Apple Musing

A few weeks ago Apple refreshed their entire line of desktop computers. In the months prior to this the entire line of laptops was also refreshed. For some the inclusion of the Mac Mini and Mac Pro were welcome suprises, but in reality this was inevitable. Apple has drawn a line in the sand, one that has been fast approaching since the move to Intel processors a few years ago.

The Snow Leopard confusion

First let's look back to last year when Steve Jobs announced that the next release of OS X would be called Snow Leopard and that it would not include any significant new user features and would instead be focused on under the hood changes for future benefit and that of developers.

This has raised many questions, most along the line of how much could Apple charge for a release with few new user features? Also how reasonable would it be for developers to mandate Snow Leopard for their software when possibly very few users will pay for an upgrade.

The headline under the hood improvements include;

• Full top to bottom 64bit code, with the ability to still run 32bit apps
• OpenCL, allowing code to tap into processor cycles on under utilised graphics card GPUs
• Grand Central, a framework that will enable developers to easily make use of multiple processor cores
• QuickTime X, a new media framework

Along with these announced improvements several other possible items have been tipped by early beta testers;

• CoreLocation, a port of the iPhone's location services to enable developers to find out where a machine is
• Marble, a new and globally implemented look and feel
• Improved Voice support

Finally the big hit for many users out there is that Snow Leopard will be available for Intel (possible 64bit Intel) processors only. The benefits of this will be;

• Smaller installed code, only the Intel side of all Universal applications will be required along with the removal of all PowerPC parts of the OS
• Apple will only need to test on one CPU architecture, therefore enabling either more testing in the same timeframe or a smaller testing timeframe required
• Better platform specific optimisation

All in all, while there won't be many new user focused features, there's a hell of a lot in there. Would you upgrade? I know I will be. Especially because this is the line in the sand that will be one of the most important moments in Apple's history.

The end of the Intel transition

2 years ago, on my personal blog, I predicted that the 2007 WWDC would be announced as the end of the Intel transition. This opinion was founded on the fact that the complete line up of hardware would be Intel based and that all the major applications (Apple, Adobe and Microsoft) would have made the move. In fact this announcement came at the following MacWorld keynote and was not played up as anywhere near as much as I had thought it would be.

What I didn't know was that a complete move to Intel was not the bigger goal that Apple was aiming for. Instead their bigger goal is to be found in the Snow Leopard release. The implications for which are enormous. Beyond the benefits of Snow Leopard and it's Intel only stance outlined above there are also the following;

• The retirement of Rossetta, the framework that allows PowerPC code to run on Intel Macs
• Dropping the PowerPC architecture issue from any further development plans
• A clean and fresh OS X architecture to build to the future, there will be many internal changes that we will not be told about

This is the "end of the new beginning" that I had been imagining before. The final piece of the transition to Intel and the transition to something better.

A platform for tomorrow

What I had missed before was that Apple's goal was not simply to transition to todays Intel platform but instead move to a platform that will be valid in the coming world of many processing cores, be they on the CPU(s) or GPU(s).

It's long been known that the increase in processor speed could not continue unhindered and that future improvements would come from increasing the number of processing instructions that can be performed in each cycle. We now live in a world of HyperThreading in each core, multiple cores per CPU and multiple CPUs per machine. To the point that the latest Mac Pro sytems have 2 CPUs, 4 cores each with HyperThreading. Leaving a possible 16 instructions processed each cycle. While this all sounds wonderful in theory there are many stumbling blocks before we can make full usage of such power in everyday life. Even the simple case of a Core 2 Duo is not utilsed to full right now.

The key new technologies within Snow Leopard will begin to open the door toward this power. Developers, who you need to remember have had access to these frameworks since summer last year, can now easily throw processes out to multiple processing lines and in some cases not even care if that is a CPU core of part of a GPU on a graphics card.

So why the new hardware?

Earlier I professed that the refreshing of the entire Apple hardware line was inevitable, you may still be asking why and how this ties into the other questions raised about whether people will pay to upgrade to Snow Leopard? Of course the answer is that some will and some will not, at least not until an upgrade of their favorite software requires it. So isn't this a bad move on Apple's part?

No, they don't care if we upgrade or not, because eventually we will be the fact that we will get new hardware. Snow Leopard isn't really for people who bought into the new Intel platform before now. It is for the people who are about to. Because now they have an entire range of hardware that is designed top to bottom to run Snow Leopard best.

I'm not even sure if Snow Leopard will run on the older 32bit Intel Macs. It won't run it's best on single core machines nor on those with the old Intel GMA integrated graphics. No, it's meant for a world of 2 core machines with fast GeForce 9400M or with a secondard 9600M or better. It's meant for a world of many GB memory and large hard drives. It's meant for the world of the current Apple hardware line up.

The line in the sand will be drawn this summer. A fresh start for Apple, looking to a future of powerful software, enabling the full release of powerful hardware. I don't think there could be a more exciting time to be a Mac developer.