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June 9, 2008

software

The black and white of Snow Leopard

Posted Jun. 9, ’08, 5:50 PM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

Snow Leopard As if the outcry about the lack of shiny new features in the last few Mac OS X versions wasn’t enough, Snow Leopard is looking to be a very incremental update to Leopard. It’s no wonder it didn’t play a large role in the keynote.

Let’s review the big features:

  1. Microsoft Exchange Support: This dominated a large part of the iPhone discussion. It was frequently referred to during the Mobile Me portion of the keynote. Apple has gone Microsoft Exchange crazy.

  2. 64-bit: More RAM!

  3. Multicore: Improving performance for multicore machines is a key priority and not just for Apple. It’s become the way we improve the performance of our computers and that trend is going to continue.

  4. Media and Internet: We have Quicktime X. It’s meant to support the latest codecs, but that’s all we know. Also, that version of Safari we mentioned with the oddly named Squirrelfish is going to be included.

  5. OpenCL: This allows developers to tap into the massively strong GPUs in modern day computers. While I can easily see the scientific desire for such a feature, I’m unsure it’s going to bring anything to the everyday consumer.

That’s basically all she wrote. It’s a little light on information and the press release is very Exchange heavy. I’m beginning to wonder if this will be known as the Exchange release of OS X. What that might say about the platform scares me.


6 Comments

Anton said:

To comment your comment "I’m unsure [if OpenCL is] going to bring anything to the everyday consumer."

Think of media re-encoding for Apple TV and iPods. You will see a huge difference there.

June 9, 2008 11:53 PM
Kelmon said:

"I’m beginning to wonder if this will be known as the Exchange release of OS X. What that might say about the platform scares me."

To a degree, the addition of native Exchange support is possibly the most important aspect of all this, particularly if Apple manages to nix all the issues some people are still reporting about authenticating against an Active Directory. I think that this says that Apple knows that they won't make any advancement into the corporate environment if they don't play nice with Microsoft technologies that are already entrenched. Whether you like that or not is really immaterial since it's just fact. What I can say is that playing better with the likes of Exchange and Active Directory brings more reasons why I don't need Microsoft's own applications or OS in order to get my work done. If you work in a non-Microsoft centric environment, then that's great but I have to expect that this is pretty unusual. This has the potential to make life much easier.

I'm definitely looking forwards to the other aspects of the OS since speed, stability and performance is always nice. However, I can't help but wish that this had been in the box with Leopard to begin with. Still, shouldn't grumble...

June 10, 2008 12:06 AM
Picky said:

As other people have mentioned on different sites, I wonder if they will be requiring users to upgrade for the Safari patch. I'd probably consider upgrading anyway, to be honest, but I would be pretty unimpressed if they forced us to pay for a Safari patch.

Other than that, and Quicktime, it seems like it shouldn't cost the full price of the normal OS.

A lot of memory is nice, but who is going to use it; 64-bit of ram is nice, but who, other than Mac Pro users, can take advantage of that, or anything remotely close to it? OpenCL is nice, but most MacBook users can't even take much advantage of it (with their limited, integrated GPUs).

June 10, 2008 4:05 AM
goobi said:

NOT A BIG ROLE??? All it got was barely a mention at the beginning. The whole damn keynote was about the iPhone. I love my iPhone a lot but there are greater affections (in a non creepy way) for the mac.

June 10, 2008 4:49 AM
Dave-O said:

@goobi, who do you think WWDC is for? The big news in the developer community (the reason WWDC sold out) is the iPhone SDK. It's the launch of a new platform!

June 10, 2008 8:36 AM
Andre Da Costa said:

When you look into the the fact that the majority of businesses world wide use Microsoft Exchange Server to run their corporate e-mail, then you can understand Apples reasons and intentions to make OS X 'Snow Leopard' (an alternative OS to Windows) work perfectly with Exchange. Its further validation of the platform too. Also, this could be a sign of better integration with Active Directory since it is a derivative of the x.500 standard on which Exchange was built. Snow Leopard is a foundational release that is basically going to do some house cleaning and prepare the platform for future technologies. I think this is a smart move.

June 11, 2008 5:16 PM

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