See, the thing that gets me is: Why release a product that is slow that could be faster? It's not like the case of SZ where I was a novice developer and as I grew as a developer, my skills increased. Apple should really only have the best of developers (or damn good ones anyway.)

Either way, it does sound good... but were they saying it'll be 64-bit only support?

Since all current Intel Macs are capable of 64-bit, why not? And this isn't about Leopard being slow because it's not. Snow Leopard is optimizing for the future. Just a bunch of back-end stuff. Stuff you'll never notice until you realize that four or five years from now your Mac from 2007 will be running just fine with the OS and software of tomorrow. I'm especially interested in the development of Grand Central. Also, Snow Leopard will be utilizing a new file management system from Sun - ZFS. Also, Snow Leopard will be able to utilize up to 16TB of RAM. That right there tells me that Snow Leopard could be in use for a decade and never be considered outdated.

If you build it, they will come.

With the explosive rate of computer advancement, it won't stay in use for long. Just look at the development cycle over at Apple, a new version every two years. Snow Leopard will outdate just as quickly.

Chris: The issues that make 10.5 slow are memory-intensive tasks, like Time Machine's autobackups, Antivirus software, and the dashboard layer. So, in fact, this is a novice developer problem. Up until 10.5's time, widgets on the scale of dashboard weren't around, except on Linux. Autobackups were done once a day, in low-usage times. People jumped on to running all this new stuff when they saw the 64-bit multicores. The underlying infrastructure wasn't able to fully use the hardware, so it got sluggish. By looking at how people use their systems, and then giving those uses more direct pipelines to the processors and memory, Snow Leopard will probably cut down on the lag.

At least, that's what I would do.

What josh said about using the same system from many years ago is very true with apple software and hardware.

I have a Macintosh Power Mac 6500/250, from 1997. I still use it today with 10.3 installed on it, and it runs perfectly fine.

I have an iBook G4 that has been used and abused in all the worst ways. The only reason I've sent it back to apple to get fixed was because beat it like a rented mule. I've dropped it probably 80 times, I've sat on it, I've piled my text books on top of it while it was running for hours, I've spilled water/coffee/beer/energy drinks on it more times then it's worth mentioning.

The only thing that has ever been replaced in it was a screen module because it was doing some crazy flickering thing and wouldn't stop. I have apple care on it, and they took care of it, had it back to me, same week.

When 10.6 launches, I'll be updating every one of my systems possible to it.


I have a brand new copy of leopard here on my desk that I've had well before Josh left. I never even upgraded to it, because I honestly couldn't see any reason to, other then the features that everyone was drooling over.

I've decided that the first machines I'll be updating will be my workstations. The G4 Quad will get updated immediately, and I'll finally add the other 4GB of ram to it. I'll also be updating my Mac Pro.

The mini will probably stay at 10.4, but I will for sure be upgrading the iMac to 10.6 as soon as possible.

without realizing it, you've actually contradicted Josh's statement. Josh was stating that 10.6 would be used for a long time, which I doubted. I never suggested that old hardware couldn't be used for a long time. I had a technology teacher who still owns a working Apple II. Operating systems aren't like that. People continuously upgrade to the latest version when it comes out, and that's just how it is. Very few people run the OSes that debuted in the early 90's (though there are some that do).

I use computers every day that run on OS/2 still. I'm one of the people who will use a computer until absolutely won't work any more.

I thought only the server version was going to use ZFS?