

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on Aug. 28th) - mrduncan
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MAC_OS_X_SNGL?mco=NzgxMDc3NA

======
snprbob86
Even in marketting copy, Apple's design taste is unrivaled:

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/>

<http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/>

I mean seriously, how many levels of tabs are too many?

[http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/whats-
ne...](http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/whats-new.aspx)

~~~
unalone
Apple's marketing is an added feature. I get a lot of joy looking through
their ad copy, in a way that I get out of very few marketing departments'.

I always wonder why Microsoft is so bad at advertising. They're _not_ a stupid
company. They create products that are nearly always good, if rarely (in my
opinion) great. But they've never shown any sort of strength-of-focus and they
make things that are ugly. I don't get it. In cases like this, it's easier to
make something that's stark and simple than it is to make something cluttered
and unappealing.

~~~
wmeredith
The difference you're seeing is design that's driven by an individual with a
single strong voice versus a committee. For clarification, I'm saying that
Steve Jobs designed this web page, but whoever did was someone with the
authority and the balls to say, "no" over and over to many different people.
Those Windows 7 pages reek of too many cooks in the kitchen and/or lack of
leadership.

~~~
snprbob86
This rings truer than ever:

<http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html>

------
cpr
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/> for all those who claims it's just
a service pack.

But, as I said elsewhere, the major improvements are under the hood.

~~~
johns
As a non Mac OS user, that link just reinforces to me that it looks like just
a service pack. But at $29, I don't think it matters. If it were $129, that
would be ridiculous.

~~~
cpr
Whoops--I didn't realize that all the changes weren't under that one link. You
have to look at all four:

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/>

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/>

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/universal-access/>

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/exchange/>

------
dny
The first OS and computer that is fully accessible out of the box.
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/universal-access/>

I can't believe it has been considered important enough to be one of the major
features of Snow Leopard, I am so happy for the blind and visually impaired.
They did it with the new iPhone the first commercialized accessible
touchscreen and they are doing it again with the new Mac OS. Apple is the most
innovative tech company there is no doubt about it.

------
sant0sk1
Nice to see Apple shipping before their publicized time frame (September). A
rarity.

~~~
prakash
The other way to look at this is that Apple gave themselves plenty of buffer
to ship.

~~~
raganwald
True, but unlike practically everyone else they didn't allow their work to fit
the expanded time available. Everyone builds in buffers and pads their
estimates, but few people are able to work to their original true estimate.

~~~
JeremyChase
OpenBSD has done it 26 times in a row:

[http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/16/2322203/Why-
OpenBSDs...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/16/2322203/Why-OpenBSDs-
Release-Process-Works)

PS: This article was written before 4.6 has was minted; it will actually be
released a full month early.

~~~
dylanz
I wish other companies would follow OpenBSD, in regard to releases, package
management, etc. Their community is awesome. Abrasive at times... but awesome
;)

------
siculars
just ordered the family box set. better deal, imho.

<http://store.apple.com/us/product/MACBOX-101801> click the family pack
option...

Also, there is no difference in price when purchasing under the education
store, afaik.

~~~
bcl
I really like the Apple Family pack pricing. I almost never buy a single copy
anymore.

------
far33d
Can someone give a quick non-marketing-speak version of what Grand Central
Dispatch really does?

~~~
Hoff
GCD is an updated and up-rated scheduler for Mac OS X.

The following does contain marketeering, but also has some decent technical
details:

[http://images.apple.com/macosx/technology/docs/GrandCentral_...](http://images.apple.com/macosx/technology/docs/GrandCentral_TB_brief_20090608.pdf)

~~~
scott_s
While I'm sure the scheduler had to be changed to accommodate it, it's not
primarily a new scheduler. It's really a sophisticated thread pool system
implemented in the kernel and exposed to programmers through language
extensions.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_pool_pattern> for the basics on the
idea - which has been around for a long time.

~~~
far33d
Thanks - this makes more sense. Just a scheduler wouldn't explain how "With
GCD, threads are handled by the operating system, not by individual
applications. GCD-enabled programs can automatically distribute their work
across all available cores, resulting in the best possible performance whether
they’re running on a dual-core Mac mini, an 8-core Mac Pro, or anything in
between."

~~~
ajross
Yeah, that sounds about right. It's a thread API that relies on applications
providing "blocks" of work to the OS, and transferring their arguments and
results around in message queues. So if you have five applications running,
each of which has 8 threads to handle the needed parallelism on a Nehalem box,
you don't need 40 separate threads and their stacks. The OS just spawns 8
threads.

That sounds OK, if kinda unexciting. I'd like to see some benchmarks vs.
traditional threading before I commit to liking it. History is littered with
cute new IPC mechanisms that didn't turn out to have the benefits promised.
This sounds a lot like a combination of sysv message queues and solaris doors,
neither of which managed to drive much real innovation.

~~~
scott_s
The thread pool approach allows you to exploit much finer grain parallelism
than explicitly fork/joining your own threads. So, an application that makes
good use of this would probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of discrete
work tasks (which I normally call "units of work," but Apple calls "blocks.")

What a thread pool infrastructure buys us is the separation of tasks (the
bundle of information passed around the queues) from their execution context
(in this case, a kernel thread). It puts a level of abstraction between _what_
is executed and _how_ that's executed.

At the risk of belaboring a point, this is an old idea - this _is_ traditional
multithreading. Java has a library for doing it, as does C++ (in Boost). A
library for this kind of parallelism was, in fact, the _first_ C++ library,
written by Stroustrup. Even the Linux kernel uses this technique internally
(by which I mean it's not exposed to applications at the user level). Cilk
(the MIT project that spawned the company Cilk Arts which was recently
acquired by Intel) is probably the best known example of providing language-
level abstractions for this technique. (I reccomend their paper "The
Implemention of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language":
<http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf>)

By pointing out that this is an old idea, I don't mean to denigrate what Apple
has done. Execution matters, and from the looks of it, they've executed this
well - they've got something working at the language and kernel level, which
is non-trivial.

------
rbanffy
I am quite surprised no other operating system has something like GCD. Is that
MarketingSpeak or is it really something new?

~~~
prospero
.NET has had runtime-wide thread pools since its inception. Unless there's
something fundamental about GCD that I'm missing, that puts Windows at least 7
years ahead of OSX on this count.

~~~
rbanffy
Well... Java had them (in almost every OS it ran on) since day 1 too. That
puts it a couple years ahead of .NET

~~~
pohl
I think the point of GCD is that the concept is being brought down to the C,
C++, and Objective-C layers, through the introduction of "blocks"...

[http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-
qa-2008-12-26.htm...](http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-
qa-2008-12-26.html)

[http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-
qa-2009-08-14-pra...](http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-
qa-2009-08-14-practical-blocks.html)

I agree there's too much marketing hype surrounding GCD, but neither the CLR
nor the JVM can jump through that particular hoop.

~~~
rbanffy
It's interesting. For the little I have seen (and I was only able to give it a
quick glance) it includes syntactic support for multi-threading being built
into their Objective-C compiler.

Are they forking the Objective-C compiler?

~~~
wmf
Apple has been shipping forks of GCC forever. In the future they won't have to
fork clang because they own it.

------
feverishaaron
Anyone know how those of us who bought an mac recently get it for $10? I
didn't see a link on that page.

~~~
mwijns
It seems so:

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/>

~~~
feverishaaron
FYI, as of right now, they aren't passing the info from the verification
screen to the cart correctly, so you have to use the fax-in form.

[http://images.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/docs/OSX_HW_UTD_FF.p...](http://images.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/docs/OSX_HW_UTD_FF.pdf)

~~~
bittersweet
I am having the same problem on the European (Dutch) store as well when I
followed the link to computers bought on the Apple store itself.

When I follow the link for computers bought via a reseller it works without a
problem.

------
kasterma
Requires: Mac computer with an Intel processor. No upgrade for my 12"
powerbook. :-(

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html>

~~~
philfreo
I think the removal of PowerPC support is why the OS is now something like 6
or 7GB smaller than before.

~~~
Zev
But it then adds in x86_64 support, which brings the size back up. The smaller
files are likely to be from not installing all the resources (localizations,
drivers, etc) at once if not needed.

~~~
imajes
it no longer ships with printer drivers i think - these are now supported by
the software update mechanism that keeps os x up to date.

------
FiveFiftyOne
I'll get it and pray that the Exchange integration makes using Mail and iCal a
little smoother. Besides, I just like upgrading to new releases :-)

~~~
cubicle67
Note: Exchange 2007 only

------
mdasen
May I ask how it is "now available"? From the site, it says that it will be
delivered Friday. Did Apple not update the page this links to? Is this an
"it's available for purchase now for delivery later" post that the headline is
misleading me on?

~~~
mrduncan
Fair point, I've updated the headline to reflect the delivery date.

------
donw
Anybody know if you can install this on a clean hard drive? I've got Leopard
on my MacBook, but want to swap out the existing drive and start fresh on a
new SSD. Would be nice to not have to do a Leopard -> Snow Leopard dance.

~~~
potatolicious
Apple doesn't do "upgrades" - if you bought a retail copy it will install
fresh on any Intel Mac.

~~~
dchest
Technically, it does (cheap upgrade copy of Tiger for those, who purchased Mac
with Panther after the announcement of Tiger, required Panther). Still, I
believe it's true that you can do a fresh install.

------
m_eiman
What's with the query string on the link, is that an affiliate identifier? The
link works just fine without it, in either case.

~~~
mrduncan
No, not an affiliate id I simply copied the url straight out of my address bar
- I'm guessing it's a session id or something.

Here is the id-less link for anyone who doesn't believe me (I can't change the
url of the post unfortunately):
<http://store.apple.com/us/product/MAC_OS_X_SNGL>

~~~
natrius
If it were an affiliate ID, I don't see why it would matter.

------
jamesbritt
Does anyone know if installing Snow Leopard requires the user to agree to
allow Apple to collect unspecified user data?

------
uggedal
What about those stuck on Tiger (my gf)? Buy Leopard and Snow Leopard update
or buy a full version?

~~~
stuff4ben
I'm still on Tiger and I'm probably not going to upgrade. I have a first-gen
"lapburner" MBP which works just fine. Leopard didn't really offer anything
ground breaking and it doesn't appear Snow Leopard will either. And I figure
anything ground-breaking will require newer hardware, so I guess I'll stay on
Tiger until the machine stops working. Which coincidentally is also why XP
users don't upgrade either.

~~~
dasil003
Time machine alone was worth the price of admission. There were also some good
unix upgrades in there if that sort of thing carries any weight with you.

~~~
stuff4ben
What Unix upgrades?

~~~
cubicle67
Leopard was the first version of OSX (actually, first BSD based OS) to receive
UNIX 03 certification

<http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3555.htm>

~~~
rbanffy
That's not exactly a good reason to upgrade by itself.

It could be if you were required by some regulation to use a UNIX certified
OS. IIRC, there were little feature changes that warranted the certification.

As for myself, I have an older iMac that won't run SL, a netbook that runs
Linux and I am perfectly happy with both.

------
plainspace
here is a link to the 09 wwdc presentation. you can skip to the 10.6 section:

[http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0906paowdnv/event/inde...](http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0906paowdnv/event/index.html?internal=ijalrmacu)

------
jpcx01
Holy shit. Early chrismas!

------
sho
You might want to hold off a little while before upgrading, at least until
10.6.1. I upgraded my laptop 3 days ago and since then I've had at least 5
Mail.app crashes, finder a couple of times, and one terminal crash. I did an
upgrade install, maybe a clean one is better, but I'm pretty surprised at the
instability.

Also, if you use Macports, that's not up to speed yet so you'll be doing a lot
of fiddling around to get that working. For example, I had to patch the port
for Erlang to get that to install on 10.6, there's probably others. Wait a few
weeks and that should all be sorted out for you.

~~~
tvon
I've been using it for a week on a 1st gen MBP (32 bit) and haven't had any
crashes.

I don't use Erlang, but I have a lot of packages from MacPorts (mysql5,
mercurial, git, svn, xorg, perl5 and python26 ) installed without any
problems. The only thing I've tried to build that failed is screen.

I did a clean install, so that may be the difference maker.

~~~
sho
This is a 64bit MBP so that is another difference.

Yeah, all of those installed without an issue for me too. Of course, you also
had to build macports itself from source, since there is no binary yet.

------
kasterma
Requires: Mac computer with an Intel processor. No upgrade for my 12"
powerbook. :-(

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html>

------
mseebach
Hmm, not exactly convincing. Leopard brought stuff like time machine, this
smells more like a big service pack. I mean, OpenCL and some of the central
applications running 64-bit? Better Quicktime and a new Safari? I don't even
use QT and Safari.

And it's $29? Too little to be too much, but still a lot for a service pack.

~~~
yardie
Did you even read link?

Here <http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/> are the new features that went
into this release. And your comment doesn't even make sense, first you say
it's a service pack than you rattle off a short list of new and upgraded
items. These things do cost money to develop. And I'm pretty sure $29 barely
covers the cost of it. I don't remember anything new being in Windows when a
SP rolled out except a new browser. (There was the uPNP browser that popped up
in SP2 I believe)

~~~
mseebach
Every other "system update" reboot I've made for the past 20 months seems to
have included an update to QuickTime and Safari -- both of which, by the way,
are available as free downloads -- and the prominent featuring of those two
products as a component of a whole new version of an OS makes it feel like a
service pack.

~~~
nudded
> and the prominent featuring of those two products as a component of a whole
> new version of an OS makes it feel like a service pack.

point me to a page that only displays those 2 updates as the main features. In
my browser Apple is clearly marketing the 64-bit, Grand Central Dispatch and
OpenCL as the main reasons to upgrade.

Also stop referring to an OS upgrade as a service pack. Because it isn't.
Microsoft releases service packs, just like Apple releases minor updates to
their OS, (eg. 10.5.7)

~~~
thras
_Also stop referring to an OS upgrade as a service pack. Because it isn't._

Well, that convinced me!

~~~
unalone
Thras, I'll ask you this completely sincerely, because I don't and never have
understood this. Why do you, and people like you, get off from reading a
lengthy debate on a topic online, and ignoring every point except the one
that's not a point, then snarking about it? It's not just you: A lot of people
do it, and it baffles me. I always really enjoy being told why my opinion on
something is wrong, and these snarky responses don't seem to prove anything.

~~~
thras
You more or less said that the grandparent was wrong "just because." You were
telling someone that he was wrong without any argument. Exactly what you
complained about with me, btw.

The only possible response to that sort of thing is snark.

~~~
nixme
> The only possible response to that sort of thing is snark.

Uh.. no it's not. You could respond like you just did now and explain that
they "were telling someone that he was wrong without any argument."

~~~
thras
Yeah. But that's slumming it when I explain things for the dimwits. I felt
dirty afterward.

