Earlier this month, we reported that The Unofficial Apple Weblog's as well as Ars Technica's sources said that Apple was working on the next version of Mac OS X, dubbed Snow Leopard. The news was that the new release wouldn't focus on new features, but on performance. During yesterday's WWDC 2008 keynote, Steve Jobs confirmed this rumour, and now Apple has published a preview page.
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Member since:2007-09-03
Agreed.
And more, with the "decline" of the Windows, comparison of Leopard with Vista will surely be the done concerning speed/bloat/design (as it's already done).
Maybe MS realized that already with Windows 7 being a more polished Vista ?
Even though geeks want features they/we represent a small fraction of the whole computer selling... Average joe wants things they/we(?) can use...
Member since:2006-02-05
Leopard isn't exactly bloated, as it still manages to be a little faster than Tiger; but if your computer could operate twice as fast, just with a software upgrade - how much are you willing to deny that that would make a refreshing difference on the *day-to-day*? Less hard disk space? Faster graphics via the GPU? Better load balancing across 8+ cores (especially when your time=money)
Dude, it's not going to run twice as fast. 15% would be a huge accomplishment, probably closer to 10%.
Member since:2006-01-02
Well it's a question of what you're doing.
Likely on average the machine is going to run 0% faster because most client machine time is spent waiting on a user. But for the latency of certain actions, which is what users care about, it is indeed possible to extract huge performance gains, depending on how optimized the particular scenario is.
Also when scaling up, if you're at a cpu count where your scaling becomes poor due to lock contention, you can easily extract 50-100% gains by breaking the locks.
Member since:
2005-11-10
If Microsoft spent a whole development cycle just cutting bloat, would you buy it? I suspect many would. Removing the bloat is what people have been asking for for years, and the *day-to-day* improvements would be the reason it would be worth it.
Leopard isn't exactly bloated, as it still manages to be a little faster than Tiger; but if your computer could operate twice as fast, just with a software upgrade - how much are you willing to deny that that would make a refreshing difference on the *day-to-day*? Less hard disk space? Faster graphics via the GPU? Better load balancing across 8+ cores (especially when your time=money).
Some have labelled this as a "maintenance" release.
Spending the full engineering capacity of 1000's of developers for a whole development cycle, is not "maintenance". It's full-blooded development for the future.
Apple want the OS that matters most to regular users - "is it fast?". And we geeks can say we want features, but if anything it still boils down to the same thing, we use the computer to it's full, we want it to be fast.
I really think this will be the most interesting and exciting OS release for geeks by far. It may not seem it yet, but by the time release is near, it's going to become a real talking point.