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A snow leopard has been spotted by Ars:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/06/04/mac-os-x-10-6-code-named-snow-leopard-may-be-pure-cocoa

Which reminds me: Has anyone seen Ghandi lately?

ssidbroadcast wrote:

Which reminds me: Has anyone seen Ghandi lately?

I think he left in a fit several months ago. It was unfortunate.

SNM wrote:

I think he left in a fit several months ago. It was unfortunate.

Care to expand on that? I never saw any forum or comment post suggesting that Ghandi was out of line or something. At least, nothing like pluscard or other trolls. He had all the good news on anything Apple-related.

ssidbroadcast wrote:

SNM wrote:

I think he left in a fit several months ago. It was unfortunate.

Care to expand on that? I never saw any forum or comment post suggesting that Ghandi was out of line or something. At least, nothing like pluscard or other trolls. He had all the good news on anything Apple-related.

I'll take partial blame for being the proverbial straw:
http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewto ... 42#p768842

Wow, that's really odd. I don't recall his posts being obtrusive or excessive, but oh well... back to the point:

I'm excited that it's Intel-Only AND 64-bit (supposedly of course, we'll know later). I feel kindof bad for all those PPC-users, but how old is the youngest PPC mac? Pretty old by computer standards, right?

Wow, that was quick - all the Core Duo and Core Solo machines already got tossed out on their ears - they don't have x86-64 support, so apparently this is going to exclude them, too. Every Mac released prior to the 2006 Mac Pro has just officially been obsoleted (MacBook Pros released in October 2006 were the first with Core2 Duos, according to Low End Mac).

The youngest PPC Mac is the dual-core G5 systems, including single 2.0 and 2.3 and dual 2.5 (what Apple called the Quad G5). They were released in October 2005. By the time 10.6 ships, they'll be fairly old machines.

I am disappointed for absolutely no good reason - it's the end of an era of sorts. To me there's something "sexy" about unusual (read: non-x86) CPUs. They're exotic. They're hot. I want to **** them in the AGP slot or something.

What a weird visual, sorry all.

I haven't seen 64-bit only anywhere.

SNM wrote:

I haven't seen 64-bit only anywhere.

I made the mistake of believing ssidbroadcast, I guess, because now that I look at the article, i don't either.

I wouldn't have expected them to make this one 64-bit only - Apple seems to make pretty good sense when it excludes something, and it does it one at a time:

10.0 - G3 and newer only
10.1 - same
10.2 - same
10.3 - New World ROMs only (onboard USB required)
10.4 - built-in Firewire only (excluding a couple rev1 New World Macs like the original tray-loading iMacs)
10.5 - 867MHz and up ensures that the machine (assuming it doesn't have a CPU upgrade) has a video card that supports a minimum of Quartz Extreme. Rage 128 and older don't support Time Machine restores and therefore Apple needed to find a way to exclude that video card without confusing owners.

10.6, to me, seems logical for Intel-only, but I woudln't expect a 64-bit kernel (and therefore 64-bit CPU's only) until 10.7 at the earliest.

From what I've read, this release is meant to be for speed and stability, not features. It kind of makes sense to just release for the most current platform, although I do understand why folks with older Macs might be upset.

If there's anything that Leo needs on older Macs, it's speed. I don't see any reason to use 10.5 on any G4 (1.33GHz iBook with the Radeon 9550 was too slow, and way slower than Tiger). So in THAT respect, I'm totally behind leaving PPC behind. It's for irrational reasons that I'm disappointed about the end of desktop PPC.

Yeah, 10.5 is really slow on a couple of G4 iBooks that I've upgraded at work. We're not bothering with the other G4s; fortunately the others all lack DVD drives & so I've got an excuse for those users.

FTM I can detect a speed drop on C2D Macbooks versus 10.4, though the kernel scheduler's better so it's faster under load.

Apple have put a webpage with a few details on it:

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

In summary, native support for MS Exchange, 64bit support, a new version of Quicktime and "enhanced multicore support".

Ooh, Exchange support for Mail.app, Address Book, and iCal makes Entourage completely obsolete.

OpenCL looks pretty sweet, as well...hopefully AMD and nVidia completely support it.

Sooooo is 10.6 gonna be free (I am not gonna be holding my breath for the answer but am curious)

tanker27 wrote:

Sooooo is 10.6 gonna be free (I am not gonna be holding my breath for the answer but am curious)

Nobody outside (or perhaps even inside) Apple knows. I'm betting on ~$50 myself, though -- no end-user features to let them charge a $129 upgrade fee, but enough work and enough cool apps requiring it that they think they can do better than free.

edit: nevermind, Apple's site does say they're planning on taking a break from feature creep...that's actually kinda nice.

Finally, Apple is ditching PPC support . I hope that speeds up OSX 10.6 quite a bit. The last PPC Mac was sold about three years ago, I believe . Does that mean that Mac OSX will finally be fully 64-bit?

riviera74 wrote:

Finally, Apple is ditching PPC support . I hope that speeds up OSX 10.6 quite a bit. The last PPC Mac was sold about three years ago, I believe . Does that mean that Mac OSX will finally be fully 64-bit?

The last PPC was sold in August of 2006 (less than two years ago).

Leopard is a 64-bit OS.

Leopard is too sluggish for you? What are you running it on? Leopard runs just fine on my Dual 2.7 G5.

It will be interesting to see how Snow Leopard performs on early/current Core Duo/Core 2 Duo based hardware vs hardware released post Snow Leopard.

riviera74 wrote:

Does that mean that Mac OSX will finally be fully 64-bit?

The first-generation Intel Macs shipped with Core Duos and Core Solos - x86-64 wasn't part of the Core famiyl until the Core2.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Ooh, Exchange support for Mail.app, Address Book, and iCal makes Entourage completely obsolete.

OpenCL looks pretty sweet, as well...hopefully AMD and nVidia completely support it.

Crossing finger that Apple won't botch the Exchange sync implementation.. Already Entourage is a sad excuse for an Exchange client...

Adi

End User wrote:

riviera74 wrote:

Finally, Apple is ditching PPC support . I hope that speeds up OSX 10.6 quite a bit. The last PPC Mac was sold about three years ago, I believe . Does that mean that Mac OSX will finally be fully 64-bit?

The last PPC was sold in August of 2006 (less than two years ago).

Leopard is a 64-bit OS.

Leopard is too sluggish for you? What are you running it on? Leopard runs just fine on my Dual 2.7 G5.

It will be interesting to see how Snow Leopard performs on early/current Core Duo/Core 2 Duo based hardware vs hardware released post Snow Leopard.

Leopard is NOT a 64 bit OS. It's kernel is stil 32bit. It does support 64bit apps but the OS itself is 32bit only. Take a look at your Activity Monitor and you'll notice that none of the OS services running are 64bit. Snow Leopard on the other hand WILL BE 64 bit as can be see on the leaked screen shots out there on the web. Activity Monitor shows the majority of OS processes running in 64bit mode. This will result in at least a 10% boost across the board compared to Leopard.

Adi

If it leaves my Core Duo iMac out, I leave it out.

It'll run great on my Hackintosh main box, but meh, when your Mac can't run OSX, seems odd to have your beige box run it instead.

They can't take the kernel fully 64bit without blowing up their drivers (of course it's a bit easier in the Mac world with less hardware to worry about, more of it in-house, and a generally newer codebase). They also orphan the first of the Intel MacBooks, which used 32bit-only Yonahs.

Sweet, I'm excited for a mostly-64-bit OS. Plus without the universal binaries, it might help get the cruft out

UberGerbil wrote:

They can't take the kernel fully 64bit without blowing up their drivers (of course it's a bit easier in the Mac world with less hardware to worry about, more of it in-house, and a generally newer codebase). They also orphan the first of the Intel MacBooks, which used 32bit-only Yonahs.

Snow Leopard will come in 2 transparent versions 32bit and 64bit depending on what type of machine it is being installed on.

Adi

Forge wrote:

If it leaves my Core Duo iMac out, I leave it out.

It'll run great on my Hackintosh main box, but meh, when your Mac can't run OSX, seems odd to have your beige box run it instead.

I doubt that will be the case. Even PPC being out is highly doubtful. As far the the Dev Preview shows, the Intel version will come in 2 versions : 32bit and 64bit.

Adi

No, I'd say PPC being out is definite - early builds of Leopard had G3 support, later builds dropped it. Apple isn't going to take somethign that's supported in teh current OS, leave it out of early builds of the next, and then throw it back in. I'd say PPC is absolutely done. I do not expect Core Duos to be left behind before 10.7, though.

adisor19 wrote:

Snow Leopard will come in 2 transparent versions 32bit and 64bit depending on what type of machine it is being installed on.

And that added complexity extends to third-party hardware too, of course.

only if the kernel is really 64-bit. Or contains a 64-bit binary - Apple's application bundles are weird; one executable contains code for 64-bit x86, 32-bit x86, and PPC processors. Who's to say that the kernel can't be some sort of hybrid, or have 32-bit driver backwards compatibility (as might be necessary in the near term of its release...they've already been able to run a hybrid OS that supports both x86 and x64 executables)?