems to be more cluttered than the rest in comparison by adding too much and not accounting for the bugs it would all cause.
Click to expand...

Exactly.

I have developed this sudden freeze syndrome with Safari (and Omniweb, which runs the Webkit) on my MBP 2.33, resulting in me having to force shutdown the machine.

So, not only is it more cluttered to look at and use, my user experience tells me they bodged the stuff behind the scenes as well. Not that those are the only problems Leopard delivers. I actually had to go back to tiger for a while because it happened several times a day. To think I paid for such a dog …

For this reason, and this reason alone, I'm not going to pay for Snow Leopard if it's "merely" bug fixes, "streamlining" and so forth, as that should have been working in the product I paid for. I'd get it for free somewhere else. Oh, and hopefully it'll coincide with me needing to buy another computer (Thinkpad is on the horizon- Hackintosh here I come!!).
 
If I have to wait 7 years for a new OS release, I hope my 'pusher' gives me some speed from time to time ... I moved away from XP as I found it stagnant (if only the first acceptable release from Redmond for end users), just to live in Tiger (on both sides) ... The only interesting thing for me on MS on the last decade has been to follow how well they improved on Java (.Net). And it seems MS still has a lot to 'learn':
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-microsoft-could-learn-from-apple.ars
In short, MS still makes easy stuff doable by a 7 year old and hard stuff almost impossible ... But I'm sure that's the right thing for their demographics. :p

As Intel has a tick (new fab process) - tock (new arch) for hw, it seems Apple is doing it too:
- Tiger (new arch): People still do not realize how impressive this transition has been.
- Leopard (new features): Some of them unfinished as new infrastructure is missing. Middle ground for new platform(s) (iPhone).
- Snow Leopard (new infrastructure): I bet this release (even though it will still support PPC) will make people want to upgrade their hw for sure!

The OS builder has to build infrastructure to use and make available what the hw makes possible, and then app devs have to use what the OS and frameworks provide to build great applications ... I'll bet Snow Leopard will provide a dev's dream environment, but it may take some time for some end users to notice (some end users do not even realize that some features were already available on earlier iterations, because they where not so visible ...).

I am enjoying being on OS X (less than 4 years yet) much more than I have enjoyed MS's environments in 20! I pay to use OS X, they pay me to use/develop for other OSs.

So, where are all those guys who said the new OS release would come in January? :rolleyes:
 
I don't know if this has already been mentioned (I'm not going to read through all 10 pages) but the apple site says:

Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.
Click to expand...

Does this sound like they may be removing PPC code? I know people are saying that in a lot of applications PPC code makes up only a tiny percentage, but surely over the whole OS it would add up to quite a lot?
 
With Mac gaining market share, it is just a matter of time before it becomes an attractive target for the virus-writing sickos.

I'm betting this new OS will make a strong effort in the attempt to add safety features to thwart the inevitable.
 
marcj said:
I don't know if this has already been mentioned (I'm not going to read through all 10 pages) but the apple site says:



Does this sound like they may be removing PPC code? I know people are saying that in a lot of applications PPC code makes up only a tiny percentage, but surely over the whole OS it would add up to quite a lot?
Click to expand...

Could be. Maybe they are going to implement an automatic architecture stripper to strip programs before they are installed.
 
shidoshi said:
- A version of Mail.app that isn't crap
Click to expand...
Name me five better email clients. Mail may have some bugs (I read about them, I haven't come across many in my daily usage) but it does a fine job as well and has some great features. Crap is a bit of an overstatement.

shidoshi said:
- Some actual user-usable metadata adding/searching support (for the file metadata support I understand to already be there)
Click to expand...
Spotlight can search through meta data, from whether a flash was used on a photograph, to the number of layers in an OmniGraffle Document, to the number of pages in a document.

This is pretty fine grain stuff.
 
marcj said:
I don't know if this has already been mentioned (I'm not going to read through all 10 pages) but the apple site says:



Does this sound like they may be removing PPC code? I know people are saying that in a lot of applications PPC code makes up only a tiny percentage, but surely over the whole OS it would add up to quite a lot?
Click to expand...

Perhaps they might also include a choice as to whether one wants to install all the goddamn bloaty templates from some of the preinstalled software (I know: Show packages>contents>Resources> yadda yadda> delete. Still a pain).
 
I still wonder if snow leopard will somehow use the touch interface.

The itablet or whatever it will be called will be out soon. Soon as maybe Macworld 2009. I mean the mac will have the touch interface sometime soon.

Windows 7 was displayed with having touch interfaces worked into the code. So, it's only logical that apple will put this into 10.6 or 10.7. Maybe leopard. Who knows.
 
I think Snow Leopard is a very good thing indeed. It is more than just a service pack like Windows (since when did Windows service packs make the code more efficient?)

A smaller OS doesn't just save hard drive space. It means that it will boot much faster, and will occupy less RAM leaving more memory free for applications, which as a result will work faster.

This will be particularly good for the likes of the MacBook, especially for people with smaller hard drives.

Like others have said, there is no evidence that there will be *no* new features at all. for example, maybe they will make the finder slightly more extensive. Maybe they'll continue to refine stacks to make them more useful and user friendly.

Remember, they said they would change the focus from extra features to optimisation. They didn't say that they wouldn't tweak existing features.

For a long time I've been saying that companies should perform this type of optimisation. Certainly it shows that the existing code is less than efficient. But no matter, Snow Leopard *is* the right way to go.
 
Small White Car said:
Are you freak'n kidding? I have a $3,000 Mac Pro whose processors often only works at 50% because the software won't take full advantage of the hardware that's there. (I can trick Compressor into running multiple threads on the same compression and it DOES speed up, but other programs don't have that option.)

If I have a $129 chance to double the speed of my $3,000 investment I'd jump on that in a heartbeat.

How can that not impress you?

EDIT: And let me be clear that while I WOULD pay $129 for this I'm betting it won't cost that much. For the full version, sure, but I'm sure there will be an "upgrade from Leopard" price, which is unique for OSX, yes, but this is a unique update.
Click to expand...

Because not everyone has a $3000 computer?
 
Wow, I don't know if it's just me but I find all the "Snow Leopard sucks because it doesn't have new features" posts kind of funny. I don't know, but for me I'd much rather spend $129 on something that's going to greatly improve performance instead of getting a bunch of new features, of which I only use a few regularly. Also, what other features does OS X even need at this point? This is much more than a simple maintenance release. I assure you that it will take far more resources to optimize multi-core performance than it did to implement Spaces or add some other Leopard feature.

It's also quite apparent that all you complainers have never owned Windows machines. Every Windows upgrade is pretty much a leap backwards in performance and no significant new features, with nothing more than a prettier GUI, some additional hardware support, and supposed increased security. What great new features did Vista add over XP? Not many.
 
elppa said:
Name me five better email clients. Mail may have some bugs (I read about them, I haven't come across many in my daily usage) but it does a fine job as well and has some great features. Crap is a bit of an overstatement.
Click to expand...

Saying "at least it's the least sh***y e-mail app from the sh***y choices we have" isn't an acceptable statement to me.

When I can't even use two different terms in Mail's search (so, say, find all e-mail from "Steve Jobs" that contain "Snow Leopard"), Mail is crap. And that's just one thing that sucks about the app.


Spotlight can search through meta data, from whether a flash was used on a photograph, to the number of layers in an OmniGraffle Document, to the number of pages in a document.

This is pretty fine grain stuff.
Click to expand...

Great. Now let me add my own meta-data to files so that said searching is useful to me, especially now that I can't use iPhoto to tag images and search them outside of iPhoto anymore. The situation right now is like if you could search metadata in iTunes for songs that you purchase from the iTunes Store, but you couldn't do any tagging of your own for songs brought in from any other source.
 
planetgenova said:
Wow, I don't know if it's just me but I find all the "Snow Leopard sucks because it doesn't have new features" posts kind of funny. I don't know, but for me I'd much rather spend $129 on something that's going to greatly improve performance instead of getting a bunch of new features, of which I only use a few regularly. Also, what other features does OS X even need at this point? This is much more than a simple maintenance release. I assure you that it will take far more resources to optimize multi-core performance than it did to implement Spaces or add some other Leopard feature.
Click to expand...

Apparently you misinterpret those posts. Intentionally?
The thing is, it's not that people don't want to pay for something that is working, no, they don't want to have paid for a product only to pay again to get all the bugs fixed.
That's a completely different scenario than what you make it out to be.

It's also quite apparent that all you complainers have never owned Windows machines. Every Windows upgrade is pretty much a leap backwards in performance and no significant new features, with nothing more than a prettier GUI, some additional hardware support, and supposed increased security. What great new features did Vista add over XP? Not many.
Click to expand...
Trust me. I not only have owned windows-machines, I work on Windows Vista and XP about every other day (not everything I do can be done on OS X). The point is, you're tring to say it's fine and dandy paying for bug fixes, in essense paying double. Good on you. I suspect you're also of the opinion that it's a good thing that you don't have disk mode on the iPhone + Touch, it's a good thing you have to activate the iPhone in-store and so on.
 
shidoshi said:
Great. Now let me add my own meta-data to files so that said searching is useful to me, especially now that I can't use iPhoto to tag images and search them outside of iPhoto anymore. The situation right now is like if you could search metadata in iTunes for songs that you purchase from the iTunes Store, but you couldn't do any tagging of your own for songs brought in from any other source.
Click to expand...

I don't know about purchased songs, but I use Bridge (CS3) to meta tag all my stuff (most of it is audio files). If you have Bridge, why not give it a try?
 
marcj said:
Does this sound like they may be removing PPC code? I know people are saying that in a lot of applications PPC code makes up only a tiny percentage, but surely over the whole OS it would add up to quite a lot?
Click to expand...

My guess is that the installer will become smarter and only copy the code you need. I've always wondered why they don't do that now. Makes sense to have both PPC and Intel on the DVD but why copy both to the user's computer?

A smarter installer would explain all of the rumors
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back