Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard Announced
At the recent WWDC conference Apple released details (and an early developer build to attendees) of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the next planned release of the OS X operating system.
Apple have also added a page to their Web site, giving some initial details of the new features of Snow Leopard.
- Microsoft Exchange Support - Snow Leopard will include support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in the Mail, Address Book, and iCal applications. This is an interesting move and an important announcement as Apple is looking at the Mac moving more into the corporate enterprise,
- Multicore - With the advent of newer multicore processors, efficiently supporting multiple cores is becoming increasingly important for operating systems. Apple is including a new feature called ‘Grand Central’ that looks like a form of OS scheduler that can manage how applications leverage multiple cores. This may reduce the complexity for developers to write code specifically for multiple cores, leaving the complex task to the operating system,
- 64-bit - Whilst Leopard does provides 64-bit support, it looks like Apple will be added additional features to take full advantage of 64-bit computing,
- Media and Internet - Both QuickTime X (the iPhone implementation of QuickTime) and an update to JavaScript performance in Safari have been announced (note that it is expected that the Safari update may be released earlier than Snow Leopard),
- OpenCL - OpenCL is an interesting announcement. It was originally rumored that Apple would be supporting NVidia Cuda, a development API for tapping into the capabilities of modern GPUs (that are largely unused). However, Apple has announced OpenCL that appears to offer the same type of functionality. Perhaps this is because Apple wishes to support both NVidia and ATI graphics processors, and not be locked into a vendors’ proprietary technology.
At first glance this may seem to be a pretty limited set of features for a new OS X release, but there are a few clues and pointers as to where Apple may be heading with Snow Leopard.
The move from Leopard to Snow Leopard indicates a minor advance for OS X. Unless they have run out of wild cat names, by simply tagging Snow to the front of Leopard, Apple are hinting about the ‘minor’ update this release may represent. In fairness, I think they are saying it will be a minor update from a users perspective, in regards its appearance and feature set. However, most of the changes seem to be aimed at the core of OS X operating system.
With the release of the iPhone, Apple are starting to use the OS X platform on a wider range of devices. Microsoft previously tried this with Windows CE, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, etc. However, Microsoft basically re-wrote the operating system to support these devices, causing a fork in their ongoing development strategy. Apple seem to be tackling the problem in a cleverer way. If they are looking at reducing the footprint of OS X Snow Leopard, allowing it to be run on lower powered devices (perhaps tablet or hand held computers) they will be able to have a single code base that can be deployed across a wider range of devices. This can represent a significant cost saving for Apple, allowing them to streamline their core OS X development and allow them to concentrate on adding functionality, rather than having to manage multiple operating systems. Microsoft is struggling with multiple versions of the Windows platforms, and with the increased size (read bloat) of Vista, you can see that unless Microsoft pulls off a miracle with Windows 7, they will continue to struggle to keep up with the faster release strategies of Apple and the open source Linux platform.
It will also be interesting how much Apple will charge for Snow Leopard. If the feature set is limited, many people may not see the value in upgrading.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard is currently scheduled for release in ‘about a year’, so we can expect a Q2/Q3 release in 2009.
Tags: OS X Snow Leopard
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