Mac OS X Snow Leopard First Look
At my age, I look forward to upgrading my OS about as much I look forward to a trip to the dentist. Why break something that works? Why risk wasting hours hunting down drivers that potentially don't exist, with the possibility that well-loved hardware becomes obsolete? Last time I upgraded the OS, I had to put my scanner on …
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Family pack vs single user
There's no serial number activation or licence code with OS X. You can install it on as many machines as you wish. So yes, it comes down to personal honesty.
Only PowerPC losing out?
It's not just PPC users that are getting left behind. 1st gen Intel iMacs like mine were 32-bit Core Duos and won't benefit from the 64-bit revolution. I'm expecting 10.7 to drop those machines.
@Steve 116
I'm amused that you're making such a big deal about a £25 upgrade. Bet you've spend hundreds of quid in the past on stuff like faster disks or more ram to make your machine faster, yet you go on as though a £25 software upgrade which improves performance is not worth it.
Oh, and BTW, your comments about Photoshop are equally laughable. Tell me again, what you're using to edit photos on your Ubuntu box?
@Steve116
My your ego needs stroking. If you aren't interested in it leave it. But no it seems that everyone else needs to be indoctrinates with your crap.
"So in the latest hype fest there's a bunch of under-the-bonnet stuff your average joe ain't gonna have the the first clue about and whats that?"
Until they actually come to use it and find it is faster and more efficient. Go say this stuff on a non geek board and you might get away with it. Come here and expect to be shot down.
"You are having trouble selling this to me i'm afraid. A technical building block it may be but in terms of broad consumer appeal or compelling reason to upgrade/purchase I don't see this exactly catching fire.?"
Nope, you are not interested. I see that you are carefully ignoring the OpenCL work and the Grand Central stuff - probably because in your world they don't mean anything. But they will.
BTW it is Mac and not MAC.
"32-64bit does not always equal performance boost anyway - it's an architecture choice more appropriate to certain classes of application (optimised database/network servers) and perhaps some high end video post production stuff where you move large chunks of data round but to mom and pop writing an email its almost totally irrelevant."
But going forward it is very big. Apple have put in place technologies that will change computing on the desktop and while these pieces are now in place please feel free to ignore them until the next Windows release (the one after 7) which will trumpet all these features as significant Microsoft improvements.
"Thanks, I'll stick to a free copy of ubuntu Jaunty running on my commodity £200 dell laptop and continue running Debain 64bit / Centos 64bit on my 8cpu quad core servers for the serious computing stuff..."
Well done. Now go back to your sandbox while the people who are interested discuss.
@Giles Jones
Have you heard of Ubuntu Studio? And OpenOffice is quite simply fantastic. I'm not going to say that Ubuntu Studio is any real replacement for Logic (although it does have VST compatibility), although I'm actually planning on playing around with it tonight.
Ubuntu is dead easy to setup, even to a relative novice. There's the occasional difficulty, but nothing that can't be solved by a quick google, or a visit to most Linux forums..and from what I've seen, using Jack, latency is right down, but, like I say, I'll find out tonight.
As far as a Windows PC is concerned, with a decent interface it shouldn't be a problem, Logic may well still be the king of production software, but I find that Ableton Live is also fantastic (and rapidly catching up with Logic, the warping in it is amazing to say the least), the latest version is stable, and it's 8 quid ( :) ) cheaper than Logic on Amazon. Of course, it is also available on Mac, but that kind of defeats the purpose of my point. Considering the money you would save doing it this way (ie paying for the PC instead of the brand), you could get a shit-hot DAW, and either a shit-hot interface/new synth/new monitors for the same price as the Mac.
Oh and I've never really experienced true glitchiness..
64-bit? And when does Bluray playback arrive?
Wait... so for 3 years now, Apple has been pedalling Macs which run the processor in a reversionary mode?!?!
Seriously, if you bought an Intel Mac that came with a 32-bit OS without explicitly mentioning it, you should be getting your money back at the Apple store. A lot of the OEMs ship 64-bit PCs with 32-bit Windows, but if you call them they take them back and give you full refund.
Although as there were no 64-bit Mac applications, I guess the point is a bit moot (like this OS service pack... sorry I mean new release!)
"Apple stole Microsofts innovation by bringing out 64-bit OS!" - isn't that the usual sort of rhetoric from Mac fanboys when Microsoft bring out a feature similar to an Apple feature?
@Shakje
Either you're very new to music production or haven't really used Logic. Ubuntu Studio is an absolute joke compared to the likes of Logic, Cubase, ProTools or Sonar.
Ableton is a great program, especially for live work, but in terms of a sequencer it's still many, many years behind the big apps.
If you're into music production nothing is as good as a Mac.
@magnetik
Remind me again about Apple's open source contributions?
Ah yes, Apple are a company who are quite happy to take extensively from open source community code but are apparently almost entirely deficient when it comes to making any contributions in return. And they wonder why not everyone shares your apparent good will towards them?
As a Linux user i'm not forced into paying for upgrades (performance or otherwise) on Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Debain or indeed BSD.
Or maybe i just need to drink a little more of that apple fanboy kool-aid...?
Btw - for photo editting i used to use some great free win32 software Pixmantec Rawshooter from a German company (before Adobe bought them to destroy competition to their own inferior RAW editor product) . These days though for my family pics i use www.piknic.com or any of the freely available cloud based online picture editors....
@Steve 116
"Or maybe i just need to drink a little more of that apple fanboy kool-aid...?" - and you've not drunk that of RMS or Shuttleworth?!
Well done! You like Linux and open source software. More people like the Mac! Even more people like Windows! Rawshooter is *very* old news. What's it called now? That's right, Adobe Lightroom. Personally I prefer Aperture, which is only available on the Mac and I also use LightZone which is available on all three. Yes, there are some *reasonably* good OSS RAW editors, for that matter there are some pretty good multimedia OSS apps. From recent experience, most need some sort of bodge to get them working. It's great that you have bought into the Stallmanian ideal of libre software, but in real terms most of the OSS multimedia stuff just isn't good enough for day to day professional use - it is by and large half-baked. The problem with the F/LOSS movement is that it expect everyone to buy into its ideals, there is no compromise, no-wonder it's finding it difficult to take off after 20 odd years. As someone that has been using digital photo manipulation software for over 15 years, the GIMP whilst good, it isn't anywhere near as good as Photoshop - Corel's Paint Shop Pro perhaps, ditto Illustrator vs. InkScape. As for the cloud based stuff, it's available on Snow Leopard too, using the fastest HTML and JavaScript engine available - the Apple lead and funded open source WebKit...
@Steve 116
I'm happy to remind you of Apple's open source contributions.
Apple's WebKit is open source. Google use it for Chrome (and, er, Android). It was also picked up by Palm, for use on the Pre via WebOS, oh and on the S60 browser on Symbian phones. And then there's all the Darwin stuff.
Good old Apple, eh?
Ubuntu? Half baked
To all those who claim that Linux is a real alternative- You're dreaming. As a person who desperately wants to escape the clutches of Macrosquash I've been seriously trying to make Ubuntu work and have given up for various reasons- mainly video. I've sort of got VLC Player working, but it's slow, choppy, and erratic. Firefox runs like a spastic sloth, and Open Office just can't compete with the bloated but effective MS Office. I'll continue to use Ubuntu for torrents and downloads because I feel Linux is more secure, but long term I believe I see a Snow Leopard in my future.
encoded morality
Computers are tools. It's just so bloody typical of people to turn them into statements of political purity or apathy.
I have all three OS's. I use all three OS's.
Windows for gaming (which it does very well on the whole), and nothing else - why go to sea in a tissue paper boat designed by landlubbers?.
OSX for laptop (Mac's are investments in a way Wintel machines never will be). Apple attested to the power of Unix when they switched to BSD. Microsoft are too proud to admit it's a better model and will keep releasing reiterations of NT/XP until the final trumpet and so the virus/trojan problem will never go away (or won't until the last hole in the MS code is closed).
Linux for everything else. Meaning, Linux for online browsing, all music and video (playback), word processing etc. No meaningful viral threat and thus no need to have some awful crappy program sitting in the background scanning everything (most of which fail to spot and protect against new fast spreading threats anyway). Total customisability - to some of us, being able to change anything is a bonus.
If I had to run Photoshop et al the first place I'd check would be Crossover to see if it supported it, followed by the Wine forums to see if anyone else had successfully run it on Linux, then I'd look at a Mac. Windows wouldn't even be under consideration.
Windows Can, OSX can..but Linux Can't...just one example
@AC
Looks Nice But... #
By Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 25th August 2009 20:48 GMT
I'm sure Apple users are happy with Leopard and Snow Leopard but I just can't see how it's any better than Kubuntu Jaunty.
Real basic things like it works?
Try doing something basic like network sharing on Jaunty. I've just plugged my laptop into the hotel wired broadband, I want to share this with my colleagues on my wifi.
Windows Can.
OSX Can.
Linux can't. At least not easily, and no hacking routes and firewall configs doesn't count as easy.
@Adam 10 , Steve 116
Adam 10: v10.4 supports low-level 64bit address spaces, v10.5 supports proper 64bit programs throughout Cocoa. 10.6 adds a 64bit kernel and 64bit versions of all the bundled apps. OS X can run 64bit user-space apps on a 32bit kernel.
Steve 116: besides WebKit, Apple bankroll a lot of development that is contributed back to GCC and are more or less the only people financing Clang and LLVM. They developed the OpenCL spec (which may not be code, but does cost money) and all of the drivers released for that for any platform so far are Clang/LLVM based (ie, Apple contributed heavily to the code too). The Darwin kernel remains completely open source (though I'll bet you're applying the "it doesn't count if I don't use it" test). Apple also own and are the primary developers of CUPS, which is an extremely popular way of talking to printers in most of the free UNIXes.
@Magnetik
I haven't used Ubuntu Studio at all so I shouldn't really have compared it. Yes, Logic is utterly amazing and a joy to use. As someone who hasn't really bought a DAW, but more of a highish spec general purpose machine, I'm happier spending money elsewhere than on the Apple brand, as Ableton quite happily lets me do everything I need to (and I have other things to consider, such as Visual Studio).
Missing Tricks
I think some of you guys missed the point of my original post - as something that is being announced as a significant consumer release, product milestone and international news event this update is lacking any stand-out unique selling point that will really make an impression on the average non-ubergeek buyer.
Sure a new OS multi-core aware thread scheduler is a great talking point if your social circle discuss NUMA architectures, HyperTransport and the latency / atomicity problems associated with sharing data addresses between distributed cpu caches within clustered multicore chipset architectures), 64bit addressing is also a fine noteworthy advance (albeit one that linux has offered for some time) if your computing requires >4gb RAM or you need to rapidly shift data chunksizes optimised neatly in 8x8byte arrays to/from cpu/memory/disk cache/network network sockets... and an new api to use the GPU for maths operations is also great for certain highly specialised number crunching applications (are the mass market really computing fast fourier transformations these days?).
Your average consumer isn't going to comprehend any of these details in the slightest beyond some vague subjective "ooh is it really faster?".
@Anonymous Coward Apple's relationship with KDE konquerer project makes for an interesting history albeit one with a tacit decision to reluctantly embrace the open source paradigm in order to benefit from an enlarged developer community - kudos to the dev's for pushing that past the apple executive.
@ThomH - isn't x86 darwin dead in the water already since a few years as key components of the kernel and driver code were withheld in the switch from ppc?
G4 & G5 compatibility isn't an issue
and I own a a working ancient G4 PowerBook and an almost equally ancient G5 21" iMac which is my HDTV now.
I'm looking forward to Snow Leopard. It's already on order from Amazon.
@Ian Davies
Ok I wasnt the only one who saw this.
Seriously Andrew...Rolls-Royce of browsers?
Im going to go back to napping on my desk :)
I'll be interested to see the progress of 64 bit support
Frankly, it's a bit lacking on all other platforms (Windows and *nix). The device drivers are there now (mostly), but there is usually a limitation or two.
Mainly, it is the browser. Many unixes do it right and install a 64 bit browser off the bat - you have to hunt around for it under Windows. Of course, once you've got your 64 bit Windows browser, with a 64 bit JVM, certain java programs don't work because they're trying to call a 32 bit DLL...
64 bit Flash? What's that? In alpha on Linux. Non existent for Windows and OS X. Popular open source programs are 64 bit on Linux only (no surprise there, really, it's up to the users to get it working).
I hope that Apple does the right thing and installs 64 bit OS X by default with new Mac sales; it's rare for Windows machines to do the same thing.
Bad Teeth... Health Care...
By Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 25th August 2009 22:00 GMT, "You realise over 100million Americans have either no or insufficient health care trouble right?"
Ummm... no, health care is available for anyone who walks into an office... many people choose to not get insurance, and insurance is often too expensive for others (cheaper to just go cash in most cases.)
By Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 25th August 2009 22:00 GMT, "And that children in the US are dying from infections caused by... tooth decay right?"
Ummm... no. If someone is dying, they can go to a hospital and get treated, regardless of age or citizenship - this is the law in the United States. Equal access to health care is guaranteed in the United States. Someone in the hospital will write out a prescription. Many antibiotics only cost $1 US$ in a local grocery store - cheaper than a 3 liter bottle of soda, that rots out their teeth.
By Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 25th August 2009 22:00 GMT, "People in glass houses should not throw bricks, especially when children in the US are dying from bad dental care, or in fact, lack of any dental care. You sir... fail."
People who don't understand market driven health care where government guarantees of health care for all [citizens & non-citizens alike] in the United States should not throw bricks.
By Adam T Posted Wednesday 26th August 2009 09:49 GMT, "I recently used a non-NHS dentist for some cosmetic work (which no insurance will cover) and it cost more than it would in, say, hungary. But it still cost less than it would in the states - I know because I shopped around. So, free or paid for - we have the better deal."
That's because in the U.S. - the purchaser of services pay for people who do not pay for their own service in conjunction with paying the people who won lawsuits for negligence against the providers. In the socialist systems, money taken from other citizens fund the person using services.
Whut ?
>Many antibiotics only cost $1 US$ in a local grocery store - cheaper than a 3 liter bottle of soda, that rots out their teeth.
So that s where the resistance to antibiotics is coming from, US people are eating them coz they are cheaper than drinking soda !!
Well it makes sense to me :)
£39 quid to upgrade all my Macs
£25 quid for a single upgrade is quite nice.
My savings come from upgrading all my Mac's at home for £39 quid. That works out to around 8 quid per device, to bring a little more grunt to those older Mac for 8 quid can only be a good thing..
Thank god I have a technet plus account for Windows 7 and the PC's I have.
Steve
@Steve116
"32-64bit does not always equal performance boost anyway"
Sheesh.
64 bit code is faster for all everything for a couple of fairly important reasons. The first is that code compiled for 64 bit has 13 extra registers to play with: this is not to be sneezed at.
The second reason affects both 32-bit and 64-bit programs once you get enough memory in the machine: enough memory here is about 1GB with a more serious kick as you approach 4GB.
It depends exactly what the machine is doing whether the simpler memory management or the increased program speed has the greater effect, but both do have an effect and you don't need to be doing anything obscure to feel their effects.
32 vs 64bit
@AC 13:51
Unless you are doing stuff like compression, crypto, encoding, high volume IO (eg network servers), rendering, audio signal processing and such the benefits of 64bit are not going to be significant. Plenty of benchmarks (albeit most i've seen are Linux / Solaris / UltraSparc) attest to this.
Larger address size and 64bit data types can unless your app is correctly optimized result in lower performance and significantly greater memory use.
Then there's a whole seperate class of problem running non-64bit code for example flash plugin in 32bit emulation where performance really suffers.
My guess would be that at least some of the suggested boost in Apple's latest is likely down to re-factored binaries now the PPC architecture stuff isn't required combined with bytecode optimisation from the LLVM compiler?
There are some benchmarks (pre-snow leopard) and discussion here http://www.geekpatrol.ca/2006/09/32-bit-vs-64-bit-performance/
It will be interesting to see what performance benefit if any the FreeBSD guys get from compilation using LLVM.
512-pixel Icons
Allowing icons up to 512 pixels large may not be all that useful for everything, but for those of us with lots of digital photos and other images, being able to set larger icon sizes than 128-pixels is quite welcome.
@Steve 116
The article you linked to tested 32 vs 64 bit on OS X 10.4. Apple hadn't even converted the kernel to 64 bit at that time so it's not exactly appropriate. Try this instead:
http://gizmodo.com/5345354/snow-leopard-benchmarks
Left to my own devices.
I can't wait to get my wonky British teeth into this shiny new OS - as soon as someone works out how to install it to PC hardware.
Now, how many taboos have I broken here?
@Peter Kay
The only 32bit code that runs on this machine is Apple's shitty EFI, Refit and Skype's statically linked Linux binary. Most Linux distros are "Pure 64" now.... there is even a 64bit Flash plugin which apparently no one that reads the el reg knows about.
Much love...
I do love the Windows lads...
Apple Fanboi: Apple have done this, designed that, tried to compromise this, Windows has this, that and a bit of that and some good bits of this or that.
Linux fanboi: No free software? Oh well, you can try this and I will be good when this O/S get that and we get something that will do this and that and hopefully more compatability with XYZ.
Windows Fanboi: LINUX IS CRAP! APPLE ARE CRAP! MACS ARE CRAP! OOOOH £479 FOR AN O/S UPGRADE? WHERE'S MY WALLET?
"Mail is now 77.5MB."
You know what, I'm still on 10.4 and Mail is only 15MB!
@AC Bad Teeth - Health Care
A link for you
Two people in the US die because of lack of dental treatment (which btw, isn't covered by Medicare or Medicaid)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/business/11decay.html?_r=1
Around 50 million Americans cannot afford insurance so have no access to medical care, around 50 million Americans are under insured so if they do need treatment, it will cost them an arm and a leg. Still, all that competition must be really good, seeing as how over 1,500 people queue up at ONE station giving free medical/dental care in LA, must be nice to live in a country which has worse medical care than a 3rd world county, or even Cuba.
back on topic somewhat,,,
Shove the DVD in, couple of clicks... make a cup of tea, wander back 30 mins later just as it's finishing up.
All my stuff works, the computer is slightly faster.. The new gamma looks a bit funny. Looking forward to seeing all this OpenCL/GCD nonsense in future- meantime, I have a slightly quicker and prettier computer.
All very painless. Can't say fairer than that.
Clever Snow Leopard
Decided to take the plunge and put a new fat and fast hard drive in my Macbook and put Snow Leopard on there. And it works a treat! The best bit so far was on pairing my Nokia n79. Snow Leopard recognised it for a smart phone from Nokia, and offered to set it up as a modem, a quick google for the APN details (on the handset) and it was set up and working. Which is a good job as my internet has decided tonight is the night to take a bath!
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