Good job there Aayush. I want to make a few comments:
krazzy, infra_red_dude and kalpik are other people on this forum who, like you, have a passion for a particular platform but are not crazy zealots (which I admit I can be sometimes).
You can be
sometimes ? You always go about singing praise for your platform without trying to think beyond the picture. Thats hardly the kind of attitude expected from a person who writes for others to read, but in your case I can take an exception. If I were an Apple, Inc. lover, I would find your words highly inspiring and would enjoy them endlessly. There can be no doubt of it. And since you write for the same company you idolise, I recommend you keep up this attitude. It might not give you a high amount of respect elsewhere, but in the case of Apple Magazines, you will sell like hot cakes.
Apple then released Mac OS X 10.1 a year later as a major update (more than a service pack, less than a complete overhaul) that didn’t bring in any fancy new features but added a boatload of improvements all over the system and made Mac OS X usable. It was a free update, but one that people would happily have paid for given the amount of improvements it brought.
Since Apple already set that precedent, there is now the possibility that Snow Leopard might be a free upgrade. However, there’s also the very real (and more likely) possibility that Apple might charge for it, but an amount much less than what they do for a full blown upgrade with major new features ($129). Macworld editors have guestimated that it will be around $30. The Apple of 2002 was much different from the Apple of 2008, so I don’t think a free update is on the cards.
That, IMO, is a very valid outlook and prediction. I think the price may be closer to 25$, but thats just me.
There is this fact that Mac10.6 is called Snow Leopard. So it sounds more like a continuation of the previous release. Otherwise we might have seen Mac 10.6 Lion instead. Just a comment about naming which I have no intention of using as a solid proof.
The other thing you offhandedly threw in was that it was “lousy coding” on their part. I don’t know whether you have used Mac OS X or not but anyone who has can clearly and categorically state that it’s not the result of lousy coding. Lousy coding does not result in something so terrific.
Lousiness in coding needn't translate to an ugly interface, and beautiful interfaces needn't mean lousy coding. Thats as far as my experiences with programming go.
Besides, the word Terrific is often relative and contextual. You know how the saying goes - no matter how good it is(or you think it is), it can get much better.
Snow Leopard is absolutely vital to the further growth of Mac OS X, much like Puma (10.1) was all those years ago. What you might not know is that right now, due to a series of events in the past, Mac OS X has a lot of legacy support—the remains of the classic environment (from the Mac OS 8 and 9 days), support for the PowerPC platform, for apps developed in Carbon as well as Cocoa and, of course, for the Intel platform, both 32 and 64 bit. There might be more legacy code that I’m unaware of.
From what most people have seen and from what has happened till now, Apple is hardly the kind of company which would care about legacy support. And this is proved from the fact that even Macintosh 9 is not supported anymore by their software.
But I see hardly any reason to complain here. Apple always has this policy that development must take place, such that any factor which pulls it down must be immidiately removed, instead of finding a workaround.
Such a thought would be laughed at by GNU coders, but Apple is different again. Apple is not a company looking at the cost to performance ratio. Its all about creating products in a way it likes, and them being accepted by its ever ready fans.
Now that Mac OS X has established itself as a force to be reckoned with, someone needed to take a bold step and do away with everything that’s holding it back to prepare it for even more drastic enhancements in future. The more you keep clinging to the past, the harder it is to embrace what’s next. I’m sure it will anger a minor group in the Mac community, and Steve Jobs does too, but they think (and I agree) that it’s gotta be done.
Once again, let me tell you that Macintosh can never become a force to be reckoned with since its completely isolated in nature. It has support only for its own platform, which itself is ever varying and the idea that you can expect your apple PC to last long as a stable product is riddiculous. Unless you keep upgrading, you are sure to loose out a vast maximum.
But again, all this critisism on apple has absolutely no value, since apple user base is totally different from the standard. So again, a full loud get going to apple.
I actually wish they would make Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard a fully 64-bit Intel native operating system that only runs Cocoa applications. Sure, it will completely screw things up right now (no Adobe or Microsoft applications) and even my (and Milind’s) Mac won’t be able to run it, but I won’t mind running Leopard for another couple of years. Since Snow Leopard won’t have any feature additions, I won’t be missing much. And by the time the next feature packed release comes along, my Mac will be old enough for us to part ways. I know that’s not on the cards yet but that would’ve meant a much better Mac OS X.
Well, if I might be able to have a word here, I would say its much much better for apple if they move back to a non x86 platform. PowerPC Processors are once again very cheap. This is evident by the fact that the Xbox 360 is available at a starting price of like 300$. And it has both a powerful GPU and a triple core PPC CPU. So I think it would be great if apple again started selling IBM PPC machines
As far as running microsoft and adobe applications goes, you made a big mark there. If apple fails to support something, then thanks to this new hyper speed race for the perfect OS, its sure to loose out a big fat market share. Back when Macintosh 10 appeared, the only competing platform was windows, since Solaris, BSD and Linux were not home ready yet. Now, with hundreds of operating system for every perpose in the market, I doubt such a drastic move can be benificial to apple in the short to medium run.
True. But Vista sort of released itself with the same attitude or at least thats what I understand from gx's posts about Windows each time he talks about Vista. Noentheless I'm thinking that a good portion of the users feel alienated in some way because of it. However the future will tell I guess. Something tells me by SP2 Vista will probably be wehre XP SP2 is .
Thats a difficult thing to beleive in. The problem is, in windows XP's days, there was nothing else worth using, so everyone bought it. Then the SPs slowly increased its creditability. But now in vista's case, the picture is a bit too different.
I'm the last person who is technical about anything . I really don't care about whether someone is running Apple, Linux or Windows. Although I do see myself buying one of the Macbooks and somehow getting Linux/Mac OS (not even sure if dual booting works on it) and before everyone stones me to death may I answer the question. "But Why? Why on earth would you install Ubuntu on a MacBook?" .
Because I can. Oh and I need a new laptop which looks nice
Well, one of my friends did a similar thing a few months back by buying a 60K sony VAIO and installing Ubuntu on it, but nobody asked him why. They actually said him congratulations. (the congrutations part was because he was hardly a month into ubuntu and he already found out how to install it in a VAIO and enjoy it).
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. Remember as of such they haven't promised anything as of yet. The fact that they will release a new feature is just an assumption. here are the features already listed for Leopard *www.apple.com/macosx/technology/ . So basically it had all these features in the OS you re using. Rather they are releasing something that enhances the performace of the product you are using. Which soudns like a fix to me.
