Apple to Unveil New Leopard OS in August

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."

This has been news on June 26

[aralin]

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/jun/26wwdc.ht ml [apple.com]

Re:More Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

It certainly makes a lot more sense for them to just use a Windows installation. If they do that, Microsoft is likely to be okay with it since it means they'll sell more copies of Windows. If Apple reverse engineered the Windows API, Microsoft would probably make "improvements" to it out of spite, to cause things to break when run on the Mac's reverse-engineered API.

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.

Re:Who writes this junk?

[kjart]

Agreed. It's not even like you'd need to edit a whole article - you're editing the summary of an article.

we certainly would see Apple's remarkable market share gain next year

(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:

The upcoming "Leopard" OS is expected to be even slicker and faster than its predecessor OS X.

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:No, We Won't.

[drewmg]

I too hate to point out the obvious but...

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 that iPod they got for Christmas.

You're right when it comes to Gamers not switching to Macs, but how many gamers don't have a PS2 or Xbox? You're right when it comes to businesses not switching to Macs, but the home computer market is certainly not worth overlooking.

Mac's marketshare may not be stellar yet, but compare it to their marketshare 5 years ago.

Does a "faster" OS really sell computers?

[rickkas7]

Sure it might have some bearing on upgrade OS sales, but does it really sell computers? I mean if you go into a store and try out a new computer, it's always going to be feel much faster than even a 2 year old computer. No matter how bloated an OS is, a new computer with a fresh OS installed on it will always seem fast. I don't see how it's a differentiating factor.

Re:Huh? Wanna say that again?

[datafr0g]

in fact the market share has decreased since the release of 10.0...

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.

Gartner puts Apple's 1996 share at 4.6 percent, IDC at 5.1 percent. Market share in 2005 was 2.2 percent from Gartner and 2.3 percent from IDC. According to Gartner, Apple's market share peaked at 15.8 percent in 1980 -- four years before the Mac was introduced.
Apple is somewhat stronger in U.S. consumer market share, with Gartner giving Apple 5.8 percent in 2005 and IDC at 2.9 percent.
It's also worth noting that Apple's worldwide market share did move up slightly last year from 1.9 percent in 2004, according to Gartner, or 2.0 percent, according to IDC.
That's because Mac sales are exceeding industry growth rates. Apple shipped 38 percent more Macs in the fiscal year ended Sept. 24, 2005, than in the prior year, and shipments were up 20 percent in the last three months of 2005.

I generally don't trust statistics but I have more faith in these numbers than someone who calls himself MSFanBoi2.

Re:Apple's next Mac OS X, Leopard

[saddino]

new finder (hopefully finally not carbon anymore)

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:Huh? Wanna say that again?

[MSFanBoi2]

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.

You are very much mistaken. XP runs about 5-8% faster on the same processor and RAM as Windows 2000 did. Windows Server 2003 is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows 2000 Server in every category, in some, such as IIS, and file serving, its nearly 4x (not percent) thats FOUR TIMES faster.

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.

Um, you really don't understand market share do you? Please get back to us after reviewing exactly how marketshare works. Please peruse http://www.pegasus3d.com/mac_sales.html [pegasus3d.com]. Apple's current marketshare of the PC world is now just under 2.0%

Or confirm it by looking at sites browser stats. This one shows Mac userbase doubling in 3 years. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a [w3schools.com] sp

Are you seriously trying to say browser stats prove any type of marketshare?

Re:More Speculation

[macshome]

Mail.app uses IMAP for it's Exchange connectivity.

Re:More Speculation

[Detritus]

Obviously written by someone who never used OS/2. 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.

List of OS X Code Names

[joelsanda]

Here's the list of OS X code names:

• 10.0 - "Cheetah" [wikipedia.org]
• 10.1 - "Puma" [wikipedia.org]
• 10.2 - "Jaguar" [wikipedia.org]
• 10.3 - "Panther" [wikipedia.org]
• 10.4 - "Tiger" [wikipedia.org]
• 10.5 - "Leopard" [wikipedia.org]

Apple doesn't have to reverse-engineer Windows API

[alispguru]

Apple has a contract with Microsoft, signed way back in 1997, that gave them rights to use the Windows API through 2002 (see here [pbs.org] about two-thirds of the way down). Windows XP came out just before that contract ended, so theoretically Apple has access to the XP API.

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:More Speculation

[thesandbender]

Apple's decision to use OWA/DAV probably has more to do with the fact that Microsoft is encouraging developers to do that. OWA makes heavy use of DAV and allows you to access messages, contacts, etc. directly as a HTTP/DAV resource. This was done because of the problems with running MAPI over the Internet (won't work over any properly setup firewall) and to support mobile devices which often go through a proxy.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/t rans/exchange/exc0428.mspx [microsoft.com]

Despite the fact that Microsoft is a lumbering giant they do have some fairly sharp people working for them and they have picked up that MAPI is a dead horse. Exchange now uses SMTP for transport between exchange servers and OWA/DAV is being pushed. MAPI is still used extensively and is supported over the Internet by RPC over HTTP (a godsend for consultants at customer sites) but casting Apple's decision to use OWA as a screen-scraping hack to get around the big evil is wholy inaccurate. The Mail.app guys are good developers who read their Microsoft Tech Notes.

And... btw... I used to reverse engineer the Mac Toolbox so we could port Mac games to DOS and Windows, so I have a little bit of experience with this whole thing. (Yes, yes... someone was that foolish, look up "V for Victory" and "Close Combat" by Atomic Games... both series were written on the Mac and ported over.) Any time the Mac lead and I got into the whole fanboy thing the owner of Atomic would ask us if we hung our toliet paper with the loose end in front of the roll or behind the roll.

Invariably we were told our answer was wrong.

Re:Huh? Wanna say that again?

[BasilBrush]

Faster on the same computer, you tit.

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?

[pdxmac]

"Meanwhile every version of OS X has been faster than the predecessor."

OK, I AM an apple fanboi, and that's just not really my experience. Yes, 10.1 was faster than 10.0, and 10.2 was faster than 10.1 (and 10.3 was, maybe, snappier than 10.2). But aren't these really optimizations that weren't yet completed in a massive rewrite?

In my experience, 10.4 is NOT faster than 10.3 on the same hardware (Mac Mini G4 and iBook G4 - really the same computers). At my employment (school), we use approx. 4 yr-old iMacs. These babies were truly suffering under the load of 10.3 last year. I shudder to think of their responsiveness under Tiger this fall.

Re:Who writes this junk?

[TheRaven64]

Memory allocation is very expensive on OS X. Anything that uses mmap will crawl due to the slow VM subsystem. I wrote some code with both POSIX aio and mmap backends. On FreeBSD, the performance of both was within 10% of each other. On OS X, the mmap backend was an entire order of magnitude slower. The FreeBSD aio backend was about 20% faster on a 1.4GHz Athlon than the same code on a 2GHz G5.

System calls are similarly expensive, especially ones that require interaction with the Mach layer. Guess where threads are implemented? Any thread locking operations are so expensive that they can easily kill the performance benefit of threaded code.

I would love to see Apple ditch the Mach layer altogether and just port IOKit to FreeBSD.

Force quit

[kybred]

Thanks for the info. Some tasks hang so thoroughly that I can't use the Dock and can't start terminal/console, so it is power-cycle at that stage.

When that happens, try this:
Click on the desktop (to give focus to the Finder)
Under the Apple Menu, select Force Quit and select the non-responsive app to terminate it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Apple doesn't have to reverse-engineer Windows

[Orrin Bloquy]

There is a hurdle to be crossed if Apple implements Win32, and that's that it's a huge PITA to implement. The Wine people have been trying to get this running for decades.

Without access to internal APIs, doing it entirely through blackboxes.

They'll get close, and then Windows will move forward again.

XP is done. There may be tweaks, but the API is frozen.

Some features, (DirectX, hard to implement as you point out, is one of them), have never been properly implemented.

I mentioned DX because of firmware differences between Mac/PC video cards from the same vendor.

Even once implemented, a Windows application will need to be installed (not the case for a Mac app), it will require some massaging of the APIs to get something that even vaguely fits into the same desktop as traditional Macintosh applications,

You're assuming it has to live in the same partition/filesystem as OS X. Bootcamp shows it doesn't. Moreover, Classic and X11 have given their dev team upwards of five years' experience dealing with sandboxes.

it will, in short, be half-arsed. Imagine what the WINE people have had to go through.

With considerably fewer years to do it. If we assume Red Box dates back to 1997, that means XP in 2001 was an incremental change for them, not a sea change. Codeweavers, in contrast, did everything through reverse engineering.

Now apply Steve Job's perfectionism,

Have you SEEN the Finder?

and Apple's lack of time and resources,

Cite references to either imaginary factor?

and ask how Apple can possibly come up with code by themselves that will work.

Assuming Red Box exists in a workable form, it's been in the works since 1997. Rhapsody was all about getting Classic/Win apps to run natively inside it on the processor-relevant platform, as well as creating a framework to run natively inside Windows itself. Do some homework.

Re:More Speculation

[drsmithy]

Obviously written by someone who never used OS/2.

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 applied) required the user to provide their own copy of Windows, which was used to run Windows software.

OS/2 ran Windows 3.x software as well as - many would say better - than Windows 3.x did. It was never "broken" at all.

Now, let's have a quick look at what the original poster was suggesting. He's saying that if Apple manage to come out with a 100% (or close to it) compatible implementation of Win32, Microsoft will modify the Win32 API to deliberately "break" it, thus rendering it useless. There are a few fundamental problems here that indicate he hasn't thought this dastardly plan all the way through:

* First and foremost, Microsoft won't make any changes that breaks existing software on a large scale (they're reluctant enough to do it just on a small scale). So the scope of any such "API sabotage" is limited to software released after any such change was made (which, realistically, is going to be *at least* 12 months down the track).

* Microsoft would have to convince developers to modify their software to use the new API changes. Given the lack of interest most developers show in changing their software for _good_ reasons (Exhibit A: the plethora of software that needlessly requires Administrator privileges) I can't see many of them doing it for bad ones.

* Microsoft have no reliable way of retroactively modifying existing Windows installations.

* The extremely marginal benefits wouldn't even come close to outweighing the legal risks.

These roadblocks _alone_ (and there are more) make even the suggestion that Microsoft will just change their API willy-nilly to break an OS X/win32 make the whole proposal laughable. It's pretty clear the original poster hadn't put any more thought into it than it takes to come up with "Micro$oft is t3h suxx0r" (which, not coincidentally, applies to most criticisms on Slashdot about Microsoft).