Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

What "OS X" might mean: the death of Windows

The Apple Blog: Spy shots show OS X without the "Mac" could clones return?

Nick Mediati speculates the the lack of the "Mac" branding in front of "OS X Leopard" means that Apple is going to let other computer makers put Leopard on their systems.

Wow.

When I said "Perhaps there are some more systems on the way that will run Leopard that won't be called Macs?" in my last post, I meant new systems/form-factors from Apple (like a tablet or ultra-portable), not systems from others.

MacRumors says the "no new features" part of the rumour for 10.6 "Snow Leopard" is because the difference between 10.5 and 10.6 is being Mac only or not... ie: 10.6 will be PC compatible, 10.5 isn't (it requires a Mac).

Let me add one more big piece of kindling to this fire that connects the dots big-time.

Snow is white. Back in the NeXT/OpenStep days, OpenStep ran on NeXT hardware, PC hardware, Sun hardware, and HP hardware. NeXT boxes were called black boxes, and Intel PCs were called white boxes. Thus, associating the Intel PC-compatible version of OS X with the colour white makes perfect sense, put into that historical context.

Does Apple think Microsoft is so weak right now because of the failure of Vista that now is the time to pounce on the PC market and absolutely kill Windows?

Does this mean Apple will be allowing Dell and Sony and HP pre-install Snow Leopard on compatible systems, or does it mean it's going to be sitting next to XP and Vista on the shelf and anyone is can take it home and try to install it?

Will Apple stick with a BootCamp-like solution for dual booting back into Windows, or will they bundle a Parallels/VMWare-like package to let users run Windows simultaneously?

Man, of all the WWDCs to decide to skip, this could turn out to be the biggest WWDC since '05 when the Intel bomb was dropped... I think this would be even bigger.

Wow. And it was only Tuesday when I told a friend of mine the story of when Apple killed the cloners when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, and then killed Rhapsody/Intel and YellowBox/NT, and that's why I didn't think his belief Apple was about to ship Cocoa for Windows would happen. We weren't thinking big enough... it's not about Cocoa this time, it's about the whole she-bang!

links for 2008-06-06

• word games: multi eight letters in search of a word
  (tags: fun game online words)

OS X Leopard? Where’s the Mac?

CrunchGear: OS X Leopard/iPhone banners appear at Moscone

Interesting to see the "OS X Leopard" branding, it's always been "Mac OS X Leopard" in the past. Perhaps there are some more systems on the way that will run Leopard that won't be called Macs?

About the Ars rumor on Mac OS X 10.6

Ars Technica: Mac OS X 10.6 code named Snow Leopard, may be pure Cocoa

It's funny how people are getting all freaked out about this rumour. Some people are saying they should release it for free since Leopard is so unstable. Given my issues with Leopard I can sympathize with that, but 'na gana happen.

Then people are worried about the "pure Cocoa" label. As Jacqui says, all it means is all of Carbon's APIs will finally be available to Cocoa programmers via Objective-C wrappers. It's about time! It doesn't mean Carbon is going away, not unless Apple wants to lose Office, Creative Suite, Quark, Firefox, and more. 'Na gana happen. Pure Cocoa might also mean Apple won't ship any more Carbon apps themselves, ie: they've ported their remaining Carbon apps over to Cocoa. This is quite plausible, it would have been an effort like this that would have helped Apple understand how to best wrap the remaining Carbon-only APIs.

As far as Intel-only goes, it's inevitable! Even if Apple kept PPC support in until 2010, they would get hammered over it, so they might as well do it now and reap the manpower savings sooner. The only PPC machines out there that are even worth using compared to current Intel systems are dual and quad PowerMac G5 towers, and G5 Xserves, and that's a pretty small percentage of the PPC systems out there.

I equate the stability issues with Leopard to Apple's resourcing issues. Remember Apple had to delay Leopard 6 months because they had reassigned developers to the iPhone. Developers good enough to work on OS X and Mac OS X don't grow on trees, there is only so much talent they can get their hands on. I think they're probably quite thin on the resource front right now because they're taking on so many platforms at the same time: Mac OS X, iPhone/iPod Touch, Apple TV. If removing PowerPC support helps free up some talented developers to work on stability issues and other serious bugs, then please do it.