Does Apple Need to Rush 10.7?
February 17th, 2010It is widely believed that Apple will unveil iPhone 4.0 at this summer’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference and ship it shortly thereafter. There’s also a passing level of speculation that they will also deliver preliminary information about the next great reference release for Mac OS X, 10.7, sporting an unknown feline moniker.
The real question, however, is whether there’s a crying need for a successor to Snow Leopard, and therein lies a tale.
Now most of you know that 10.6 arrived last August, several weeks ahead of Apple’s promised delivery timeframe, with the usual amount of fanfare. But much of the advantages of Snow Leopard lie in its potential, rather than any visible improvements. Consider Grand Central Dispatch, which provides built-in tools to allow applications to better support all those recent Macs that are equipped at least two processor cores. Consider the plight of owners of those super-expensive Mac Pros, with eight powerful processor cores and not much to do with them.
Another advantage, enhanced 64-bit support, lets apps access more than 4GB of memory, which will surely make a difference when you are engaged in heavy-duty content creation, particularly when it involves image editing and 3D rendering. And don’t forget OpenCL, which passes off key processing tasks to the often underutilized graphics chips on your Mac.
As you have probably noticed, precious few apps have been updated to support the first or the last, and even Apple was slow to make their products 64-bit savvy. What this means is that Snow Leopard’s promised performance improvements remain just that — a promise. Yes, 64-bit can help some, but keeping all your Mac’s processor cores active as much as possible will have a more immediate impact. Even converting a big audio file from one format to another can benefit greatly, but how many apps out there use more than one processor core?
Now to be fair to the developers in our audience, I realize that supporting Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL isn’t trivial. Apple provides enhanced tools to get the job done, but lots of work is still required. On the large, sprawling apps that benefit most, you can expect it will take months and months to ship upgrades.
Just the other day, I was reading some preliminary information about the forthcoming Adobe Creative Suite 5, which will include a 64-bit savvy Mac version of Photoshop. Yes, there was a 64-bit Windows version of CS4, but Adobe gave the excuse that the switchover to Intel hamstrung their developers, not giving them enough time to complete the job and deliver a Mac version without a substantial delay. That’s because Adobe took the easy way out in the early days of Mac OS X by porting their apps to Apple’s legacy Carbon environment.
Regardless of the pros and cons of the programming issues, it stands to reason that the expectations for Snow Leopard have yet to be fulfilled for most of you. Yes, maybe it’s a bit snappier and, for most, a little more stable. But the under-the-hood stuff isn’t doing what it was intended to do — yet!
That being the case, where’s the rush to 10.7? Regardless of what Apple offers for the next major operating system upgrade, there will be those inevitable compatibility issues, even if the fundamentals of Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL remain pretty much the same as they are now. Besides, how could Apple resist the temptation to tinker with a few odds and ends of the system plumbing to make it work better? No doubt there will also be interface changes and new features that developers will want to support.
So would it make sense for them to be forced to essentially suspend their Snow Leopard compatibility projects and spend the time and money moving to an even later operating system?
I’m sure little of this is lost on Apple. The other question is whether there’s any incentive to rush to upgrade Snow Leopard by the end of 2010 or even by the middle of 2011. Maybe there is, but I don’t see it, not when the existing operating system is working fine and Mac sales are still raging at a pretty good clip.
While Microsoft appears to be doing well with Windows 7, in terms of early adoption and potential business migrations, there’s little evidence that they have managed to stem the gradual erosion of their operating system’s market share. They haven’t slowed Mac sales, and making the swichover from XP to Windows 7 so difficult isn’t helping matters.
This isn’t to say that Apple will not stage a 10.7 technology demo at the WWDC. It’s possible they will, just to indicate what they’re working on, and provide a 15 to 18 month estimate for shipping a final version. That step would move the full feature rollout to WWDC 2011, which would seem a more sensible move.
It would also help developers if Apple assured them that they could continue to deliver Snow Leopard upgrades without having to confront major compatibility problems when 10.7 finally ships. But there’s no rush for them or us.
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I have a very different idea of what OSX.7 might be like. Snow Leopard was mostly under-the-hood stuff, and at the small amount they charged for it Apple probably didn’t do much more than break even on its development costs. On the other hand, Leopard has been around since October 2007. The time will come pretty soon when Leopard’s innovations start looking old and tired, and surely by now Apple has developed a lot of wizzy new technologies and interface changes, the sort of thing that make an impression on the average consumer. So I imagine that OSX.7 might concentrate on that stuff, and be sold at a more traditional price, calculated to bring in some serious money, but without any revolutionary changes of the kind that would challenge programmers (who indeed do need to play catch-up for the new things in Snow Leopard, and shouldn’t be thrown off balance by anything very revolutionary at the moment).
Personally, I’d like to see both Apple and Microsoft stabilize for a while. Snow Leopard and Windows 7 are clearly the best versions of their respective platforms ever. Both are popular with users, and both are actually very pleasant to actually use everyday. To avoid the hassle of another OS upgrade for an extra year would be a wonderful thing. Just keep up on the routine fixes and let the developers on both platforms catch up.
No, 10.7 should be baked in the oven even longer.
I recalled that former Apple CTO Avie Tevanian, before leaving in early 2006, mentioned that the pace of Mac OS X upgrades was going to slow down from what were 12-18 months cycles. It made sense because there were so much to do in making a viable Mac OS X in the beginning during the late nineties and early two-thousands. When I got my titanium PowerBook in November 2001, one could easily see that Mac OS X 10.1 was a work in progress. Booting back into the default OS 9 ensured a “snappy” PowerBook performance.
I can now see how well Mac OS X has become. Been using Leopard on a MacBook for over a year and very pleased as to its hardware/software reliability. I do not recall seeing a kernel panic (knock on wood!). My PowerBook running Tiger experienced a number of kernel panics from six to a dozen times in the same time frame. I don’t know the exact count, only the last “no crash” time of use is showing almost three days.
I have Snow Leopard on an external hard drive for an occasional test drive and keeping up with the updates. There is no need to jump from Leopard to Snow Leopard at this time. I expect to be using Snow Leopard when I buy a MacBook Pro (replacing my aging PowerBook) this year. I had thought of making the purchase at mid-year 2010, but am considering a push back of several months for the Rev. B Core i”n” models.
OS X has come a long ways, and definitely in many ways Snow Leopard is the best yet, but there is still lots of room for improvement – for example, Apple has been hinting at a Resolution Independent UI since Tiger (which would allow you to use higher resolution displays, but scale the UI up so it doesn’t get too small), Quicktime X is a good base to build on for the future, but has a fraction of the feature set of it’s predecessor. And working in enterprise there are still niggling unreliability issues with Active Directory binding and logging onto Windows shares that are extremely frustrating to have to deal with. And don’t even get me started on OS X Server, which has come a long ways but has some glaring deficiencies that need to be fixed if it’s ever going to gain any traction. Then there are all kinds of options for enhanced functionality – like the pulled ZFS (or another replacement), more instantaneous snapshot style backups for Time Machine, perhaps an OS rollback feature for an update that goes bad (it happens), etc etc.
I think the scenario plays out like this.
WWDC 2010 Apple shows a Top 5 flashy new features in OS X “Lion”. A few will be truly new and make for great demos. The buzz will start about what type of applications will leverage the new features and UI. Over the next year the Beta of Lion will continue to grow and sprout new features and show polish.
Apple will deliver OS X 10.7 Lion either August or September of 2011
As for features I’d like to see:
1. A good uninstaller- Mac users love trying out apps but we don’t like the cruft left behind from apps that didn’t make the cut and got deleted.
2. An update manager – Software Update has already trained Mac users to go to one source to look for software updates. Apple should either allow third parties to push updates through software update after a period of time has passed (to verify the stability of the update)
3. A new filesystem – Imagine a Time Machine that saves only delta changes no matter how large your original file is. Suddenly a Terabyte of Time Machine backups saves years of data with room to spare. A new filesystem could aid in improvements here as well as data integrity and metadata handling.
4. Further improvements to Quicktime- Legacy Quicktime will forever be 32-bit. Quicktime X is the new 64-bit successor with QT Kit being the bridge between the two. QTX is going to keep improving in performance and functionality and 10.7 should bring improvements here.
5. Graphics – 10.7 should have OpenGL 3.x support, and hopefully the resolution independence. Now with 2 distinct platforms (Mac OS X, iPhone/Touch, iPad) Apple has a lot of different display resolutions. They need to finish RI so that developers can use one set of icons and widgets across the three platforms.
Also expect to see more features from iPhone SDK creep over to the Mac.
Stuff like Location API, Multi-Touch and more.
All laptops should have a GPS receiver IMO. It allows the location stuff to do its magic and also can be an aid for Lojack type of laptop security.
I eagerly await 10.7. Snow Leopard is a really good OS but I’m demanding.
@hmurchison, Let’s take your request for “a new filesystem” a step further. I’d like to see something like a replication environment where my laptop or iProduct has the subset of files that I’m working on, and fit its capabilities, with a rather transparent link to a cloud backing store, to/from which changes are synchronized.
Somewhat in the way that Lotus Notes users just keep working away on projects and mail while they’re trapped in an airplane with me, then just plug in at their home to send/update everything.
A “digital hub” on steroids, and not just for docs that I create: iTunes store items — vids, tunes, apps, movies, books… should work the same way. Whether I have a permanent license or a short-term rental or just access something on-demand, my choice of which gizmo I’m using should be transparent to whether I chose to squeeze a given album onto my iPhone or not, if I want to listen to it.
Likewise, we’re about ready for more integration of the social networks into our calendars, address books and ToDo lists. If someone who’s given me an email address updates it, I’d like it to flow thru to my info — or to the cloud that my info syncs to, maybe more accurately.
Of course, many of us work intensively with documents, such as a podcast or wedding album that we’re assembling. I’d like to see some of the notions of project management, non-destructive editing etc. generalized into word processing, presentations and so on, along the lines of Google Wave. Wave looks tremendously valuable in the multi-user space, but we could use it across the whole spectrum of files we access as single users.
@hmurchison: to expand a bit on your first idea, “a good uninstaller”, I think this should be a behavioural change for the Trash can itself. The simplicity, in concept and practice, of dragging an unwanted app to the Trash, just like any other unwanted thing, is absolutely sublime and shouldn’t be lost. Rather than having a separate utility app, à la AppZapper, to uninstall apps (although that may not be what you were suggesting), the Trash should specially detect when an application bundle is being dropped on it, and offer to chuck in the app’s support files along with it — explaining, of course, that if said files are left in place, the app will “remember” your original settings should you ever choose to re-install it. To aid in this, perhaps applications (or OS X itself, somehow) should be required to maintain a list of support files to avoid having to rely exclusively on a “search and guess” method like AppZapper, which has been known to produce a false positive every once in a while. Such lists should be able to indicate resources that are shared with other specific apps (i.e. other parts of a suite), so that only if none of those other apps are present will the shared files be removed.
Mac OS X 10.6 was all about under the hood improvements. Version 10.7 does not need to go there – instead the focus should be on the GUI and other gee-whiz improvements. The most obvious thing to do would be to incorporate some of the iPad elements into the OS, but I doubt they would do that so early in the game. Maybe in 10.9 we’ll see that.
There is another feature I would like to have in a future OS X (10.7, I hope):
Some advanced form of data syncing between multiple computers.
I have an iMac, a MacBook Pro, and a TimeCapsule for backups (which I also sometimes abuse as a shared drive), but I would like my documents to be synced between all of these devices, so I don’t have to remember which Mac has the latest version of a file.
@Frank van Leeuwen,
Frank, see Mac OS X Server. Workgroup Manager and Open Directory will get you to where you’re going.
I’m more curious as to what updates Mac OS X Server 10.7 will bring. Server 10.6 was supposed to give us ZFS, but it seems like Oracle’s takeover of Sun put a stop to that.
@Bryan, Server isn’t a home product. I’d like to see Apple fill in a few more ‘middle’ spots like the one the iPad will settle into between the iPhone and the Mac. For instance, a Home Server supporting sync and media storage, and a desktop to fill the yawning gap between the Mini and the Pro — something with a couple of slots, a couple of drives, four cores.
We don’t know Apple’s larger plan. I’ll speculate that SL was a way to deploy the under the hood changes which will be used by a future version of OS X. So they may not need to deploy 10.7 but it may be part of their long term plan.
No, MAC OS X 10.6 is still young at version 10.6.2. I think it will continue to evolve while giving developers time to go fully 64-bit. OS X 10.7 can be a clean 64-bit platform with no legacy 32-bit.
What exactly are people saying no to here? 10.7 in calendar year 2010 or 2011?
No operating system is ever perfect or completed.
Yes, the 64 bit kernel, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCl are a big bite for the developers to swallow, but these are enabling technologies. New capabilities will open up once they are digested.
The ramifications of this needs to be brought home. Not even the pundits understand what the next step will mean. Apple will be seeing major improvements in speed and flexibility over Microsoft Windows on the same hardware, but what will this lead to? Are those improvements necessary? Will the marketplace reward them?
The question, also, is one of timing. Should Apple take 12, 18 or 24 months until releasing 10.7? The developers will vote for a longer time span, because it gives them time to recoup their cost from the last upgrade.
Why Should Apple want a shorter time frame? That is because the OS wars, between Apple and Microsoft, were never over; a temporary truce was called to allow Apple to set its house in order. It allowed Apple to migrate to Mac OSX. That migration is finally coming to a close.
Hence, Apple must finish side lining the Carbon API’s to become a fully object oriented operating system by utilizing the capabilities in Snow Leopard. Many improvements and enhancements have been in development since Leopard 10.5 was released. More streamlining of the Mac OS is possible as the cruft is shed.
Questionable decisions made twenty years ago can be discarded as legacy. Some features in NeXTstep have been waiting since 1997 to be added to Mac OSX. They couldn’t be implemented until Carbon was gone.
The Mac OS needs a new file system; HFS+ journaling is adequate but ancient. I can understand why Apple bailed on ZFS, since a better file system, B-TreeFS, is coming close to fruition.
Apple has solved most of the problems it had in 1997, while Microsoft’s situation has deteriorated. Microsoft has many hidden problems in its business model. Many commercial Windows XP users have little reason to upgrade until the hardware breaks. Windows 7 looks good on the surface, but it is a steam pile of crud underneath.
It is not enough for Apple to be substantially better than Microsoft; it must be many times better to break through customer bias and media prejudice. This means that Apple must push the leading edge with frequent upgrades having undeniable benefits. Apple must push into what was Microsoft territory, but it will do so without adopting an Enterprise market business model.
A problem here is one of perception, too. We have not seen the full benefits of Snow Leopard, yet, and won’t until Apple upgrades to the 64 bit kernel, by default. I’m expecting that to be in early summer. Apple can only implement those benefits when enough applications are enabled in 64 bit code; those benefits need to be internalized before the next upgrade.
Hence, I think it unlikely that Apple will upgrade until a year after that. This would coincide with a 24 month cycle.
Unless I missed it nobody is talking about touch gestures and it’s impact on 10.7. I have the new Apple Magic mouse and with the handy shareware MagicPrefs it has hinted at what might be coming to Mac OS X. Although I don’t see anyone wanting a desktop with touching the screen replaces the cursor I believe Apple maybe be showing us the future GUI with the release of the iPad. How do we get rid of an interface that hasn’t changed much since the point and click 80’s? Steve might be looking to minimize drop down menus the trick will be to get software and customers adapted to working differently on a computer. Will the desktop matter in 10 years? Will portable devices make the desktop and the desktop OS a small niche platform?
I agree with the comments that 10.7 will be about some very VISIBLE changes that users will be able to see (while 10.6 was about under-the-hood technologies).
My hopes
1) resolution independence. This has to happen if the quality of screens continues to increase. Already too many users squint unless their eyes are good.
2) touch screen interface. Probably not to replace the mouse, but useful for any “multi-touch” scenarios(spinning photos, zooming in, adjusting window edges). I imagine that the next iWork desktop apps will still some interface elements from the iPad version, but will still be primarily a mouse-based system (same with iLife).
3) cloud computing. I don’t know when the new hub will be ready for Apple cloud computing, but I’d say it’ll line up with 10.7 availability. I want my data locally, but a full online sync (and backup) with access to my docs/photos/music/apps on any Mac (or iPad, or web)
Reading a lot of these suggestions for further under-the-hood improvements, I can’t help thinking that there’s already a wide gap between what the Mac and Snow Leopard have to offer in theory with what they is able to deliver in the real world. Things like multi-processors Grand Central and OpenGL in essence represent a hardware manufacture’s vision of the future, and it’s striking how little interest software developers have shown in signing up for the effort. With the exceptionof 64-bit capability (maybe the easiest to implement), since the debut of Snow Leopard, as far as I can remember, we have heard next to nothing about the development of a new generation of consumer-grade software to take advantage of these technologies. It’s not hard to predict that sooner or later there’s going to be a consumer backlash against this ever-widening gap between promise and reality, as potential purchasers grow more cynical about the Mac’s ability to deliver the goods in the real world. So right now it would be pointless, and maybe even counterproductive from a business point of view, to make this gap even wider. What, after all, is the point of buying a new model with six-core processors when you can’t get very much use out of your present two- or four-core ones? (Asking questions like this is what I mean by consumer cynicism.) Of course I realize that a similar gap is opening up in the PC world too, since 64-bit technology and multiprocessing are in essence Intel’s vision, but the difference between Apple and PC manufacturers is that Apple markets software as well as hardware and therefore has the capacity to rectify the situation, set an example for other software developers, and satisfy consumer demand for a new generation of software. This is why at this point in time Apple has a much more urgent need to develop a new generation of sofware, including its iLife and iWork suites, than to worry very much about an OSX.7. If I were Steve this is where I would be devoting most of my energy and deploying my best software-development talent, even if it meant stealing them from the OS team.
Hardware is always ahead of software and if the hardware doesn’t exist then there is no need for the software. Thus even Apple delivers new software and hardware capabilities that are often not fully taken advantage of in their own software until the hardware or software containing new features has reached a significant base. I noticed that the last iWork used Core Animation a lot more than the previous version even though the previous version had access to Core Animation frameworks.
Let us not make any bones about it though it’s the OS features that are delivered by a crack team led by Bertran Serlet and others that power the nextgen features in Software. 10.7 sets the bedrock for innovative apps and improves our chances of seeing more groundbreaking applications. We just need to understand that the software will always lag the hardware in support because of legacy developers will only start using new API when their userbase begins to migrate to new systems/OS.
All their best developers had been working on the iPhone and now they’ve been shifted to the iPad. Nobody good is working on the Mac OS until the iPad ships and then it’s back to the iPhone for OS 4.0. Maybe, just maybe they’ll put the hotshots back on to the Mac OS by the end of the year and hopefully we’ll have something hot & good a year later.
@Sven Svenson,
I think you “hit the nail on the head”. Recent reports indicate that profits from the iPhone/iPod have reached nearly half of Apple’s income. I am sure that the iPad will contribute to the situation where Apple is increasingly something other than “a computer company”. Even though there will be a lot of people not getting the iPad (such as me), it will likely be “the next big thing” for Apple.
One of the major problems Apple will continue to face is the potential loss of their core users of Mac computers in the photography and graphic arts market. Adobe, you know, the company Steve loves to hate, has yet to commit to rewriting their Creative Suite apps in Cocoa which means that the Mac platform will be held back by this situation unless Apple choose to completely abandon that user base and move on. Either way, the probability is that this market segment will continue to migrate to the Windows platform because the Windows CS apps are now supposedly fully 64 bit capable.
Grand Central Dispatch will need a lot more work to deal with apps that have not been updated to benefit from more CPU cores. A very good start would be to allow the user to manually assign cores to specific apps to get them off of the main system where they are causing problems.
Anyway, Apple will increasingly become a consumer electronics/gadget company.
I am sorry, but it seems that you are basing your performance assessment of Snow Leopard on wrong or missing vital assumptions. The amd/intel 64-bit computing model helps in two cases: (i) if you need to compute with larger numbers, arithmetic is accelerated, and if your code profits from more registers, because it does complex data manipulation, you will see a boost from the use of the additional registers; (ii) if you need to address more than 2^32 bytes of memory directly, you can do that without hassle and in a flat memory space. On the other hand all pointers double in size, and even many integer types, increasing memory traffic, potentially slowing down performance upon a simple recompilation.
Some 64-bit compilers also behave badly (such as the intel c compiler – faster than gcc in 32-bit mode, but sometimes poor in 64-bit mode), so recompiling in 64-bit mode would in fact penalize some kinds of apps (that’s why apple is very active in gcc, llvm and clang development).
Most applications do not need to be recompiled for 64-bits. The performance gains for a file manager, or an address book, or a text editor, probably also for a web browser, are more or less irrelevant. Even some multimedia applications need not, since they are using vector instructions (SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE3, SSE4 and so on) for their heavy computations and their performance does not change with the mode of the cpu (32 or 64 bit).
Snow Leopard has streamlined the performance of the kernel significantly – this has been done using better scheduling and resource allocation algorithms, and changing some fundamental internal data structures. One of the most immediately noticeable advantage is that memory management has been improved considerably: using the same applications as under Leopard, my computer needs less swap files – we are talking about having 3 or 4 Gb of swap files constantly allocated under Leopard, and only 128-512 Mb under Snow Leopard.
There’s lots of ways the interface can still be improved… there’s still things that OS 9 did better! But whether this would justify a new cat is another question (if they ever address these things in the first place).
Sven, the kernel is the same… On the current iPhone OS in fact there is still a relatively old version of the Darwin Kernel (older than the one used in 10.6.1).
Snow Leopard was a fantastic update to the new century OS whose ‘titanium underpinnings’ were showing some tarnish.
With 10.7 I expect a return to addressing the User Experience. With Windows 7 MS has made up a lot of ground on the Mac OS. Now Apple needs to innovate again for the sake of the user, differentiating themselves from the pack.
The holy grail of technology is exceptional speech recognition. We’re still waiting for a break through and I don’t expect it for another 10 years. But when just about anyone can have a plain-talk chat with their Mac it will be amazing.
In the interim I see Apple doing more with gestures – perhaps ‘hands off’ gestures using multiple cameras or other sensors that detect the user without physical touch.
Second, Apple has a real opportunity to reinvent the keyboard. The iPad will be a proving ground for this. Imagine a Mac keyboard that is glass, features touch feedback, and can dynamically change from a QWERTY keyboard to a sound mixing board or video control system, a game controller – designed by the game developer, or some sort of canvas for design to augment the display.
Third, 3D continues to be elusive but desired. I would expect Apple to begin to exploit some of the UX seen in Time Machine for using other aspects of the system.
Finally, simplicity: It makes sense for Apple to offer the iPhone/iPad UI on the Mac itself. Some users, including the very young and the very old – not to mention the very busy – may find this preferable to a single dock or a stack that emerges from the dock. I can’t say I’d use it, but the marriage of UX between iDevices and Macs seems to be a likely step forward.
Now…
Where’s that Breakout easter egg?
If Apple are in such a rush to implement OS 10.7, it suggests several things.
Number one is that the company wants to make sure they keep everyone on the upgrade treadmill.
Number two is that there must be more problems with Snow Leopard than are generally realized. (Snow Leopard is, after all, a first generation Intel only OS product and Apple does not have a terrific track record on first generation (or Rev A) products.)
Another thought is that it distracts attention from the other problems Apple is experiencing, such as the ill conceived iPad without Flash and the growing problems with hardware that has been released without adequate testing. Apple appears unable to get products out the door on schedule without omitting some crucial aspect of testing and development. Apple runs the risk of people eventually realizing that “the emperor has no clothes”.
@”Doubting Thomas”,
Is Apple “really” in a rush to implement 10.7? Judging from past releases 10.7 coming next year would be right on schedule.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X :
On March 24, 2001, Apple released Mac OS X v10.0 (internally codenamed Cheetah)
Later that year on September 25, 2001, Mac OS X v10.1 (internally codenamed Puma) was released (6 months)
On August 23, 2002,[75] Apple followed up with Mac OS X v10.2 “Jaguar” (11 months)
Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther” was released on October 24, 2003 (14 months)
Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” was released on April 29, 2005. (18 months)
Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” was released on October 26, 2007 (18 months)
Mac OS X v10.6 “Snow Leopard” was released on August 28, 2009 (14 months)
So let’s average the last three releases and we get 16.66 months. Thus a 10.7 upgrade will likely come out April/May of 2011. Which means Apple needs to identify the featureset (major) at WWDC this year with plans to ship in a calendar year.
Snow Leopard isn’t problem free but I believe it’s more stable than Leopard was by the third 10.x.x release.
The notion that OS X 10.7 development distracts from the iPad or hardware is folly. The same core team working on OS X also work on the iPhone OS as well. The hardware team is separate from the software team so progress in one area or lack thereof doesn’t mean the other team is hampered. Snow Leopard was likely delayed because Apple had to get the iPhone out but since then they’ve delivered timely iPod Touch/iPhone OS updates without issue.
With record sales happening for Apple quarter over quarter I think it’s clear that they are operating very smoothly with a few small roadbumps rather than resembling a rudderless ship.
@hmurchison,
Cont.
Flash is going away
(Virgin drops Flash)
(Vimeo HTML5 player for video)
Google beta tests HTML5 video
SublimeVideo (another excellent HTML5 video player)
The writing is on the wall. Using flash for video playback or web elements that are basic is silly. Expect developers to begin to move away from flash heavy websites as HTML5 playback builds steam.
@Roberto Avanzi : Unfortunately the streamlined kernel performance came at the cost of instability. For example incorrect lock handling is causing 30-second “beachball” hangs for many users. There’s no easy way to know how widespread these problems are statistically, but clearly their prevalance is greater in 10.6 than 10.5 or 10.4. Unless they rise above a few percentage points Apple probably keeps its resources on feature and performance improvements rather than stability though.