Apple unveils near final version of Mac OS X Leopard - Page 3

No, it also lets you control their machine.

Some folks are complaining that the Leopard features aren't a big enough improvement, but what about speed?

One thing that people always seem to leave out/forget with OS X updates is that the speed of the OS always seems to improve quite a bit. Remember?:

10.0: Icebergs move faster. Dear God.
10.1: A bit better, but still way too slooooooow
10.2: The first release that was truly day-in, day-out usuable, speedwise
10.3: Not bad at all.
10.4: Good, and gettin' closer to 'teh snappy', but still not quite lightning.

If Leopard is lightning, or close, that alone is a major reason for me to get it.

Of course, I am more impatient than some.

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Can someone tell me what happened to the Dashboard button on the Dock? None of the pics I've seen have it. Does this relate to that Dashboard will be integrated into Finder? Or is Stacks going to be the place where widgets will hide? Or has the dashboard been just relegated to F12 keyboard shortcut and there is no dock icon? I think the later is true, but interesting to note.

not as impressed with leopard as i wanted to be, but i think there might be a vision of the future of the mac OS within leopard and it starts with quick look.

quick look seems to be able to effectively do away with applications like quicktime. you can view a movie fullscreen from the finder without opening any new application. it seems like this could be extended to other applications like itunes and others so that the finder becomes iLife. i don't know, just some thoughts.

I stand by what I said. This could be because it's a still a beta and the OS isn't full 64-bit and so they could get the most beta testers but there's no way to run a full 64-bit OS on a 32-bit CPU. Either that or the OS isn't 64-bit like Jobs said it was, which wouldn't suprise me at all.

Since making my comment I've done more research about which Mac will be affected and it's pretty depressing!!


here's the links in wikipedia
Apple Intel Transition including timeline
Details about which Intel processors are 64-bit capable
Details about the Core Duo processor

Yeah, you're just plain wrong. They're not locking out 32-bit machines. The minimum requirement will be a G4.

The interesting thing to me is that the sites that reported the ZFS "leak" (e.g., Apple Insider and MacWorld) didn't mention that ZFS wasn't mentioned by Steve in their main coverage.


Give up Linux lovers -- your passion is for a geek thing mostly unlikely to take over the OS world for long to come. Think the difference between Firefox and Thunderbird. Firefox makes computers easier to use while being technically superior. Thunderbird has close to zero appeal to most Firefox users even though it's arguably more powerful than Outlook ever was.

So even if Desktop Linux is more powerful, more secure, cheaper in TCO, and even if there weren't leventy-seven competing GUI's for the damn thing, it still wouldn't seal the deal with people already knowing Win and OS X and their being "good enough."



1. probably half right. And I'm down with that. The more of us there are, the more resources can be thrown into R&D.

2. well, I see plenty that will move my maccing forward. Some of it's things you can do yourself. I created a downloads folder ages ago, but I like the little picture of the latest download on top. But other bits like QuckView (or whatever it's called) and the parallel previewing system in Finder will be highly useful to me.


I did expect SOME hardware today. At least new monitors (as begged for by one of the other suits on stage, whom I thought at the time was in on knowing their announcement was minutes away). Those available are long in the tooth. But fear not, as the man said many Apple hardware intros are done lately without major fanfare (especially after the storm of criticism at Steve's supposed overhyping of the "a few new fun products" speech last year, when in actuality the press had hyped itself up, IMHO).

But by and large I think we caught glimpses of a larger Apple strategy today. "Safari everywhere," including on your upper model iPods, BTW sells iPhones (and yes he did later say there would be Tiger version). The "three great ways to run Windows on Macs" combined with the gaming announcements knocks out two more reasons people have wavered on switching. (I'll use Safari where I have to and stick with the Fox, thank you, at least until there's something resembling as many add-ons and all the Gmail features work on it, but I get the logic for the great unwashed.)

ZFS, if it's a true story, will be a strategic deal in the longer run, especially as MS is at least two years behind in this important plumbing of its OS. And for Leopard Server, it will be huge in the minds of IT buyers.

And while only quickly referenced, YouTube on Apple TV along with ease of networking if you go all Mac (Airport Extreme, Apple TV, Macs, iPhones, iPods) will sell more hardware. Because people will be captivated not only by "it just works," but also by "it works on all my devices in basically the same ways." The unmentioned rumored deal to go to Movie rentals is another piece of a strategic mosaic building an Apple life style.

So take a chill pill and start salivating over what will be a hardware torrent by Christmas buying season to play with all of this on. Monitors, iPods, MP's, iMacs (with more options on the 24" job to fill the gap between consumer and pro hardware), a Santa Rosa MacBook, maybe even a Thinbook or gussied up high end MB.

Buncha' sore winners here says me. Who can't accept that personal computing is inevitably moving from PC-centric and productivity-centric to multi-device life-style centric, and Apple gets this. So no mini-towers in your Christmas stockings, boys. But plenty of good stuff.

Don't bet your house though on that.

Quote of the day!

As the others said, don't be so absolute in what you say. I would suggest to read what Apple officially says in its web site. Now if you don't want to believe that this is so, then OK.

To my eyes, I think it's quite impressive. OK, if the dock wasn't reflective or the menu bar wasn't transparent I wouldn't miss it. But I do think that Leopard seems to be a superbly useable evolution. Don't forget, this is 10.5 NOT 11 so I would say evolution is the name of the game.

Another thing - the Stacks (and coverflow preview) feature looks like it has multi-touch very much in mind. I think there is a whole swag of revolutionary hardware (using evolutionary software) ready to redefine the "computer" paradigm.

You got a MacBook Pro update just before the conference and the iPhone at the nd of the month. The conference itself (at least this year) is about prepositioning Leopard and showing just how much more integrated and elegant the OS is in comparison to the pot pourri that is Vista in all its flavours.

Personally, I can't wait!

No Apple did have a feature advertised for iChat in Leopard showing the actual Finder window of another computer in the theatre screen. One of those last minute and unfortunate drops, I am afraid.

Hey,

Hadn't Apple announced that Leopard would be a binary PPC/Intel release (and doubtless the last)?

64 bit "end to end" kinda puts the kibosh on that, no?? Or was I in an altered state when I thot I heard that....?

Man, the mis-interpretations are enormous.


He didn't say it was 64-bit. He said it was 64-bit and 32-bit side by side, in one package.


Again, it has 64-bit code in it. But that doesn't limit it to 64-bit processors. There's intel code in there, but it still works on a PPC mac. Same concept.

And, besides all of that, why not look at it in the sense of making money. What kind of stupid-ass would Apple be to basically say "Hey, 90% of our users can't use this kind-of-lame OS upgrade! That's going to spur sales!"

More importantly, looking at the specs, he's basically said people's 3 year old iBook G3s now have out-dated hardware.

Absolute nonsense. It'll work just fine on G4s.

You are utterly wrong. The beauty of Leopard is that there is only one version, unlike Vista and XP where there are separate 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

The 32/64 bit nature of Leopard is easily the most under-rated achievement of the OS. Even Microsoft, with their vastly larger resources, couldn't work out how to do what Apple have done.

With Windows, you have to get either a 32 bit version or a 64 bit version. For the 64 bit version, all drivers have to be specifically 64 bit. The 32 bit Windows drivers will not work.

Leopard is different. It has 64 bit code in it, but it also has 32 bit code. So you can run it on a 32 bit CPU just fine. When running on a 64 bit machine, the 64 bit code (where it exists) will be used. In addition, 32 bit drivers work just fine on 64 bit machines, even alongside other drivers which are 64 bit.

there wont be an 11. 10 is the mark of a revolution. 10 means X. OS X is what people know. even though OS X means OS 10 we still have people saying OS X 10.4. 11 is meaningless.

It seems AAPL is dipping even more, it's going to get worse since Steve show off 10 features that most people already learned from rumors. Is there any more secret features that people haven't learned from last show case? Not impressive at all!

Small correction here, not from rumors but from Apple itself during last year's WWDC and its web site. There were zero precise rumors about the new desktop and Finder. All the rest Mac-scpecific features showed at WWDC were known. The WWDC surprise was not Mac-specific.

11?!? Meaningless??? Try telling that to Nigel!

Dave

IMHO, I'm looking forward to this release. I'm on the fence over whether I should actually upgrade or not, however, as I've become fairly comfortable with my current computing environment in 10.4, and my computer may not run any faster in 10.5 (it's a G4; I'ma have to wait to see what other G4 users think before upgrading my own computer). Just about the only feature that will tip me over the edge is the merging of iLife, iWork, and OSX... it needs to come in one package for $129. It's begging to be released like that. Everyone'd be happy, they'd sell a ton more copies, and it would be so much more of a bargain. I don't think I should have to pay more than $129 per year to keep my computer up-to-date on software, and I'd really appreciate the convenience of simply throwing all the new software into a package deal. Please Apple. Come to your senses.

EDIT: Come to think of it, they REALLY should think about including dot mac as well. If you think about it, the only limitation in the past for free dot mac service has been the cost of webspace and bandwidth, which have gone down significantly since dot mac's beginnings. In addition, with next-generation web technologies in place, services like dot mac can be faster and more useful than it used to be. The popular GMail offers two gigs of storage and virtually unlimited bandwidth... for free. That's right. Free. It may not have all the features of dot mac, but it goes to show that dot mac has only a few steps to go before it is financially viable for Apple to throw a service like dot mac in with their operating system package. As the internet becomes more and more important to personal computing, options like this should present themselves more and more.

Actually the stock seems to be going back up.... 120.92 ( +0.73 ) as of this writing.

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Thanks. But it was so true.

I remember checking out 10.0 when it first came out, and I was just shocked/horrified. It was very cool, but completely unusable, entirely due to the speed issue. Really re-confirmed my belief in NOT being an early adopter of anything. \

Of course, once Jaguar came out, I jumped on board, and was very happy about it. I still missed OS 9 for a little while though... it was nearly as stable as OS X, for me at least.

It was really only bad ol' System 7.5.x (and 7.6?) that crashed more often than a drunk driver in a snowstorm... only Windows 95 could match it for driving into a tree. Those were the bad ol' days.

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OK then there's nothing really different between this and Vista, Xp x64, server 2003 x64 or the new server 2008 (which by default is 64 bit). These can all run 32-bit and 64-bit applications side by side. Also the retail versions of Vista come with the 32 and 64 bit versions on one disc. In regards to drivers, with Vista in order for your driver to be WHQL certified by MS you must make a 32-bit and 64-bit version of your driver. This greatly reduces the problem of having for 32-bit but not for 64-bit. IDK if I'm sold on running 32 bit drivers on a 64 bit system it doesn't seem very stable but we'll see if they can pull it off. I personally like MS requirement for both 32 and 64 bit drivers in order to obtain WHQL certification better than the ability to run both it seems much more stable.

Why not wait for Leopard to come out before worrying that it won't run on G4s or early Intel, or that its 32-bit compatibility isn't the best? You seem to be doing an awful lot of hand-wringing for a system that's still months out, and you seem to be much more a Vista boy than anything else (condolences on that, btw).

Don't worry, be happy.

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It did before yesterday. In fact, I was just looking at it Sunday and telling my mom how cool it would be when she had computer questions.

Did you ever take the time to notice that retail copies of Tiger are installable on both Intel and PPC Macs? But this must be impossible, right, since a PPC can't use a GUID partition map, and Intel can't use Apple partition map.

But wait! It works! Why?

Because Apple made the Tiger installers (after 10.4.4) able to install either GUID OR APM, automatically, with no input necessary from the user. That said, I have a feeling Apple knows what they are doing. Just because Microsoft can't pull it off, it's not impossible.

Woah there buddy, I choose to use Vista as you chose to use OS X. My first computer was an iMac and I've used OSes 6-10.4.9. I chose to switch to windows cause everything works with it, I don't have to wonder if there's a driver for Windows I don't have to wonder if they make this cool program for Windows because everyone does. I can build my own computer exactly how I want it. There ARE features included in Windows that still aren't included in OS X (remote desktop, backup). I don't like Apple's form over function mentality (you can't put a removable battery in the iPhone it would look ugly), I also don't like that they release final products that are buggy and unstable and expect everyone to pay to be beta testers (like OS 9, OS 10.0, itunes 6, etc). I don't like how when people have problems with their mac and then post these issues on the apple forums apple will delete their posts and like nothing's wrong even though many are having the same problem. Yet somehow they get voted #1 for customer service!! I could keep going but I won't.

OK, my last post in this tpic was a bit bland. And in light of so much controversy, and a whole night of working and thinking this topic over, I have some things to say.

First of all, Leopard could be -- in ever box -- a duel0disk of both 64-bit and 32-bit. Meaning, there is only one BOX version, and in every box you get 32/64 bit version. That just makes it simple. Or, who knows. But Leopard will be 64-bit. Heck, they announced it twice, so it must be.

Second, I think the reason people are dissappointed have little to do with what the expected, but the fact that they have been lied to. Jobs said there are 300 features in Leopard. I counted 17. 10 were on stage. So, the question is, where are these other features and why must Jobs tell us there are 300 features, and the same time, only announce three new features? Something isn't adding up, besides one fact: he's trying to hype it as something big. I don't know if thats true, but it does seem like it. And, unless he's counting every little feature (which he might be), I dount there are 300 new features to Leopard. Even with counting those little features, are there really 300 new ones?

Third, with all of that said, Leopard is merely a evolution rather a revolution. It is a bunch of small differences that will add up to a big bang in the end, like Tiger. And someone all ready mentioned the speed factor -- I bet Leopard is hugely faster then Vista, however, do you guys think it will be a memory hog? Think about it -- you have Time Machine running in the background, widgets running, and then all that 3D stuff, Core Animation playing a huge factor, all of which take memory. So, ya or nah on the memory hog?

Finally, is Leopard better then Vista? I still hold to what I said, that Tiger killed XP, and Vista was Window's savoir from the big cat. However, Leopard doesn't seem all that different from Tiger, adding some note worthy additions, making it leaps and bounds past Tiger, but at the same time, Vista added some pretty notable additions (like the flash drive as ram). So the question is, which one is better? I still being that Tiger is a better OS then Vista will ever be, and since Leopard is just making the Tiger experiance better, prettier and hopefully faster, then I will say Leopard is the victor.

But what do you think? ANY developers out there actually USEING Leopard and can tell us from experience if it's any better then Vista?

EDIT:

The new finder rocks. I hope it's tabbed, but if not, oh well. I love the cover flow idea, makes surfing your files a breeze. :-D Love it.

why is the dock reflective but the menu bar at the top isn't. it just seems so last minute hack like "oh, windows has transparencies, well, so do we! take that, aero!" I could understand it if they added it for aesthetics or functionality, but the more i look at it the less it serves for either case

Ok, you use Windows (condolences on that, btw). So why are you here, then, and so very worried about what Leopard will and won't do?

Btw, my first OS was Windows 3.1. I made the switch not long after Win95 and have never looked back. Note that I'm not on a Windows forum trying to talk up OS X, or hand-wringing about all the things that are going wrong with Vista. Why? Because I'm very happy with OS X, and Windows no longer interests me, because its an inferior user experience. I could go on, but I won't.

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Because I love technology and I'm still interested in the goings on at Apple, I didn't know this site was for mac users only and no others were allowed. I still deal with OS X on an almost daily basis, not because I need it to do things I can't do in Windows but because there are 3 active macs in my family since my dad is a mac fanatic but yet the Mac isn't easy enough for him to use and he has to get me to do everything for him.

Anyone have a copy of the beta and can see if there are tabs in the finder?

Odd. 'Cuz you sound a bit more like a troll:


Look dude, it's ok. We get a number of Windows users who are insecure that OS X may be better, and want to find a way to validate their buying decisions. In your case, it was jumping to the wrong conclusion about Leopard and then shooting your mouth off about it, but, there have been worse posts. \

Another giveaway was you getting tres defensive and listing all the reasons why Windows "is teh better" when asked a simple question.

If you wanna stick around, well, I'm not an admin, and even if I were, I wouldn't ban you, but you might want to consider chilling out some, so as not to appear the doof. Peace.

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pmjoe, I'm just reposting this because things are so screwy and my post is in a screwy spot. Controlling another computer over ichat was an advertised feature before monday (I was looking at in Sunday, so I'm very sure).

I was looking at recent pictures of the new desktop in the gallery on the Apple site and realised that in none of the pictures was an icon of the Macintosh HD, does this mean they've gotten rid of it, or will it still be there, but they've somehow gotten rid of it for the photo's??? Or have I not read something that tells me what's happened to it??? I also hope apple has changed the look of the folders, cause when I maker a new folder on my desktop, the current graphics of it, isn't that appealing.

I also agree with recent posts about Leopard working with G4's and 32-bit systems, I don't think apple is stupid enough to make it incompatible with these computers, especially after having a go at MS for having people upgrade their machines just to run Vista.

I am 100% certain they will not do that. Consider that 32-bit will be necessary for the original MacBooks and even the current Mac Mini, and that it will also be available for the PPC G5's, considering many G5's are still under one year old. If they can make it 32-bit, and they can make it PPC compatible, why would they not make it compatible with a 32-bit PPC?

One thing that's been really underemphasized in the discussion of Leopard is OS speed. Remember how sloooow 10.0 and 10.1 were? Tiger's pretty quick, but it's always something I worry about. \

The good news is that I'm hearing that Leopard is really really FAST. I had to go to other forums to find some info on that, but the news appears to be good:

The new finder is absolutely the best part. How many years have we wanted a cocoa finder? It's HERE!!!!! Browsing network shares is no longer met with delays, it's using the fast Unix finally. I can try to mount 10 shares without every seeing a cursor.

Proper multi-threaded support. No more pauses when clicking on the menubar or anything else. Apps keep chugging along.

No more beachball so far.

It's the perfect OS for productivity. No crazy changes, just refinement to the extreme.

It's a beautiful thing!

DVD player has been able to play HD-DVDs for a long time. It has blu-ray and HD-DVD settings in prefs now.


--- And, from the same user (who apparently is using the WWDC beta of Leopard):


# Spotlight, completely re-written with faster database, and backend

# Finder, did I mention it's completely new? Networking, browsing, anything that used to beachball is SUPER FAST. The finder doesn't beachball on large folders, nor do you wait for thumbnails to come up, or wait period. You can try network shares as fast as you can click them.

# The entire system has new underpinnings, that are better threaded. No pause if you click on a menu. THIS IS REALLY, REALLY big deal, as it takes months to rewrite that code that handles this sort of thing.

# Redesigned printing servics, and dialogs, no more of that HORRIBLE 60 dropdown items. Preview of your document (thumbnail) is in every print dialog, and page setup can be reached from this window. Also printing does not put up a dialog covering the screen while it spools pages. No more stopping your productivity, while you wait to spool.

I'm just getting warmed up. It's extremely fast. This alone is worth $129



I'm just surprised that Steve didn't make more out of how much faster Leopard apparently is. If he had, we might be hearing significantly fewer "WWDC was kind of a disappointment" -type complaints. \

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Yeah, that's what it says now.

EDIT: aaarrrrggghh, the return of random time post positioning. I thought maybe the down time was to fix that? Man, the AI database must be well and truly borked.

It's still there.