Snow Leopard
 

Rumor mills are all active: 10.6 aka Snow Leopard is coming soon. Some pundits are positing that SL will be "Intel Only", not available for G5s. That strikes me as quite possible; but my guess is that Leopard development won't stop immediately; there'll be 10.5.4, possibly .5 & .6 etc. for a while yet because lots of dual and quad-core G5s and Servers have life in them yet. At the same time, I expect 10.6.0 will grow as the only live branch of OS X. It was inevitable; Apple is never going back.

My own dual-core G5/2.3 with 3G of memory is still quite peppy, particularly so since I bought a SeriTek/2SE2 PCIE to PATA-II (3G) card and installed two PATA 3G hard drives in it, one at 7200 RPM and the other at 10,000 RPM, my boot disk. I don't notice that this machine is any slower in normal use than an MBP 2.6 Intel core-2 Duo.

I imagine that all of the following are still more than peppy enough too, so I can't see Leopard going away anytime soon:

Power Macintosh G5 2.3 DP (PCI-X) -- 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970fx (G5) x2
Power Macintosh G5 2.7 DP (PCI-X) -- 2.7 GHz PowerPC 970fx (G5) x2
Power Macintosh G5 Dual Core (2.0) -- 2.0 GHz PowerPC 970MP (G5)
Power Macintosh G5 Dual Core (2.3) -- 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970MP (G5)
Power Macintosh G5 "Quad Core" (2.5) -- 2.5 GHz PowerPC 970MP (G5) x2

well it strikes me as odd that they are already making a new os, possibly to rival windows 7, that being said i hope they put some better "new" features into it. I still think that leopard will go up to 10.5.10

The rumor mills say that Snow Leopard will not contain many new features but will instead be a polishing and consolidation of Leopard.

Good. Damn thing's bloated as it is, and infected with featuritis. They should remove some features and refine the performance & consolidate the behavior of what they've got.

I love this. They haven't even fixed all the obvious bugs in Leopard yet.

Menu Back Button does not recognize previous folder state. - worked in Tiger
Spotlight defaults to entire drive rather than folder you are searching. - worked in Tiger
Automator Finder menu items buried in multiple folders and slow to act. - worked fine in Tiger

They better offer some kind of upgrade path to those that invested in Leopard's beta debut. Otherwise, I don't think they should consider crowing so hard against Vista in their ads.

some of the rumor mills think that 'Snow Leopard' will run on Macs and PC's :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

lets hope not eh!

if that happened id buy a new gaming rig and install snow leopard on it :)

but these are all rumors....

Amen to that, brother.

I wanted to downgrade my MacBook to Tiger but I doubt it would work, since it was released after Leopard had been released, and as such, shipped with Leopard.

to be fair some features of leopard have become really important like spaces and time machine

But since the name "snow leopard" still has leopard in it maybe it will be like a discounted semi update and not a full os...

"Snow Leopard" and no new features are bad ideas for Apple. Remember, this is a company that greatly benefits from hype and marketing - what is there to get excited or speculative about with a release that merely stabilizes what we've already got? I'm all for getting a more robust operating system out of the deal, but that won't have boxes flying off of the shelves! They need a unique name (not a rehash of the current name) and some new features - this could be the one that overhauls the Finder :D

Spaces, Time Machine, and Quick Look I won't say have been useless for me.

BUT.

Stuff like the dock is inexcusable. I like the 3D dock, but it slurps down performance like no tomorrow on machines with bad video cards.

I disagree. I don't think it's inexcusable at all. I think NOT developing forward for newer and better equipment and hardware is inexcusable. I think being handcuffed because someone with an old video card might get left out is inexcusable. Thinking ahead is not inexcusable. Being stuck in the past is. Forging forward is not inexcusable. Being unable to as a company, is.

I don't mind that Apple forges ahead. Indeed I prefer they do. I don't mind when they drop classic and won't mind when times comes to drop ppc support from newer Operating Systems. It means my next up-to-date current system will not be a bag full of bloat that has been duct taped and jury rigged to support far too many things because someone might have been left out.

If the next machine needs even more gigs of memory and more processors to do the functions I want, give me the features I want, and has the look I want, then fin....I'll pay for it. It's better than paying for a new operating system that's lagged behind because it has a gynormous number of backward compatibility compromises and shortcomings.

And I'm sure Apple will be happy to have me buy it too. They are, aftera ll, a business and in business to make money. Making you and me, the customer upgrade and buy new hardware is how they do it.

And there's nothing wrong with that, especially since they do it by making us want to upgrade. We aren't forced to do it. ;)

I think this is an interesting idea, but I can't really see it as something that Apple would do. Firstly it's like admitting there's something wrong with Leopard, Schneb's excellent short list notwithstanding, Leopard is still a very fine OS. Secondly I can't see the marketing or market positioning angle on this. Satisfying those of us that have been griping about Finder sluggishness, or Spotlight defaulting to the whole drive does not drive a market. It sounds more like a major, free (or very cheap) update to me not something that huge amounts of people are going to run out and buy. The closest equivalent I can think of is like SP1 or SP2 for XP and Vista. The difference being Apple seems to roll a lot more bug fixes in larger updates in the meantime. It'd be like 10.0 to 10.5 if Apple didn't use point upgrades already as completely new OSs.

I find a few flaws with your argument here...

That's all well and good, but the "machine with a bad video card" is one they sell today. Actually, three of such machines are sold. The MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the Mac Mini. All of these come with Leopard preinstalled with no way to downgrade to Tiger.

Therefore, Apple has to think about these handicapped machines as well. Tis the reason I say that stuff like the Dock is inexcusable. Because Apple has these machines on the market, supposedly ready to handle Leopard, and they can't.

Pretty much that's what's happening right now. One run of Monolingual will take care of the PPC code problem. (Or vice versa for PPC machines)

But this is a double-edged sword. We shouldn't have to upgrade our Macs for EVERY NEW SYSTEM VERSION. That would kill one of the golden things that makes Macs better than PCs; Macs aren't upgraded as often, nor do they lose their value at fast rate. Also, since a lot of the time the only way to upgrade a Mac is replacing it, replacing your Mac any sooner than 3 years at the minimum doesn't sound like a viable solution. (Leaving out the obvious things like Hard Drives and Memory for the sake of argument)

I know Apple is a business, and they want to make money, but I believe this is one of the facts that they take pride in, which was pointed out in one of their Get a Mac ads.

But we don't! I think you're over reacting. Most people don't notice any issues with the dock or the Finder. I'm not saying there aren't any, but they're not so severe that the average user will notice. Especially not a Windows switcher. Waiting for a response - any indication that the system recognized a click - is par for the course on any PC I've ever had the misfortune to use. I want to point out that my FAST machine is a four year old 2GHZ Dual G5, and it is far more responsive than any PC.

well ive heard some more stories about "snow leopard" that apple plan to release it in jan 08, and plan to release it to devs at wwdc, They say theres no new features, but it will be faster and more secure... blah security has never been an issue, and unless 10.6 is a hell of a lot quicker than leopard, i dont think it will sell that well

True, but that may be the point of dropping PPC, if that is what Apple is doing. It would allow them to focus on refining the code.

Wow. Thanks for that tidbit. I've been happily running Leopard on my 2 year old MacBook since last fall, not knowing it couldn't handle it. Silly me. Activity monitor shows Dock taking anywhere from 0.2% to 0.8% of my CPU time. I had no idea it was sucking down my performance so much.

Priority One should be that Leopard (or Snow Leopard or Cub of Leopard or whatever) should run faster than Tiger on any machine that can run both operating systems. If not faster than at least as fast.

Priority Two should be to finish getting rid of inconsistencies, some of which were introduced in Leopard, some in Tiger, some date all the way back to Cheetah for god's sake.

Priority Three should be streamining Time Machine. It's cute, it's impressive, it takes 40 acres of hard disk space and you can't boot from your own freaking backups. Make the backups bootable. Create options that make far fewer backups going back in time and trim the necessary size of your backup drive to something far smaller.

For the new features that bring CPU and graphics-card expensive eye candy, stick a prefs pane in that turns that mess off, optionally.

Buy up SheepShaver and refine it, make it more stable, and release it as an optional install. Intel Macs should not only be able to run Classic operating systems, they should be able to run 68K apps as well as PowerPC apps. You don't see Windows users unable to run more than a small handful of old PC programs, they've got backwards compatibility back to the pre-Windows days in many cases.

Fix ⌘-F. Use spotlight indexing but bring back the Panther-era user interface, with additional checkboxes for searching unix system folders.

Fix iMovie. Restore the missing features, make it fast & nimble, add some sparkly new features.

Fix iDVD. Blu-Ray support. User-editable & user-creatable Themes. "Special Features" capabilities as opposed to nothing but chapters.

And patch over the bugs and misbehaviors in networking & window handling introduced in Leopard 10.5.0 that remain unfixed.

I agree on your entire post.

I agree with some of the previous posts that the 3D dock is gratuitous eye candy. However, I have a MacBook and have to disagree with Anti. My MacBook is more than capable of running Leopard. The dock does not handicap me at all. Even still, in some areas, Leopard is noticeably faster than Tiger was.

I agree with most of your previous post, AHunter3, except for the above. I don't want to see Apple sacrificing resources that could be put towards developing new features or refining the OS for better performance put towards supporting really old legacy stuff. That takes man-hours away from forward progress. That is exactly what is bogging Microsoft down. They need to free themselves from the shackles of worrying about being backwards compatible with 1980s software.

I noticed that with 1GB and 512MB of RAM, it chopped up every now and then, or would take a couple seconds to respond. Switching it into 2D mode fixed that.

Now with 2.5GB of RAM, having it in 3D mode shows no slow-down.

Actually I'd go farther than SheepShaver. I think a modern Mac ought to be able to open an emulation window and boot not only MacOS 9 but System 7 and System 6 and System 4.1 and so on back to the original 1984-vintage System 0.9. Apple would not need to stick many resources into it, the combo of SheepShaver, Basilisk II, and vMac cover the ground; all they need is a mechanism for letting those environments piggyback on networking provided by OS X for printing, file sharing, and IP address. For the older environments, they could skip that if they can provide a print driver that will print to some kind of file that can subsequently be printed in OS X. [The ancient printer driver Print2Pict comes to mind for System 3 etc; something akin to Adobe Acrobat's PDFWriter for System 6 and early 7].

A "virtual Mac" environment for running 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, etc up thru a second copy of the latest and greatest 10.5.x should also exist as part of the OS. 10000 times more useful than "Spaces"!

forgive my ignorance, but who needs to run os's that old?

You must not have been using a Mac back when those OS's were current state of the art. Or you do not care about files you created back in that era. Also, sounds like you don't support other folks' and their computer needs, but some of us do....

a) I have an entire book written in MacWrite format (divided up into chapters). With what, exactly, would you propose I open those files with under OS X? Or even MacOS 9?

b) I'm a FileMaker geek and I am asked periodically to convert some old databases to more modern format. Usually that means converting from FileMaker 6/5 format or sometimes 4/3 format to the current architecture, and FileMaker 9 can do that, but sometimes I get something older, and not as rarely as you'd think. In the last 18 months I have converted

• a couple of FileMaker Pro 2.1 databases, requiring a conversion first to FileMaker 4 format under Classic then a convertion to FileMaker 9;

• a FileMaker Pro 1.0 database, same process but unlike converting a 2.x db can only be performed in a Mac environment

• astonishingly, a Nashoba FileMaker 4 datbase, that is to say predating the era in which FileMaker was called "FileMaker Pro". Can only be converted by FileMaker Pro 1.0 which will not run with sufficient stability under anything newer than System 6 (crashes when you try to open/convert); the resulting FmPro 1.0 db then needed to be converted to 4.x as described above, and then to 9.

• Another of that era where the owner just wanted the data out as tab-delimited text, was no longer a FileMaker user. Required opening FileMaker 4 in vMac under System 6 and exporting.


c) Hobbyist stuff. I have FileMaker Server 2 and could run networked FileMaker 2 databases for multi-user environment but to do so I'd need not just the ability to run the software but to provide it with valid networking

I have two volumes of class notes and assignments written in an early version of Word (no longer openable in a version after 6 or so), with figures drawn in MacDraw. The only way I can get at them now is on a Mac SE/30 running Sys 7.5.5 that still has those apps on it. Knew there was a reason I kept it.

Give Apple some credit. You can't do all of what you ask for, but you can run a lot of very old stuff on a Mac. :D

But that's 10.4.11... Leopard is devoid of Classic support, and I think that's what AHunter is getting at.

If that was some form of sarcasm, I apologize. It seems my sarcasm detector isn't working well today.

Not really sarcasm. My point was that Lode Runner was written in 1984. I bought the Dual G5 in 2004, and Leopard came out in 2007. That means that you could run a 23 year old program on the most current operating system on hardware that was still relevant (although certainly state of the art) in 2007, up until Leopard came out. That's not perfect, but it is pretty good.

There does need to be a cut off though, and I think at this point, we've all had plenty of notice. We've seen other systems become obsolete, and we've seen others have problems with Y2K, and other issues related to old data/software. It's time to start thinking about what to do with our old software and data, especially if it's more than a dozen years old. That is after all, more than 6 iterations of Moore's Law.

Anybody remember Power Pete?

That was where I was headed as you noted, but I figured that I'd already pushed pretty hard. Shoulda completed my thought I guess.

I personally would like the infinite backwards compatibility. I will pull back to my original recommendation though: except for weirdos like me, the ability to run MacOS 9 vintage apps would be sufficient, hence my recommendation to buy up & solidify SheepShaver.

Who woudn't? ;)
The problem is that it gets more difficult to do the farther out you get, and the returns diminish rapidly, especially while Moore's law still holds. At some point it just isn't worth doing.

Looks like it IS Snow Leopard.

I just hope it isn't as it sounds. IE we pay for a ton of things that SHOULD have been included in a Leopard update.

AT LAST!!!!

AT LONG LAST!!!

I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT!!!!

10.6 will FINALLY have integration BUILT IN for Exchange (only 2007)

In only a year I will be able to share contacts and cal's with my work colleagues! (so long as my work update their agin Win2000 Server)

errrm yaay exchange integration ....(i assume thats good)

Is Snow Leopard just Leopard cleaned up? Good, it needs it. Completely inconsistent interface.

surly leopard users should get it at a discount as well

Maybe even pleasantly happy Leopard users will get a discount.
:)

That surly is possible :)
:rolleyes:

hush... tis late and im revising for my physics/geography exams... i have no time for spelling

Both QuickTime X and OpenCL sound intriguing...I wonder, trying to read between the lines of very little text at that page, if more things are going to be LLVM-based?

Question regarding the ram.
 

I would like to know if i can install the 16TB of ram on my iMac. I am very confused:confused: regarding all that ram.

iMac 2GHz
1GB ram
250GB Hard Drive

http://www.gt.se/polopoly_fs/1.11926...3447786819.jpg
Don't these seem really dangerous?

I can't really tell if you are being serious or just joking. No, you will not be able to install 16TB of RAM on your iMac. You won't even be able to install 16GB of RAM on your iMac. There are three major components that determine how much RAM you can support:

1. The OS/firmware.
2. The CPU that runs your computer.
3. The memory bus of the logic board.

A 64-bit CPU can theoretically address that much RAM and Snow Leopard will theoretically be able to utilize that much RAM, but the memory bus of your logic board will not (at least not without replacing the logic board).

From the tech specs page for the Mac Pro:
If you manage to get 1 TB of RAM on any personal computer, let us know how you did it, and how you funded it!

Although of course that 16 TB will likely be addressed as virtual memory for the time being.

By the by, a little about 10.6 Snow Leopard Server:

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/snowleopard/

Full ZFS read/write access... mmmm, good :cool:

They look really cuddly.

Yeah pity that they have to grow up and become dangerous and I assume ravenous. Otherwise it would have been cool to have a couple of those and putting a big sign on your property "Beware of the cats".
And those are the cubs that were born in 2004 in "Nordens ark" in the southern part of sweden.

Now I found this years:

http://www.bohuslaningen.se/bild_ark...0000044489.jpg
born on the night to may 26

Actually, they look mighty surely to me. ;)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

Quote from Snow Leopard Web Site:

"To accommodate the enormous amounts of memory being added to advanced hardware, Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today."

However, I doubt this includes the iMac.