The buzz revolves around speculations and rumours that Apple may be releasing a new version of OS X to developers at this year’s WWDC. The discovery of a symlink in WebKit nightlies, as well as TUAW’s report today about 10.6, fuel the fire, and our combined desire and curiosity to see what Cupertino can come up with is strong. Except for Leopard, other versions of OS X came at about a year difference, so the timing would not be too surprising. What is surprising are some of the details of “Snow Leopard”1:
- No new major features
- Intel-only
- Pure Cocoa
I doubt it. Sure, the developer seed might be Leopardesque in feel, as most of the hard work goes into the underpinnings of the OS at this stage in the development cycle. I just do not see Apple releasing a 10.5.4 update as an operating system, completely devoid of new features, and for-pay. To further Duane Storey’s thoughts, I think it would make Apple look even more like Microsoft, vis-à-vis business practices, and even though Cupertino is big on customer lock-in, they have managed to offer sufficiently many good things that make that lock-in an acceptable trade-off. We are not all fanboys and the RDF is not a magic veil that makes us completely blind to things like these.
The Intel-only situation is something that, yes, will happen at some point. It seems to be a bit fast, but if Apple’s numbers indicate a lot of users have moved to Intel, by all means. I do not want Apple to suffer from the issues that ensuring backwards compatibility brings — Microsoft can have all of that. It would be hard to drop support for an entire platform with just a revision update (say, 10.5.4) so, 10.6 would give Apple that opportunity. I know many will be angry and annoyed — a lot of professional shops use high-end G5 rigs that are quite up to their needs — but everybody knew, the day Intel was announced, that this day would come. If it comes 3 years later (by the time that 10.6 would actually be released) I think there should not be too much uproar.
Cocoa only? Sure, why not. Most indie developers are Cocoa anyway as far as I can tell and Carbon is, at this point, an old and inadequate framework. I am sure somebody, somewhere will contradict me, so please enlighten me.
I am eager to see what happens at WWDC and how the AppStore launch goes. And I don’t mind not getting 10.6 soon. I would much rather have Apple work on Leopard and make it stable, then turn around and bring us something cool in 10.6, whenever that happens. There is still some time before Windows 7 turns up.
- Not yet an Apple official codename [↩]
