I haven’t written about Apple in a while, and there are a few reasons for that. One reason is that there are others who are better writers who express the opinions I would have expressed, but more completely and more coherently. There’s no use republishing the wheel. Secondly, just about everything I’ve written in the past that is Apple-related is based almost solely upon conjecture with few or no supporting facts. Sometimes I’ve attempted to use history as a guide to the future, which has lead to my final reason for not writing about Apple much lately: I’m almost always wrong.
The WWDC keynote coming Monday, however, has proven to be too hard to resist. I’ve found some of the rumors that always pop up this time of year to be too interesting to go without comment.
3G iPhone: This one’s a lock. As some of you may know, I’ve resisted purchasing an iPhone. The device itself has certainly been compelling, but not compelling enough to overcome AT&T’s ass rape service plans. Exclusivity with a crummy carrier is a point I used to argue against the iPhone’s existence way back when, and now it’s a factor that prevents me from having purchased this device in its inaugural year. Contrary to all of that, I have a feeling that the new iPhone hardware and software revision that’s going to be announced Monday are going to be compelling enough to overwhelm whatever reservations I have about service plans. That and the fact that my employment status earns me a 20% discount with AT&T. I’ve got the debit card warmed up and ready for my purchase Monday.
.Mac revision/rebranding: I’ve been a proponent of .Mac since its first day, despite the bitching and moaning of people who feel they’re entitled to the service for free instead of paying $100/yr retail. (Is $100/yr too much for an optional service? Really? Skip a few cigarettes, drink a little less beer, pack a lunch a few times, and you’ll more than make that up. The problem isn’t that you don’t have the money, it’s that you’re cheap and entitled. Ugh, idiots.) I will agree that .Mac has the potential to be, and should be, more than it currently is. Service levels can be improved, .Mac members could be offered more discounts and product tie-ins from Apple and third parties, and most people have a favorite service they’d like to see added. While it’s obviously not possible to meet everyone’s expectations, it’s certainly possible to improve.
What those improvements will be, I can’t say. The rumor mill has been sparse in that respect, and I have no reason to believe any single improvement may come to fruition. One rumor that has been knocked around a bit is the new potential name, MobileMe or .Me. Based solely on that tidbit, excluding any technical merit an upgrade to the service may have, I think the name would be silly. We already live in a narcissistic world, lead by MySpace (shudder), where just about every damn thing has the stupid word “my” in front of it. The idea that Apple would want a service with the word “me” anywhere in the name makes me want to grab some marketing hack by the hair and bang their head against a concrete wall until I feel satisfied that this unfortunate individual has paid the price for my personal frustration. Please, please, invisible giant in the sky, hear my prayer and make this whole MobileMe name thing just another dumb rumor.
Beyond that, I’m excited to see what happens to .Mac.
10.6 “Snow Leopard”: Ok, here’s another one with a funny name, but it’s better than *me*. (”Leopard Extreme”? “Leopard Take Two”? Not any better, really.) Rumor is that Apple may preview Mac OS X 10.6 and it will be, in effect, an Intel-only Leopard step-up, with lots of performance and security improvements and no major new features. I can believe this rumor.
As we saw with the Intel introduction a few years back, Apple has some sneaky squirrels in the basement somewhere who work on secret projects that are parallel with public projects. At the first day, Apple had universal binaries, Intel compilers, and Intel machines ready to go, for all practical purposes. Who says there isn’t an OS X team that has been working in parallel with public Leopard developers to create a very optimized Intel-only build of Leopard?
This is where I show my ignorance, but you’ll be able to follow my train of thought. My understanding is that Intel has produced a compiler that’s much more efficient at compiling for the Core 2 Duo than GCC 4 is. (And now some developer who actually knows will tell me why that statement is dumb.) It’s within the realm of possibility that Apple has been compiling parallel builds of Leopard with the Intel-optimized compiler, and they’ve reached a point where they feel comfortable enough to make that OS build its own product. Apple is selling, and has sold, a bus load of Intel Macs, and will continue to do so. Why not give Intel Mac owners the best performance the Core 2 Duo is capable of in their own OS build?
But what about the many PPC users still out there? I see 10.5 and 10.6 as being sold and supported at the same time. If the feature sets and a large chunk of the code are roughly equivalent, it’s no extra burden to Apple to support both, and creating both may simply be an issue of minor code revisions and compiling twice instead of once. (”Simply”. Yes, I said that. Some developer is yelling at me right now.) Having both operating systems out in the world at the same time would also explain why 10.6 follows 10.5 so closely. PPC and Intel users keep the same feature set for another year or 18 months after the introduction of 10.6, and 10.7 becomes Intel only, with universal binaries relegated to 10.5 only. PPC fades out, Intel becomes the focus, and during that transition, nobody is left behind in terms of features.
I also think of 10.6 along the same lines as 10.1… as an improvement that will be provided free or for the nominal cost that Apple has charged in the past for other such upgrades. People have always asked why Apple has those little coupons included in the latest OS box. The last time they were used, I presented mine to acquire a free copy of 10.1. Maybe that’s the case again.
There it is, all the baseless conjecture and hedging an outsider can muster. We’ll see how wrong I am Monday.
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June 5th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Here we have it. Yet again, what I’ve written has been echoed to some degree by someone in a more prominent position with a larger audience. I found this in my RSS feeds seconds after I published m own post. Rob Griffiths, of all people, has the same ideas in mind for 10.6 as I do:
Does Apple have an OS X update up its sleeve at WWDC?
June 5th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
I have to say that’s a brilliant idea for 10.6. Apple’s gone through some big transitions over the last few years: OS 9 -> X; PPC -> Intel. They’ve so far been really good at easing the transitions. This would be a brilliant way to subtly jettison the old baggage without jettisoning any customers.
As far as the iPhone goes, my wife & I have wanted one since day 1. Between a mortgage, a baby on the way it’s just not in the cards at the moment. When we can finally swing a couple in a year or so, I can only imagine what they’ll be capable of. 3G? Ha! I’m looking for 5GXQ with auto-sync-via-subspace!
Plus a pony.
June 5th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
OR… could it be… that 10.6 “Snow Leopard” is the “OS X iPhone”, as seen in these pictures? Could it be that Apple has decided that OS X for its portable device(s) is worthy of its own version number, because it’s different enough and development is significantly separate, with different goals, etc.?
From Wikipedia:
Slightly smaller OS X for slightly smaller devices, code named after the slightly smaller cat that shares a name with the current OS.
I figure if I throw enough darts at the board, I’ll eventually hit something.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
I think you’re a little off on the compiler thing.
There’s no reason you couldn’t use the Intel compiler to build the Intel version of your application and GCC to build the PowerPC version of your application.
I could see PowerPC being “deprecated”, as in Apple will no longer be putting time and effort into doing flashy things with PowerPC. For example, notice that the iPhone emulator for the iPhone SDK is Intel-only. This makes some sense, as emulators are difficult enough to do on one platform without trying to do so for two. I think you’ll probably see more of this from Apple.
June 6th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
That could be. The only problem with that, however, is that Apple is also a stickler for simplicity, especially in the iPhone.
Apple wants to make sure that when you hear a name, you know exactly what’s being talked about. Take their notebook names: MacBook - the regular one, MacBook Pro - the big metal one with all the stuff in it, MacBook Air - the really light one.
If Apple does see the iPhone version of OS X as a separate entity, as it probably does, it will want to make sure that it gets a separate branding.
The 10.X branding works well for system software because it’s not meant for a specific computer; it’s meant for all their computers. Mac OS X has a life which transcends iMacs or MacBooks or Mac Minis or anything else. It is a conscious decision to say “This is the latest version of the operating system we have been shipping based on our core principles of functionality since 1984. Your Mac is designed to run this OS beautifully.”
The OS for iPhones (& iPod touches) is designed for one specific device and cannot be separated from said device. It therefore makes sense for the branding of that OS to remain inexorably linked to said device. The statement is “This OS is here to make your iPhone work. The new version will make it better.”
So, to make a long story short (too late), I don’t think the iPhone OS will use the same branding as the computer OS. It would be too confusing. Especially if the goals are different, the name should be different.
Also, the photos posted here at YML do seem to confirm some sort of different branding.
June 6th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
There’s actually two problems with the “they’re just going to recompile it with the intel compiler” conjecture. The GCC compiler is not identical to Intel’s, there are a number of GNU extensions in the GCC compile. The second problem is even bigger, even if Apple has studiously avoided GNUisms, Cocoa, and therefore most of OSX above the lowest levels, is Objective-C. Intel does not have an Objective-C compiler.
This is not to say that Apple couldn’t work with Intel and make one, or that Apple could simply stop compiling universal binaries with their existing gcc compiler. (That in itself would be a significant disk-space and thus performance improvement.) A recompile with existing Intel compilers however is not possible; unless the skunk works at Apple have been working with Intel to rewrite their compiler. (Since unlike GCC, I recall Intel’s compiler is encumbered, they couldn’t rewrite it alone…)
June 6th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Oh, by the way, if you want to see what running Leopard without Universal Binaries is like, try Xslimmer. It simply removes extraneous multi-architecture and languages from binaries, with considerable space savings. I saved 2 gigs here, and I don’t have that much software installed.
June 6th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Obviously I understand little about compilers, but is my concept plausible? Could it be that Apple has, through whatever means, an Intel-optimized compiler that can be used to improve current performance significantly with minimal code changes?
June 9th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Well, it looks like you were right about the smaller aspect of Snow Leopard. This page on Apple’s website specifically touts Snow Leopard as taking up less disk space.
It would appear from what little is said here that Apple is focusing on the smaller and faster aspect of OS X. What that’ll really mean, however, remains to be seen.
I have to say one thing, however. The new price point for the iPhone is low enough for my wife & I to consider making the leap sooner rather than later.