Apple to Show New iPhone 3.0, Mac OS X in June
Adding fuel to the new iPhone fire, Apple yesterday announced that the company would be holding an event for developers at the beginning of June.
This year's World Wide Developer’s Conference is set to take place June 8 to 12, and while there’s nothing in the invite about new hardware, the company last year announced the iPhone 3G at the WWDC. Set to take place at Moscone West in San Francisco, Apple promises users a look at the “powerful software behind the iPhone OS and Mac OS X,” which can really only mean one thing: iPhone 3.0 and Snow Leopard.
If you want to attend this year’s WWDC, you’re going to be paying a price. While Apple boasts those who book in the next month or so (before April 24) will save three hundred bucks, early bird tickets will still set you back $1295. Ouch.
We know there’s not a lot of Mac users around these parts (at least, not as many as there are iPhone users), but if you’re part of the Mac-minority, what kind of changes would you like to see implemented with Snow Leopard? Let us know in the comments.
"And now we would also like to announce that this building will explode in 15 seconds! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!"
Snow Leopard will *not* magically make your programs run faster just because of all the new multithreaded performance tweaks and CUDA integration etc. I know to some of you this might sound like a stupid and obvious comment but the number of people that seem to think that it'll wave a magic wand is surprisingly high. 10.6 should make writing parallel code a darned sight easier in theory, true. It should be a fair bit snappier since everything under the hood is meant to be rewritten in parallel (significantly a parallelised Finder). However, existing code will not run significantly faster, if at all. Single threaded programs will run just as fast. There's a chance that existing parallel codes will be able to use better system libraries to run faster but, honestly, the gains will be minimal. This isn't to say that down the line 10.6 will prove to be far faster than 10.5 due to multithreading, but its going to take time for the newer technologies to be adopted.
Apple is hyping up the multithreading of 10.6 which can lead to such assumptions as I've mentioned above. Why are they doing this? Well, 10.6 is largely an 'under the hood' improvement. As others have said, there's not a lot of obvious stuff that users will see in which they can exact improvements. Snow Leopard comes with all kinds of fantastic technical improvements and performance benefits but most of those will not be seen by the user. So they're caching in on the current chitter-chatter of multiprocessing.
I certainly can't wait for 10.6 to come out and I'm very excited in regards to programming with CUDA etc. The multithreaded Finder would be enough on its own for me to upgrade. I just hope people can be realistic with their expectations of the new OS.
To clarify, "it" refers to the NVIDIA card in the Apple system running 10.6
I just want them to make a good OS from start so I don't have to wait a year or 2 before upgrading.