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AppleGirl1990 · Jan 22, 2009, 09:05 AM

I now get the feeling that we aren't going to see SL for many months. Even Apple's own website still lists SL as a year away.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

slugslugslug · Jan 22, 2009, 09:34 AM

Well, yeah, last June they said "about a year". I think most people were expecting it to come out many months from now.

OreoCookie · Jan 22, 2009, 09:37 AM

I'm not sure, but it just looks like the text hasn't been updated. AFAIK it's slated for released in Q1 (which could very well slip into Q2).

64stang06 · Jan 22, 2009, 11:14 AM

It's not like 10.5 suddenly stopped working.

AppleGirl1990 · Jan 22, 2009, 05:44 PM

Well, i would assume Apple would keep it's website up-to-date. You can't just post things, keep the links alive and then forget about them.

Big Mac · Jan 22, 2009, 06:15 PM

Yeah, not necessarily. Things get updated when there's something to update them with.

slugslugslug · Jan 22, 2009, 07:34 PM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

I'm not sure, but it just looks like the text hasn't been updated. AFAIK it's slated for released in Q1 (which could very well slip into Q2).

You didn't hear the Q1 in any official context, though, did you? AFAIK, the only on-the-record mention of a release timeframe was "about a year" at WWDC. I seem to recall some mumblings about how it would be early, but via rumor sites who weren't making a big deal out of it. I didn't read anything into them, since there were persistent rumors of Leopard arriving early, and we know how that turned out.

larkost · Jan 22, 2009, 07:55 PM

All you have to do is to look at the lack of rumors about repeated developer seeding. When Apple gets ready to release something big they often up the tempo of developer seeding for a while before. Has anyone even heard of a seeding recently?

The rest of the "early release" rumors are just wishful thinking.

OreoCookie · Jan 23, 2009, 07:30 AM

Originally Posted by slugslugslug

You didn't hear the Q1 in any official context, though, did you?

Yes, it was on macrumors. Jordan Hubbard, in charge of Unix technologies at Apple, made a presentation on OS X. On one of the slides, he mentioned that the time frame for release was Q1 2009. I assume he means `real life quarters' not fiscal quarters (otherwise it should be released very soon).

I wouldn't read too much into that, I wouldn't be surprised if it is released in September or October and a demo at the WWDC.

AppleGirl1990 · Jan 23, 2009, 08:59 AM

September or October? That's a terrible thing to say.
I'm sitting on top of a powerful machine and i want my cores enabled!

OreoCookie · Jan 23, 2009, 09:26 AM

I doubt a quick release of Snow Leopard will change that immediately. I think we need to wait for applications to take advantage of that. I very much doubt Adobe will be at the forefront here (for the sake of cross-platform compatibility), but it'd be nice to see apps like Final Cut or Aperture take better advantage of all the raw power.

I'm also not sure how Apple is going to market Snow Leopard: from the screenshots and videos that have been floating around the web, it is clear that not much has changed. (I think I've also seen screenshots from newer builds, but I'm too lazy to look for them.) As a matter of fact, if nobody told you it was Snow Leopard, I doubt people would even notice the difference.

On the other hand, there have been rumors floating around that Apple will overhaul the UI and replace Aqua by `Marble.' Perhaps that's why they didn't want to show anything from Snow Leopard up until now …

CharlesS · Jan 23, 2009, 11:38 PM

The whole point of Snow Leopard is supposed to be speed and stability, so rushing it to market would appear to be a dramatically stupid idea.

EndlessMac · Jan 24, 2009, 03:36 AM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

The whole point of Snow Leopard is supposed to be speed and stability, so rushing it to market would appear to be a dramatically stupid idea.

I agree. If Snow Leopard was officially released with major bugs then I would be very disappointed. Snow Leopard is a refinement upgrade of Leopard and it would not make any sense if Apple released it before they thought it was ready.

I'm in no rush to upgrade and would rather Apple perfect the OS before officially releasing it. Fast releases between OS are money makers for Apple and appeases fanatic Apple fans who get bored if their OS is two days old.

For the rest of us, I think we would rather have a stress-free upgrade to a better OS even if it takes longer.

AppleGirl1990 · Jan 24, 2009, 07:37 AM

I agree with what you're saying. I have a PC at work and it locks up 10 times a day (not kidding).
Stability and Speed make Apple a better platform.

With that said, hurry up and release it.

Salty · Feb 2, 2009, 11:36 AM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

September or October? That's a terrible thing to say.
I'm sitting on top of a powerful machine and i want my cores enabled!

Uhh, your Cores are enabled. There will be some enhancements in Snow Leopard for sure, but I kinda wonder what exactly do you use your Mac Pro for, cause I kinda wonder if you're going to even notice the improvements on a machine as already painfully fast as yours.

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 2, 2009, 11:12 PM

I recognize that my machine is the fastest available, but even so....the new Face technology in iPhoto turns my mac into a slow, jolty mess.

If it's bad for me, that means its terrible for others.
We need more speed.

64stang06 · Feb 2, 2009, 11:17 PM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

I recognize that my machine is the fastest available, but even so....the new Face technology in iPhoto turns my mac into a slow, jolty mess.

If it's bad for me, that means its terrible for others.
We need more speed.

I have a Mac mini core solo (1.5Ghz) and the faces feature in iPhoto isn't terrible at all. I realize that I only have 10,000 photos (give or take), but I think that with that many pics along with the processor speed that it does the job fairly well.

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 3, 2009, 12:03 AM

Mine "isn't terrible" either, but i guess i expect a higher standard from apple.

MindFad · Feb 3, 2009, 04:51 AM

iPhoto Face recognition is supposed to be hella snappy in Snow Leopard on dual independent frontside buses.

Hella.

Big Mac · Feb 3, 2009, 05:00 AM

Haha. It must be disconcerting for anything not to be hella snappy on that level of hardware.

Spheric Harlot · Feb 3, 2009, 05:49 AM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

I recognize that my machine is the fastest available, but even so....the new Face technology in iPhoto turns my mac into a slow, jolty mess.

If it's bad for me, that means its terrible for others.
We need more speed.

Considering that the iPhoto face recognition is slow as molasses for pretty much everyone, what makes you think this can be approached by updating the OPERATING system, rather than the badly optimized code in iPhoto?

Catfish_Man · Feb 3, 2009, 01:29 PM

Indeed. Most performance problems I've run into in apps that I work on have been easily pinned down as problems in my code, not problems in the system. There have been a few exceptions though (Adium uses a custom preferences system because NSUserDefaults was far too slow, for example).

larkost · Feb 3, 2009, 01:36 PM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

Considering that the iPhoto face recognition is slow as molasses for pretty much everyone, what makes you think this can be approached by updating the OPERATING system, rather than the badly optimized code in iPhoto?

Or maybe facial recognition is just compute-intensive task? Image processing in general is one of the more difficult tasks, and finding a face from the bits with any sort of accuracy probably requires that a collection of algorithms be applied to the image. It could be that that just takes a lot of processor time.

turtle777 · Feb 3, 2009, 02:38 PM

I don't know what everyone is talking about.

My iPhoto initially indexed over night, since then, it's all snappy. I don't get any sluggishness from Face Recognition. I'm on a recent 24" iMac with 2.4 GHz.

What am I doing wrong ?

-t

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 3, 2009, 02:56 PM

The sluggishness only happens when you click on the Faces or Places button.
Once it loads, it's fine.
It's the sluggy loading that we are all complaining about.

Salty · Feb 3, 2009, 03:06 PM

are you beach balling? Honestly while I don't have a bajillion photos, I really didn't notice any problems with Faces on my 2Ghz Core Duo...

AppleGirl1990 · Feb 21, 2009, 06:51 PM

Back to the main topic. SL.

When will we see Snow Leopard?

turtle777 · Feb 21, 2009, 08:54 PM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

Back to the main topic. SL.

When will we see Snow Leopard?

Don't know, but I won't be buying my next Macbook until SL is out.

-t

Gankdawg · Feb 22, 2009, 12:53 PM

I'm waiting to see if Apple releases a SL/iLife/iWork package before I buy. I'm holding off on iLife now.

freudling · Feb 25, 2009, 02:35 PM

I think Snow Leopard is the release we have all been waiting for. Every release of OS X has been faster, and about as stable as previous releases. With Leopard, they threw a lot of gui enhancements in, as well as features, and it is kinda bloated. Still a great system, and I would never go back to Tiger, but I get spinning beachballs and sluggishness sometimes. The Finder is not that responsive, for instance. It is generally more buggy than Tiger.

But since I have been using Safari Beta 4, a 64 bit cocoa app, I think that Snow Leopard is going to be super fast, because Safari Beta 4 is so much faster and responsive than the previous releases, and Apple is moving pretty much all of their apps to cocoa, 64-bit, as well as the OS going over to 64-bit all the way into the kernel. So everything is going to be much faster... full 64 bit processing, smaller footprints on apps, cocoa apps much more responsive...

Spheric Harlot · Feb 25, 2009, 03:21 PM

Originally Posted by freudling

But since I have been using Safari Beta 4, a 64 bit cocoa app, I think that Snow Leopard is going to be super fast, because Safari Beta 4 is so much faster and responsive than the previous releases, and Apple is moving pretty much all of their apps to cocoa, 64-bit, as well as the OS going over to 64-bit all the way into the kernel. So everything is going to be much faster... full 64 bit processing, smaller footprints on apps, cocoa apps much more responsive...

*sigh*

64-bit doesn't necessarily mean faster...in some circumstances, it can actually mean slower.

Safari 4 is faster, but that has NOTHING to do with 64 bits.

Chuckit · Feb 25, 2009, 03:47 PM

Yeah, 64-bit isn't a magic speed potion. It actually means the computer has to do more work pushing extra data around that aren't even needed most of the time.

P · Feb 25, 2009, 06:20 PM

Moving x86 code to 64 bits actually does increase speed by as much as 10% on some code. The reason is that the x64 instruction set doubles the number of addressable registers, so you're relying less on the imperfect prediction skills of the CPU renaming facility.

The downside is that you tend to use up the cache quicker. This is also the reason why moving to 64-bit code on a G5 is a wash or slight slowdown in most cases, as the PPC ISA is not nearly as register-starved as x86.

CharlesS · Feb 25, 2009, 08:05 PM

Also, 64-bit Cocoa apps get a new runtime, although I'm not sure whether that has any effect on performance or not.

P · Feb 26, 2009, 07:26 AM

Hmm, does that mean that they've fixed the ABI issue on PPCs? That would add a few percent of performance on PPCs as well - if Snow Leopard ever comes for PPC.

Spheric Harlot · Feb 26, 2009, 10:19 AM

It won't.

Chuckit · Feb 26, 2009, 11:56 AM

Originally Posted by P

Moving x86 code to 64 bits actually does increase speed by as much as 10% on some code. The reason is that the x64 instruction set doubles the number of addressable registers, so you're relying less on the imperfect prediction skills of the CPU renaming facility.

…and the extra data it has to deal with effectively cancels that out on average.

Originally Posted by P

Hmm, does that mean that they've fixed the ABI issue on PPCs? That would add a few percent of performance on PPCs as well - if Snow Leopard ever comes for PPC.

The Cocoa runtime isn't an ABI. I'm not familiar enough with Mach-O to comment on it, but they're definitely not the same thing. I haven't heard that the 64-bit Cocoa runtime is any faster — the overall effect is, it solves some of the design problems with the old one and is currently a lot buggier since it's new.

P · Feb 26, 2009, 12:02 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

The Cocoa runtime isn't an ABI.

I know. The 32-bit PPC ABI is borked on OS X (due to the speed of porting it from x86), but the 64-bit ABI may very well be designed more expertly for the job. I don't know that it is, but it seems logical.

Big Mac · Feb 26, 2009, 12:16 PM

Really - the 32-bit PPC ABI is screwed up from the early days of OS X and was never fixed in all those years? How could that be possible?

Chuckit · Feb 26, 2009, 02:26 PM

Because changing Mach-O after OS X had been out for a while would have been troublesome as well and I guess Apple didn't think it was worth it for the marginal speed-up, choosing instead to speed up the system in other areas.

P · Feb 27, 2009, 01:39 PM

Sort of. OK, let me explain a little further: The ABI in the PPC version of OS X is based directly off x86 model. There is a very good reason for that - if Apple had made a change to it, they would have had to redo their entire development tool chain before any useful work on PPC OS X could have been completed. Having the Openstep crew twiddling their thumbs for 3 months, or doing a new Openstep release, or training them to be OS 8 developers, would not have been productive use of their time - nor would unnecessary bugs stemming from an untested compiler-linker have helped development. Apple was on a tight schedule and decided to eat the performance loss to get the OS released sooner.

Having released 10.0 and 10.1, Apple was now in a tight spot again. They could of course change the model with 10.2 or 10.3, but what to do with all the old apps? Telling their ISVs to just recompile would have been a disaster. They could have made a bridge solution, but that would have slowed all apps using the old model even further before the recompile came down the line, and you all know that MS and Adobe wouldn't have delivered a recompiled app until the next major (paid) update rolled around. And how to handle third-party libraries that used the old model? Or do you need two copies of each library for the forseeable future?

So they sat tight. With 20-20 hindsight, this was of course a major hint that they were waiting for something to take this big problem off their hands. Silly me for thinking that it was the 64-bit transition.

TheoCryst · Feb 28, 2009, 08:41 PM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

Safari 4 is faster, but that has NOTHING to do with 64 bits.

Umm... that's also true because the Safari 4 Beta is a 32-bit app.

AppleGirl1990 · Mar 1, 2009, 09:20 AM

For some reason i now have the desire to eat warm cookies...

turtle777 · Mar 1, 2009, 11:35 AM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

For some reason i now have the desire to eat warm cookies...

You better be glad I don't have the naked mole rat in my sig anymore

-t

AppleGirl1990 · 08:31 AM

A little birdie told me that June 9th is the expected release date for SL.

turtle777 · Mar 11, 2009, 10:32 AM

Well, I call it teh intarwebs, but if "little birdie" works for you...

-t

angelmb · Mar 11, 2009, 10:34 AM

Does the little birdie twitter?

AppleGirl1990 · Mar 11, 2009, 01:41 PM

No twittering going on.

Interestingly, i just read an article online which says SL may be delayed until the Fall. But i have high confidence in my source, so i'm sticking with June 9th.

64stang06 · Mar 11, 2009, 02:31 PM

Originally Posted by AppleGirl1990

No twittering going on.

Interestingly, i just read an article online which says SL may be delayed until the Fall. But i have high confidence in my source, so i'm sticking with June 9th.

Is that the same source that said we'd see a demo of Snow Leopard at Macworld this year?

AppleGirl1990 · Mar 11, 2009, 04:56 PM

SL was suppose to be demo'd. For whatever reason, it ended up on the back burner. I can't blame my 'source' if things doing go according to plan 100% of the time.

Plus, i think Apple puts out false info to throw everyone off.