All Articles Tagged 10.6

Apple.com has put up a teaser page for their next-generation OS X, 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard. And the features, to put it mildly, are mind blowing:

Exchange support built in, so that iPhone and OS X share common business email, calendar, and contact sync.

64-bit monster, supporting a theoretical 16TB (terabytes!!) of RAM.

Multi-core optimized, using “Grand Central” to chip away at one of the biggest problems in programming: how to really take advantage of multi-core processors.

Media from iPhone! building on the iPhone OS X, Quicktime X takes advantage of streamlined, next gen tech for modern codec support, and ultra-fast javascript for the web.

Open CL, to co-opt the GPU into doing some heavy crunching on the compute side.

How does this relate to the iPhone? Aside from using what they learned making iPhone OS X, from optimization to shrinking the OS footprint, rumor has it Snow Leopard will go a long way towards unifying the OS X branches, leveraging development efforts, and in the end, giving the best of both worlds to desktop, laptop, and handheld users.

Great, I just got through WWDC 2008 and now I’m already jonesing for 2009. Way to go Apple!

Last year Apple infamously delayed the release of their long anticipated OS X 10.5 Leopard in order to devote more resources to their soon-to-launch iPhone. When Leopard finally roared, it brought with it a host of new features, including CoreAnimation, Time Machine, Coverflow and Quicklook, and some 296 more according to Apple.

So would the next OS X release be similarly feature-packed… and delayed?

Turns out maybe just the opposite. Rumor is Apple may release OS X 10.6, claimed to be code-named “Snow Leopard” as early as Macworld in January 2008, and maybe even debut a beta this WWDC (?!).

Sounds crazy? Here’s what’s crazier: just as “Snow Leopard” comes off as a minor addition to “Leopard”, so too is OS X 10.6 supposedly a functionally similar product to 10.5! Focus this time may just be on stability, making what’s good better, and increasing the unification between the various “flavors” of the OS Apple now deploys across the Mac, iPhone, and Apple TV platforms.

Personally, this sounds great to me. OS X is mature enough at this point that more eye-candy or changes for changes sake can easily take a back seat for the final polish analogous to the 10.1 release of the early days. Nailing down the platform will let Apple take both the Mac and their mobile initiatives, headlined by the iPhone, fully and functionally into the future.

Gimme.

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