Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August 519
Max Fomitchev writes "Looks like Apple is going to reveal its new cool and fast Mac OS code-named 'Leopard' in the upcoming World Developer's Conference in August. Good news for Apple! And terrible news for Microsoft. If 'Leopard' is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient, in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
More Speculation (Score:5, Interesting)
Way back in the day, Apple code named their boxes by color. From the aforementioned article: So we can speculate that Leopard might not only be fast but also encourage a partitioned Windows installation using boot camp so that it can reference everything within Windows and run Windows apps flawlessly without having to reboot or (more importantly) reverse engineer Windows.
Again, this is just speculation, I've been expecting them to put 'red box' functionality in a release of OS X soon.
Re:More Speculation (Score:2, Insightful)
There's nothing at all in the article on Fomitchev's site that wasn't common knowledge weeks ago. Apple itself announced Leopard's unveiling over a week ago.
Another self-promoting Slashdot submission! Submitted by Fomitchev, about Fmoitchev's blurb on Fomitchev's blog, which links to a short article that is hardly newsworthy.
Someone tell me why I should pony up to be a subscriber again? Even at the low, low price of free, Slashdot's n
Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot stories are almost always links to blogs which links to reprints of stories. Half of them are uninterestingly written or contain nearly no information. BUT
Even if there was no link, if it was just a headline: Apple to soon release OSX Leopard!...without even an article..it wouldnt matter because slashdot is about the discussion. I want to see what people think about leopard..i want to see people uncovering cool features that arent mentioned in most stories..i want beta testers to come forward and tell about their experiances...THIS is why slashdot is great. Much more interesting than sites with many stories, but no usable forum to speak of. (digg,etc)
That beeing said, I have no idea why anyone would subscribe. I just block ads and get the stories ad-free anyways. And as for seeing them early...who to discuss with..yourself?
Re:More Speculation (Score:4, Insightful)
I've had with these editors. I'm assuming they get paid for their work, yet they can't even check articles like this for substance, or spot that the sumitter and blog owner are the same person and probabably looking to get some quick ad revenue.
And even if the editors work for free, you'd at least expect they had enough pride in their work to do a decent job.
Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Funny)
Slashdot users actually reading the article? You must be new here.
Re:More Speculation (Score:4, Informative)
That's probably also why Apple didn't reverse engineer MAPI so Mail.app could talk to Exchange, choosing instead to screen-scrape Outlook Web Access.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM tried this already with OS/2, it failed (Score:5, Insightful)
This was already tried with IBM OS/2 and it failed, and IBM was even requiring that users have a real copy of Windows. The future is vitualization and being able to run any version or patch of Windows. BootCamp is cool but it is temporary.
Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you even stop for a second to think how idiotic - not to mention unlikely, bordering on impossible - this idea is ?
Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Informative)
I used OS/2 extensively. Indeed, I've still got my original media for several versions at home.
Microsoft went out of their way to sabotage OS/2 by "enhancing" Windows in ways that would be difficult or impossible for IBM to emulate.
No, they didn't. You have no idea what you're talking about (or think you are).
IBM didn't "emulate" Windows in OS/2, they used their licensed source code for the Win16 API. Later releases (when the code licensing no longer
Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to post anonymously on this one...
But speaking to a well known Oh-Ess Ecks programmer, I asked him about the possibility of Wine noting that he would be the one to ask. He is very collegial with Microsoft and I've hung with him and one of M$'s top programmers as they have both bitched and moaned about the other's OSs (and the Microsoft guy actually made a few points I never thought about before that were on the money...I program Windows for a living but own a niche Mac support company that grew out of a mailing list I use to moderate...I can almost give up the Windows programming these days as my organization is starting to look like it needs centralized day to day leadership, but beyond that, I could care less what OS anyone else uses. I know how to use both and my Vaio is as much a part of me as my new Intelbook).
Getting to the point, talking to the guy and asking him about the possibility of using my Windows skills to port applications using WINE but with a translated front end on the Mac side. Pretty much, simply run the APIs of the apps I have created or have access to, and create new native front ends. Best of both worlds I thought (sorta like when I would create C++ backends and use VB to build the front end on the PC and Hypercard for the Mac -- I got pretty proficient at making certain DLLs could be recompiled as a XCMD simply by dropping it in the right compiler and letting the headers decide what to do with it).
His response was one of the most direct responses I've ever gotten about future plans without him saying anything. Claimed to have looked into WINE, had it running internally (this was a year back, when I was still planning on having to use an X86 emulator to do most of the work as I didn't think the Intel switchover was going to happen so quickly) and he said that while it was a good product, they weren't going to use 'compromised' APIs to do this. When asked if they had any plans to license or develop any of their own non-compromised APIs, he responded that there was no plans to license anything. It was a pretty strongly worded statement, especially when looking into the point by point claims and what was missing from my original query. And considering the last statement I received in this manner was positively prophetic looking back upon the email.
With Bootcamp and the new emphasis on Parallels and my knowledge of their staff, my best bet is that Apple is planning on leveraging Windows to their own needs, making it usable but a pain. Sort of like how their Bluetooth products refuse to work with the Windows side of the Intelbook and simple features that could have been added were ignored to ensure that you only got exactly what you needed to run Windows solidly in Bootcamp, but not with the trademark Apple Ease of Use.
Apple doesn't have to reverse-engineer Windows API (Score:3, Informative)
Despite that, you're probably right that it would be easier and safer to require a real Windows install underneath. Apple has always been about things Just Working, and using the real Windows code is the surest path to that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apple doesn't have to reverse-engineer Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Without access to internal APIs, doing it entirely through blackboxes.
XP is done. There may be tweaks, but the API is frozen.
I mentioned DX because of firmwa
Re:More Speculation (Score:2, Insightful)
Where did that get IBM with OS/2???
Nathan
Re:More Speculation (Score:5, Funny)
No, but it's Leopard Meat! They go mad for it!
Sounds like microsoft would come out okay (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More Speculation (Score:3, Insightful)
They just look sort of OS X-ish, the widgets just don't feel quite right, because the shapes, the spacing between text and button edges etc. is different from native widgets. So in the end it just looks like some Linux app using an somewhat close but not good enough OS X theme.
And t
Stock Tip (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stock Tip (Score:2, Insightful)
In all seriousness, why doesn't Apple sell Leopard for like $99 to PC users? Would drivers be the limiting force? If it comes out before Vista, is better than Vista, and cheaper, and has less system requirements....it could really sway people over to their camp. Or is it because then nobody would need to buy their hardware? En
Re:Stock Tip (Score:2)
Driver issues would cause stability isssues, it would suddenly be more attractive to spyware and virus makers.
Basically it would be windows. Only probably worse because MS have a lot more practice at dealing with those issues which is why XP is by and large, so much better than 9x in these ways.
Re:Stock Tip (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft could seriously limit and control the hardware on which Windows would run, they could probably do a lot better with drivers, too.
These days, now that Apple is using more standardized Intel chipsets, they are able to pick a few configurations that are identical to perfectly good PCs out there and develop for those machines. As technology advances, they'll still have a limited group of configurations to develop for. (And yes, they aren't putting out high powered gaming configurations right now, but they will have high powered graphics workstations when the high end desktops come out.) If they had to start supporting everything, they would be opening a Pandora's Box of compatability issues. Dealing with the required driver variants would eat up the same resources they're using to innovate.
Besides, the reason Apple sells OS updates for $99 is that they know that everyone buying a copy has already bought a machine they produced.
-JMP
Re:Stock Tip (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stock Tip (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Stock Tip (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Stock Tip (Score:2)
Then wait until the enthusiasts are euphoric, talking (as now) about competing with MS, raising share dramat
Re:Stock Tip (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stock Tip (Score:3, Funny)
Who writes this junk? (Score:5, Insightful)
If "Leopard" is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
Maybe the reason fewer people are taking Slashdot seriously is because Slashdot doesn't seem to take itself seriously.
Hire a f-ing editor to check out and rewrite the most egregious but still post-worthy submissions. No, a real editor, not one of your friends.
Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. It's not even like you'd need to edit a whole article - you're editing the summary of an article.
(emphasis mine)I found that pretty amusing. Since when is a 10% (plus or minus; feel free to correct me with solid info) marketshare remarkable?
Also, from the actual article itself:
Is this actually a new OS like the article suggests, or just a new revision of OSX (10.5 or what have you)? If it's not supposed to be completely brand new, I find this article somewhat questionable.
Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:4, Insightful)
By week, I think you mean year. The fact leopard would be announced at WWDC was pre-announced at last year's WWDC. I'm not sure how this is news.
Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when have Microsoft OSs not been slow and resource-hungry? And when did Apple ever not prioritize elegance and performance?
Careful - your fanboyism's showing.
Erm, a long time. Apple needs to differentiate itself from Microsoft to retain its market share. Moving to an Intel architecture was a risky step, as it deprived them of one of their major differentiating factors, PPC architecture.
The minute Apple runs on commodity PC hardware no-one has any reason to buy expensive Mac hardware, so they won't. This takes Apple out of the hardware game, and makes them entirely reliant on software and iPods. Mac OS/X will then compete directly with Windows, and though it's faster, more stable and more secure, Windows has that whole 90%+ market share thing going for it. Apple would be squished in short order.
Sorry? If Apple wants to make OS/X run on commodity PC hardware it's going to have exactly the same problems. Sure, it could arbitrarily draw a line in the sand and refuse to support hardware older than X years, but that's not going to impress anyone used to Windows' (at least passable) support for legacy PC peripherals.
And even if the problems weren't as severe as MS's in the short term, by giving up control over the hardware OS/X runs on, Apple will be ensuring it only gets worse in the future, until within a few years they'll be just as stuffed as MS.
Riiiiight, because Ballmer et al are reknowned industry-wide as cuddly, fluffy-wuffy teddy-bears.
Certainly MS is looking shakier than it has for a long time, but I doubt the paranoia level's decreased much since Bill left.
Very poetic.
Except, of course, the dinosaurs actually kept the "mice" down for millions of years, and it was only once the dinosaurs had already naturally gone extinct on their own that the mice even had a chance. There's nothing like a bad analogy to really demonstrate you don't know what you're talking about...
This is probably the only mildly sensible thing in the entire article.
What, you mean the guys who failed to put a dent in it for the last twenty years? Sorry Mac guys and girls, but when a cash-poor FOSS operating system written by a bunch of hobbyists frightens MS more than a long-term competitor, you obviously aren't competing quite as hard as you think.
A better candidate than Apple?
Linux (free, doesn't have to worry about profits or budgets, has been eating MS's lunch for years on the server-side
Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder where people get the idea that OSX is fast. Apple marketing?
Most benchmarks that i've seen seem to indicate the opposite.
http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/ [berkeley.edu]
Even my X41 Thinkpad with it's Pentium M 1.6GHz running debian testing with stock kernel does time echo "scale=5000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l faster (1m9s) than MacBook Pro 2GHz running
Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:3, Informative)
System calls are similarly expensive, especially ones that require interaction with the Mach layer. Guess whe
Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who writes this junk? (Score:2)
This is just NOT news. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is just NOT news. (Score:2)
No shit. I used to come here in 1998 for interesting stories about relevant tech stories and people. And posts like this story are the reason that after being a Slashdot newbie, then a junkie, I'm now visiting less and less.
I don't know whether Slashdot's audience matured right out of reading it, or if the quality of posts simply decreased. I don't know who "samzenpus" is, bu
Re: (Score:2)
Re:This is just NOT news. (Score:2)
This is absolutely true. This is not news. It is not so much that it was reannounced a week back, but Steve Jobs announced it almost a year ago at WWDC 2005. I thought he had, so I checked the video of his keynote to make sure I did not spread incorrect information on /. At about 57.5 minutes into his keynote, he says that they will be telling us about Leopard at WWDC 2006. Now, I understand that some in the Windoze community may be used to being told that something will be ready at a certain time....and th
This has been news on June 26 (Score:5, Informative)
Yet another Apple commercial (Score:4, Insightful)
Year of the Mac? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems a bit out of character..
Big Cat Names (Score:3, Funny)
Yeeeeeeeeeeee.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't trust that source (Score:2)
Wake me when.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wake me when.... (Score:3, Funny)
Remarkable Market Share? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Remarkable Market Share? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Remarkable Market Share? (Score:2)
who said vista was slow? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does a "faster" OS really sell computers? (Score:2, Informative)
2.2% is remarkable? (Score:3, Insightful)
In calendar year 2005, total PC unit sales were 208.6 million.
Apple's selling plenty to survive as a profitable niche product, sure. But they are competition for Microsoft in the same sense mainframes are.
Wow, Slashdot is really falling apart. (Score:4, Insightful)
If "Leopard" is really what it claims to be, i.e. fast and efficient in sharp contrast to slow and resource hungry Windows Vista, we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year."
WTF is that? First off, it's wrong. It's very very wrong. Tiger is better than XP now, but did we see 'Apple's remarkable market share gain this year'? No. There is nothing certain about Apple and 'market share gain' no matter how superior their products. Forget 'remarkable'. Second off, it's written so badly I had to go over it three times to make sure it really said what it said.
Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
This makes the assumption that the masses want "fast and efficient." I think quite the opposite. If the masses wanted fast and efficient, they would turn off the fancy stuff in XP and turn it back to looking like 2000. Sorry, but the masses are not interested in speed or efficiency, they are looking for e
Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard (Score:5, Informative)
One should note that it's not Carbon that makes the Finder suck. Any decent, full-featured OS X application can be written in Carbon if the developer takes care to implement things correctly. And even more importantly, some things in OS X can still only be done in Carbon, hence the Framework's inclusion in many Cocoa applications as well. Unfortunately, most users associate Carbon with all those ported ("carbonized") OS 9 C++ applications written on top of Metrowerks' PowerPlant, so it makes sense Carbon has a bad rap, but the fact is: Carbon is not the issue here. Carbon's fine.
Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard (Score:5, Interesting)
Carbon's fine, until you actually bother to learn Cocoa. The fact is, religion about this aside, Cocoa is just better. As in 10,000% more productive better. The fact that apps also tend to look better is not a reflection of Carbon per se, but it is a reflection of just how much work you have to do in Carbon to makes things come out right. I'd rather spend time on making the app functional rather than endlessly tweaking the widgets. I came from the Toolbox, then Carbon, and now Cocoa, so I know of what I speak.
However, I disagree that PowerPlant is the cause of a lot of problems, because in many ways PP was the Cocoa of its day, Mac-wise (ignoring the fact that Cocoa has existed in some form since 1987, just not on the Mac). Using a framework on top of Carbon is the only sensible way to program with Carbon - anything other than a small app is unmanageable in Carbon if you don't have a framework there. What may be a source of this perception is that between System 8.0 and 10.0, Apple changed a lot about the organisation of the Toolbox/Carbon and PP may have struggled to keep up with that. It was a tough period all round.
I'd like to see the Finder written in Cocoa, because it would likely be a lot more functional since getting functionality together in a Cocoa app just takes much less effort than the same functionality in Carbon. Given that Apple seems to want to throw a Finder together I'm sure it would be a lot more polished in the same timeframe if constructed in Cocoa.
Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, I did not mean to malign Powerplant (it clearly replaced MacApp as the only framework to use, and hell, only way to really write an application pre OS X), but in IMHO it is indeed the source of all these Carb
Microsoft way ahead (Score:5, Funny)
It does not matter, and Apple does not care (Score:2, Insightful)
None of those things will EVER happen. Apple has come to understand you can run quite a profitible biz by having 7-10% marketshare. It even helps them because the evil virus authors don't write viruses due to it's market share compared to windows(one of the reasons). The OS runs well (one of the main reasons) because Apple controls the hardware it runs on, as opposed to MS havin
Empty Article (Score:5, Insightful)
The article had NO MEANING. It was one of those things you say to your buddies while hanging around. "You know, if Leopard is as fast as Apple says so, MS could be in deep [insert colorful adjective here]." Then you're promptly shot down by your friends, reminding you that the masses have a "Crapple" frame of mind because their last experience with Mac OS was with the pizza-box LC IIs running System 7 from back when they were in high school, and they don't care any more.
Not only does this bode poorly for Slashdot's credibility as having important and accurate information, but what does this say about journalism in general, when this passes for a good article. Oh, wait, it's not even an article! It's a blog posting! Do we even know who this Max Fomitchev is? I've never heard of him. This place is slowly becoming a rumor mill full of dupes.
Come back when you've got an article from a credible source, no less than 500 words, with some real analysis, facts to back it up, and maybe a cool graphic or charts or something. Until then, stop wasting my time.
You are all too negative (Score:2)
So, Editors, pay not attention, keep linking to them as long as there are any to be found. When there are none, that's the interesting time. The rest of us wil
Bloody naming! (Score:3, Funny)
With Windows, I know that the step from 2000 to XP is significant because the names are way different. Similar with XP and Vista. But seriously, how can I expect something significant going from Tiger to Leopard?
BTW, I guess I can blame my ignorance, because as a long-time Linux user, I only view Windows and MacOS/X from afar.
I Suspect... (Score:5, Interesting)
List of OS X Code Names (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the list of OS X code names:
Re:List of OS X Code Names (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure Vista is the slow resource hungry one (Score:3, Insightful)
The Windows machine is more than twice the clock speed of the economy mac mini, but even with this in mind I can't help but get the impression the MacOS is abnormally sluggish.
I am not traditionally a mac user (or a windows user for that matter) and people who are more familiar with Apples history tell me that the lack of a 'snappy' feeling in the GUI is just something you get used to, and not representative of the efficiency of the O/S... but i'm not sure that I buy into that.
Anyway, Let me go ahead and make my points very clear:
1) Vista is really not sluggish in the sense we are talking about here. Especially if you get the new RTM (post beta2) builds from MSDN. In fact it is much snappier than any Mac/Gnome/KDE desktop I have worked in on similar hardware. (Perhaps this is becuase the windows GUI is so ugly
2) Current MacOS IS sluggish, maybe its becuase of all that silly anti-aliasing and frequent x86 emulation, I really don't know, but if they make a new O/S which solves this problem there would be ALOT of people more willing to use it, especially if they can get some damn native applications available for x86.
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:2)
Dude, read that sentence back...I'll wait, so you can sound out the words.
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Because Microsoft has chosen the option to add in more options, rather than streamline. Can't really fault them for this strategy, since it seems to work for them and most people, but it annoy
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:2)
Windows XP is also around 4 years old. On ne
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:2)
Rubbish. Windows 2000 was the one edition that I had to think twice about. I know many people who kept running windows 98 on a seperate machine (or as a dual boot) because it was faster for games. Windows 2000 added a lot, including better stability and security, but it was not faster on the same hardware.
Direct x - maybe, but I am stil not sure until I see some benchmarks. I know new releases rem
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well one could go with history and note the fact that EVERY new version of Windows has been a lot slower than the predecessor. Meanwhile every version of OS X has been faster than the predecessor.
If you look at the unit sales of Macs from Apple quarterly reports, you'll see that they is usually significantly larger growth YoY that in the overall PC market. That means growing market share.
Of confirm it by looking at sites browser stats. This one shows Mac userbase doubling in 3 years.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
I can see why you selected your username. But you'd do better if you didn't overreach yourself with your FUD.
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd do well to follow your own advice. I've already posted this, but what the heck:
Q1 2001 [com.com] (roughly 5.4% worldwide) and Q1 2006 [appleinsider.com] (roughly 2.0% worldwide)
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect that has something to do with the fact that, with Apple, you constantly have to upgrade your hardware as well as your software. It's not like you can go back and install OS X on your 1998 PowerPC 740 and expect it to run faster than the OS it originally came with.
-Eric
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:3, Informative)
The first OS X (Cheetah) was released in 2001
The current OS X (Tiger) is compatible back to the slot loading iMac of 1999.
ANY computer that was bought for any version of OS X can still run the current version of OS X.
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since your post is in line with what I was going to say, I decided to just add a couple of things and then add my other two cents directed at the others reading these posts.
To add to the facts you present, if a computer system h
Re:Huh? Wanna say that again? (Score:3, Informative)
Really? Not according to this article: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/busines s/14191452.htm [mercurynews.com]
Apple may have lost market share in the late 90's / early 2000's but they are recovering. I believe this a lot of this is due to OS X.
Re:I think there is that possiblily - (Score:3, Insightful)
So, basically you choose your computer on the basis of its marketing image, rather than any serious look at what it can actually do, or how it works. You realise how lame that is? Still, it is certainly this sort of attitude that has handed Microsoft its 90%+ market share, so you're not alone.
Re:I think there is that possiblily - (Score:2)
As to the marketing image. its important to a lot of people, but perhaps its not just the image as put out by Cupertino of the products. Its also the image put out by the Mac people, the attitudes struck and so on. Its something that a lot of people do not want to be associated with. Something that has been commented on in the Mac online communi
Re:No, We Won't. (Score:3, Informative)
Thousands of casual computer users are switching. I switched. I know at least 10 people in my age group (20-30) who have swtiched. 10 more who are thinking about it. People looking to buy a new comptuer when they go off to college are looking at Macs more seriously than ever. They do the same things that any casual user is looking for in a Windows computer (email, web, chat, word processing), they look better doing it, and they work flawlessly (and better) with
Re:No, We Won't. (Score:2)
Sure, how about 2001 vs 2005? A quick Google found this [com.com] from 2002 and this [appleinsider.com] for 2005 (hint: they are basically the same, maybe even lower). The rest of your post hit the nail on the head (though maybe unintentionally) - Mac's are all about perception and appearance. They seem to have a far larger market share than they actually do.
That being said, I'm also considering getting a Macbook :) (why no integrated video, w
Re:No, We Won't. (Score:2)
I agree (Score:2)
I'm switching to Ubuntu.
Re:No, We Won't. (Score:2)
Re:No, We Won't. (Score:2, Insightful)
What you fail to recognise however, is that Microsoft never have, and never will, deal with advancement of technology (why bother when you've got Sun, IBM, Apple e
Re:...long before Longhorn (Score:2)
Re:My feelings on OS X (Score:5, Insightful)