A Word On Snow Leopard
For those that live under rocks - or lead normal happy lives, Snow Leopard is OS X 10.6, Apple’s next update to OS X.
You might be able to find some discussion on the net about it, and you’ll eventually see that any intelligent discussion comes down to the fact that people think the update should be free… like a service pack is for windows.
This is because Apple have made the mistake of telling the press and public that 10.6 won’t contain any new features. That’s surely going to make consumers think “What? Then what am I paying for?”. The truth is that Apple are introducing a ton of new features - they’re just not aimed at consumers.
What Apple have said publicly is that 10.6 will be a complete optimisation and clean up with strong emphasis on increasing security and stability. Great! But people have come to expect those things to be free, as point release updates, like 10.5.3.
What people don’t understand though, unless they’re familiar with the technologies being used, is that the updates being made in 10.6 are far more than the bug fixes they’re used to downloading through Software Update every two weeks.
It’s a sad fact that people have come to understand Operating System updates as GUI Updates. They think that if it doesn’t look different, then nothing has changed. They couldn’t be more wrong. 10.6 will be bringing in features that enable the system to run up to twice as fast as it used to on the same hardware, be more secure without bloating the system, and reduce the amount of disk space the OS occupies on disk, leaving you with more space for your music, videos and whatever else you store.
Look at Microsoft. Bill Gates has been quoted saying that Microsoft tend not to work on bug fixes and system optimisation, because bug fixes don’t sell. You can’t market bug fixes - people don’t care. What people do care about, is the new transparency features, the 3D windowing system and all that crap. Apple are also to blame here, they’re not totally innocent, they turned mundane backup features into a 3D interface, and gave it a fancy name, and managed to spur a product out of it too.
And sadly, it’s true. You tell someone that this OS that looks exactly the same, and doesn’t contain anything immediately visible as being ‘new’, and then you show someone the exact same OS, but with a bit of an interface update, and which do you think they’ll choose?
It’s my opinion that the general Apple customer will turn their nose up at 10.6, due to the aforementioned points. The people who will embrace 10.6 and more importantly understand what changes have been made are developers. I believe Apple are targeting the developer community with this release, and here’s why:
Grand Central
“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.
Ask any developer and they’ll tell you that writing software to take advantage of multiple cores is difficult. So what does this do? Removes that difficulty and allows developers to make their applications multicore aware without having to sacrifice time and effort that could be well spent on making their application better.
This is also good for the consumer - they just don’t know it, and never will. Grand Central will make all those applications that Apple users have come to love and live by run faster and more efficiently. It’ll pave the way for more apps that they’ll come to love and allow the existing apps to improve. Why wouldn’t they care about that??
Open CL
Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.
This one is another feature targeted at developers. Similar to nVidia’s CUDA technology, this allows developers to write programs that utilise the graphics card to offload a ton of processing, hence speeding up the application. What’s my powerful graphics card doing as I write this post? Nothing much - displaying some windows… Unless you’re playing a game, or using a graphics intensive application, your GPU is going to waste. Adobe are already looking into including this technology in Photoshop to allow processing of large scale image on the GPU, freeing up the CPU to worry about keeping the system running smoothly.
Again, why wouldn’t consumer’s care?
Those are two of the bigger features being brought in with 10.6, along with complete 64-bit a whole new filesystem (ZFS), and I’m sure there will be more to follow (Safari 4 anyone?).
Just because these features don’t reveal themselves upfront to the user doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t plowing tons of time and effort into this release. This work is so much more than a service pack. The OS is being effectively rewritten from the ground to accommodate these new enhancements. When has a Service Pack ever done that for Windows?
