Then you're both crack babies. Apple's competitive analysis group watches the industry, but I assure you there are better places to get information than trolling rumor mill sites where you get a few grains of truth along with a whole lot of lies and idle speculation.
On your second comment, Apple is running double time in the SAME direction as Microsoft. Apple recognizes that its architecture is not up to large scale use and is pulling many ideas from Windows NT into Snow Leopard. That's not a bad thing. Apple has a great set of API for the user interface and a great set of application development tools, but Windows NT has a lot of wisdom packed into it from mainframe architecture. VMS + 111 = WNT, remember? Since both Darwin and Windows NT have roots in Mach, they have much more in common than Darwin has with Linux at this point. Snow Leopard is so that Apple can take time to align with those high-performance principles and sprint BEYOND what Microsoft has done.
Another one of those cases where people who know about as much as Jim Cramer does about predicting the stock market, insist on spewing crap about X being better than Y because of something they misheard from a friend of a friend who read something somewhere.
You need to read more of my posts before making assumptions, as well as understand that a little humerous banter does not suggest ignorance, but simply a sense of fun.
At no point have I suggested Apple don't track the market. Your general point about Snow Leopard has already been made in this thread, by myself and others. However, your understanding of some of the core architectural principles behind NT and Leopard are flawed. In the development of WinNT Microsoft aggressively developed components (such as the virtual memory paging system) which at the time were way ahead of what current hardware was capable of. It was a brave move, and this in particular was just one of the components of the architect of NT that was designed in that way. The very nature of what we consider to be part of an operating system has now changed, as has the hardware operating systems run on.
UN*X moved in its own directions, and in true hare and tortoise style, the lead NT built has not been maintained. This is not an attack at Microsoft, they sprinted ahead, and have been deservedly banking that investment for 15 years. However, times have changed and although both operating systems have common ancestors... just as we don't breath through gills, its not particularly meaningful to point at a shared history and claim that makes the descendants the same.
As a developer who has worked on many architectures over many years, and was teaching operating systems theory and practice to Masters students, I'm very comfortable in this area and certainly not depending on half understood water cooler conversations.
In particular, the changes being made in Snow Leopard are not a back-port or reverse engineered from Microsoft developments (although of course many features are being "borrowed", and rightly so. I welcome exchange integration, and wish they would lift the Windows 7 desktop layout management features). However, the performance improvements coming from two distinct areas:
- Improved Frameworks such as OpenCL and Grand Central. These are the long term investments that will pay dividends as developers adopt them. They won't magically start improving matters, there will be conscious effort required to use and exploit them (in the same way Core Animation didn't suddenly make everything start tweening between states).
- Architectural performance improvements derived of lessons learned from porting OS-X to a mobile platform. These range from changes to Quicktime movie playback, to more fundamental changes in the kernel (including memory management and scheduling).
Of course there will be other things gleaned from general and publicized research, and of course Apple keeps up with, and contributes to, thinking in these areas and will chose which and when should be applied to OS-X.
One thing I think we both agree on is what Apple is doing with Snow Leopard; positing their operating system to continue to deliver competitive advantage over the next 3-5 years.
