Mac OS X 10.6 - Snow Leopard - Resources, Info, and Commentary

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Having been waiting for the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release, I'm happy to say I'm running it now with no real problems. I have included some discussion about both the OS and the coverage below. Here, I am mainly focused on features, expectations/perception, and transitions in the new version.




Scope of Update vs. a Service Pack

A number of web pundits are making noise arguing somewhat derisively that Snow Leopard is more of a "service pack" than a full version upgrade. Personally, I'm a bit surprised by this. The underlying improvements are so significant (see below: 64-bit, OpenCL, and Grand Central), that I do not understand this point of view.

In fact, I believe two factors are at play here: 1) Apple is experiencing some backlash, and it has become fashionable to be down on Apple, and 2) Software manufacturers have been correct in including numerous UI changes and features, because that is what these pundits seem to focus on.

Snow Leopard Compatibility: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Compatibility List

Image via Wikipedia

Snow Leopard Compatibility: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Compatibility List

Get ready for Snow Leopard. Check out your apps for compatibility here.

Apple's QuickTime X, Grand Central, OpenCL, and LLVM

Apple's recent publicized patents (link1, link2) and their own pronouncements for Snow Leopard all point toward an exciting combination of technologies. I believe Snow Leopard's QuickTime X will be built on OpenCL which will use LLVM (project, WikiPedia) for general purpose processing in a manner parallel to how Apple already uses LLVM to enhance OpenGL under Mac OS X.

LLVM and OpenCL will allow developers to hand off code and a profile to OS X (probably via Grand Central), and the operating system will find the best way to deal with the request. OpenCL provides the necessary abstraction and LLVM will provide the JIT compiling once the target hardware is determined. This gives the OS a chance to make decisions based on a variety of factors including power usage, other pending requests, realtime/video/audio , CPU/GPU scheduling, and hardware availability.

This makes it easy for developers to take advantage of whatever hardware is available in a particular Mac now or in the future to accelerate processor intensive functions. In addition, it allows the OS and application to handle a variety of situations (e.g. battery vs. power or realtime vs. non-realtime needs).

QuickTime X (along with other frameworks such as Core Animation) will likely take advantage of this to avoid the need to have different plug-ins for different hardware. Mac OS X will handle the processing needs taking best advantage of the available hardware while simplifying QuickTime itself.

This will continue two of Apple's goals:

1. Giving it's developers an easy way to code complex applications
2. Providing an available alternative to proprietary frameworks such as DirectX

Apple realized they were vulnerable, if proprietary frameworks took hold and either were not available on the Mac (Direct X) or were available only in a low quality manner (Flash). In recent times, Apple has supported open standards such as MPEG-4/H.264, AAC, and Open GL in an effort to fend off Windows Media and Direct X.

I believe Apple has foreseen the importance of harnessing the power of GPU's and multiple CPU's and does not want to fall victim to a Windows-only standard in this area, so they have created and pushed the OpenCL standard to prevent this. If OpenCL can take hold as a cross platform standard, it is much less likely a proprietary solution will take hold.

Apple is more than happy to compete on price and quality, but they are at a disadvantage if there are certain frameworks or standards that are simply not available on the Mac. By being in the forefront of this important area allows them to continue their present growth without concern of being shut out of this vital area of processing power.

Apple's New MacBooks and MacBook Pros: Analysis and Opinion

Just in case you've been living in a proverbial cave, Apple introduced new consumer and professional laptops today. Here are a few areas I thought were interesting.

Unibody Construction

The most obvious thing about the new laptops is the new "brick" design, where the main "exoskeleton" of the laptop is machined from a solid block of aluminum. Where all other laptops (including previous models of MacBook Pro) are built with a skin of plastic or metal covering an internal structural skeleton, these new designs eschew the thin exterior with internal bracing in favor of a strong exterior holding all the parts together. I expect these new laptops feel like solid devices and will avoid most or all of the creaks and flexing that make traditionally designed and built laptops feel cheap and fragile. In addition, all the aluminum holding everything together should act a bit like a large heat sink helping to remove heat from the laptop's interior.

Multiple GPU's in the MacBook Pro

While the MacBook receives a massive upgrade in the form of integrated nVidia graphics (GeForce 9400M), the MacBook Pro received the integrated graphics AND discrete graphics (GeForce 9600M GT) with additional processing power. The really nifty part here is hybrid SLI, which allows the MBP to decide which GPU to use based on energy requirements and processing demands.

Presently, it appears you must log out to affect this change (I assume the Window Server must be restarted). But I think the more interesting question is whether both GPU's will be available concurrently for use my OpenCL and Grand Central under Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6. If so, that would represent a massive amount of processing power available in a laptop.

If Apple continues to rewrite many of the processor-intensive frameworks such as Core Animation, QuickTime, video compression codecs, and others to take advantage of this power, it will allow for a real change in what is possible in software. All this processing power can make new heavily animated UI features possible and dramatically reduce encoding, decoding, and transcoding time for all forms of media.

The especially nice thing about Apple's Mac OS X architecture and hardware integration is simple: if this kind of power is available in many new Mac's and it is built into the Snow Leopard core frameworks, all these benefits are "free" to the programmer and the consumer. Even old software could benefit from improvements in QuickTime and the frameworks.

Blu-ray and DRM

Contrary to rumor, Blu-ray drives were not included in the new laptops. Some people found this surprising, but I don't understand why. Steve Jobs said Blu-ray was a "bag of hurt" and that it did not make sense to inflict the licensing on consumers presently.

I think there are a few reasons why Apple is not including Blu-ray drives even as options at this point:

1) As in the market in general, the improved video quality is nice but not compelling. The slow uptake in Blu-ray is because upconverted DVD's look very good. The improvement from VHS to DVD was HUGE in both quality and convenience, and there is significant improvement from DVD to Blu-ray, but it is not of the same scale in quality and there is no improvement in convenience.

2) Apple makes money directly and indirectly through video downloads, and HD video downloads are just beginning to pick up steam. Blu-ray is the only remaining competitor to HD downloads in general, and Apple will never make big money on Blu-ray.

In addition, it seems clear that physical delivery will continue to lose sales to downloads and may eventually disappear entirely. Why I like the idea of owning a physical piece of media that cannot be taken from me, the copyright holders would like to have more control. They will continue to push for downloads and streams where they have tight control.

3) And that brings us to the final and perhaps biggest reason: I believe the copyright holders and Blu-ray licensing may force Apple to include large amounts of DRM controls to protect the content from Blu-ray discs much like Microsoft did in Vista with such "wonderful" results. The copyright holders never want to see a repeat of the situation with DVD's, where the encryption was broken and they lost control of the content stored in that format. I would be shocked if they allowed Apple to include Blu-ray video playback without ensuring that there was no way to every get the video into another format, and this may force Apple to make compromises they would rather not make.

FireWire

I find it depressing to see another example of a better technology (FireWire) losing out to a lesser technology (USB). After recently removing FireWire from various iPods, Apple has now released a MacBook that also does not include FireWire. Where I like the less CPU-dependent features of FireWire, the writing has been on the wall for some time.

FireWire has always been a good hard drive connection technology, but much of it's success has been in delivery DV video. With the increasing popularity of MPEG4 H.264 and flash-based video cameras, there is less and less need for FireWire. With no compelling reason to include it over USB (which is good-enough for many things), it will likely disappear as a viable technology over the next few years.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Unless you've been living under a rock the last few days, you probably know Apple just (briefly) announced the next version of OS X, calling it 10.6 Snow Leopard.

In a break with past releases and announcements, they have said they are not focusing on "features". The press release says:

Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance os OS X, set a new standard for quality, and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation.
...
In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world's most advanced operating system.

While Apple says they are not working on features, it seems more accurate to say they are not not working on too many user features.


Foundation
In past releases, OS X has been in a state of flux with important API's changing or being replaced. This has made OS X a bit of a moving target for developers. It appears with OS X 10.5 Leopard and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple is attempting to settle things down now that they have things close to where they want them. New API's will surely be added and changes will be made, but it seems likely they will avoid the wholesale changes of the past.


Grand Central (Multi-Core CPU Utilization)
OS X has always been multiprocessor aware, but it Apple seems to be reacting to the CPU industry's effort to focus on multiple cores instead of individual processor clock speed. Now that the GHz Wars have all but ended, the efficient use of multiple processors and multiple cores is the primary method to improve performance.

If Apple has made the process of programming for and utilizing multiple processors easier to implement (or nearly automatic), this will be a huge deal and a major advantage. If they have created methods to more efficiently use multiple processors at an OS level, this will be nice (especially if they are rewriting OS X to be more reentrant allowing multiple "in flight" OS calls).

NY Times Article and Interview with Steve Jobs

“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”

Apple, he claimed, has made a parallel-programming breakthrough.

OpenCL (GPU Utilization)
It appears Apple is pushing a new, open standard to allow general purpose use of the GPU. If Apple can make general use of the fast GPU's sitting idle much of the time, this will be a major performance enhancement. If they can make this GPU utilization mostly automatic for the everyday developer, it could be a significant coup.

It will be interesting to see if this has anything to do with LLVM for which Apple has long been suspected of having a special use. They are already using it in OpenGL.

CNET Article and Interview with Nvidia's CEO

"Apple knows a lot about CUDA," Huang said, implying the company might be ready to formally embrace Nvidia's technology to make it easier to exploit graphics chips inside Macs. Apple's implementation "won't be called CUDA, but it will be called something else," Huang said in an interview here at Nvidia's headquarters on Wednesday.

From the NYT

“Basically it lets you use graphics processors to do computation,” he (Jobs) said. “It’s way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has, and it’s really simple.”

64 Bit
This is a no-brainer for Apple. By using a larger address space, they engage in some "future-proofing", while giving some RAM hungry apps some breathing room. Being able to address 16TB of physical RAM is nice now, but it will be am absolute requirement soon. As with hard drive space and closet space, more is better.


QuickTime X
Apple is learning from every project they implement. In creating the iPhone, they apparently worked to make QuickTime more efficient, and QucikTime X Mac (and Windows?) users will benefit from that.

It is fascinating to imagine if this might be interwoven with OpenCL. It seems generally like a good idea to offload audio and video media processing to the GPU when possible.

Apple's Press Release

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. (emphasis added)

Exchange 2007 Support
By adding Exchange support into OS X for use in Mail, Address Book, and Calendar, Apple will remove one of the single biggest obstacles to selling Mac's into business and the enterprise in particular. It seems Apple realizes continued growth will require some level of business adoption, and this one feature will go a long way towards enabling those sales.


Mobile Me
"Exchange for the rest of us" is Apple's tag line for Mobile Me which will replace .Mac . This seems to largely apply to iPhone users, but the features will be nice for Mac (and Windows?) users too. Mobile Me will sychronize and give users access to their contact and calendar along with their Mobile Me e-mail, all through a jazzy Web 2.0 Javascript interface blurring the lines between local apps and web apps.


SquirrelFish (Javascript Engine)
The Webkit team has been working on a new, faster JavaScript engine for Safari called SquirrelFish. This will provide a major performance boost and runs the SunSpider benchmark 1.6 times faster.

Obviously, Apple's new Mobile Me platform and web sites in general will provide a better experience with a faster JavaScript engine. More of the application-like features of the web sites we all use require JavaScript, so this could be a big help.