Category: Debated

Arguments, appeals, or otherwise analytical.

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Debated

WWDC08 Keynote – Snow Leopard

> “Man, I should have kept my ‘Mac OS X 10.6 ignored’ square.” – John Siracusa

(I’m breaking up my thoughts about the WWDC keynote into multiple posts this year.)

The 10.6 is seen in its natural climate.

For the sake of not wanting to vomit every time I type it, I’m going to refer to Snow Leopard merely as “10.6”.

A mere blip at the start of the Keynote (when Steve says “This morning I’m going to talk about the iPhone”, he *means it*), OS X 10.6 would be talked about only at the OS X State Of The Union. To the chagrin of those who care less about the iPhone, the OSXSOTU is always the first session covered by the NDA that surrounds WWDC.

Luckily, some relief came in the form of a since-deleted press release from Apple. Also, in the time it’s taken me to write this, the official Snow Leopard homepage appeared.

To dissect what we know:

* A technology code-named “Grand Central” will enable developers to more easily leverage multi-core processors. It’s hard to consider this a bad thing, although I haven’t seen a lot of multithreading issues in modern applications (from my very casual viewpoint).
* A technology called “Open Computing Language” (OpenCL) allows developers to tap into the GPU for general processing. It has been “proposed as an open standard”, which is interesting as I can find no information to this effect (and OpenCL was a name formerly used by a Linux cryptography package).
* The theoretical limit on system RAM will be 16TB. So when those 2TB RAM chips come along, OS X will be *so* ready.
* Quicktime X will come bounding along, seemingly destroying hopes for Quicktime 8 or 9 in the meantime. Hopefully “support for modern audio and video formats” indicates that Apple will embrace some of codecs that have been killing Quicktime for what feels like ages.
* Safari will get the recently announced SquirrelFish – but it’s not like you can’t run that and get performance upgrades right this second.
* Exchange support will finally be rolled into Mail, Address Book, and iCal, which is great if you’re in the sort of environment using Exchange. Everyone else may not care so much – but we’ll come back to this.
* “Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.” Consider this confirmation that 10.6 will not run on PowerPC. Nothing else is likely to shed that much weight from the OS. I don’t expect Rosetta to die any time soon, much like Classic (technically) will live until 2009.

Lastly, and most smugly satisfying for me, 10.6 is scheduled to ship “in about a year”, which sounds remarkably closer to my August 2009 prediction than TUAW’s “shipping by January 2009”.

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Debated

The Alleged End Of OS X for PPC

History lesson: Back on June 6, 2005, Apple announced that they were transitioning away from the PowerPC processor line to ones made by Intel. Rumblings formed quickly – *how long until they drop PowerPC support from the OS?*

TUAW wrote yesterday about “10.6” being unveiled at WWDC next week:

> We have also learned that OS X 10.6 may go gold master by December 2008 in an effort to start shipping it in January ’09 at Macworld Expo. Mac OS X 10.6 will be a milestone release for Apple, as it will leave the PowerPC behind: a fully 64-bit clean, Intel-only Mac OS X.

John Gruber weighed in this morning:

> I still think it seems too soon by at least a year to drop PowerPC support — especially for G5s, which are still extremely capable machines by today’s standards — but that’s the word on the street.

Gruber’s on the right track here, but not because the machines are still capable (which they are).

Consider two truths about Applecare:

* Applecare typically comes in two quantities: the free one-year that comes with each machine, and a three-year extended service warranty.
* Applecare provides support for all point revisions of the current operating system and the final point release of the previous operating system.

As far as I’m aware, Apple has never released an OS that cannot by installed on computers that fall within the three-year window provided by Applecare. Once a machine falls outside of that window, a machine is not guaranteed to run any new major OS revisions.
The PowerMac G5 was the final machine to be killed in the Intel transition – a slight irony given that the developer kits for the Intel transition were in PowerMac towers. The MacPro was introduced to market on August 7, 2006.

For these reasons, I would not expect Apple to kill off PowerPC support in their OS until after August 6th, 2009.

(An aside: that’s also the day that Classic finally becomes unsupported, as there won’t be any Applecare eligible machines that can still run Classic.)

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Debated

In Which Microsoft Ruins XBLA

My life has always been one of jewel cases, DVD boxes, and shrink wrap. Multiple generations of gamers have inadvertently mastered obscure arts such as “removing adhesive security tags”, “shredding shrink wrap”, and “raising the CaseLogic stock price”.

Physical media has remained the primary distribution method for video games since the inception of home consoles. But with the current slew of platforms, digital distribution is finally not merely a possibility but a reality. The channels come in many forms: from the [Xbox Live Arcade](http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/livearcadexbox360/) and the [Playstation Store](http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/Store), to Nintendo’s [Virtual Console](http://www.nintendo.com/wii/virtualconsole) and recently launched [WiiWare](http://www.nintendo.com/wii/wiiware), to the hugely popular [Steam](http://steampowered.com) platform run by Valve for Windows.

A lot of gamers still love having discs for a variety of reasons. But there’s a growing movement of gamers and publishers pressing towards digital distribution. Gamers gain quicker access to games, less fiddling with discs, and the ability to reinstall their purchases at a later point. Publishers can create smaller, more innovative titles that wouldn’t survive at retail, keep a smaller budget, and not worry about fighting for shelf space in a brick-and-mortar store.

Or so we all thought.

Continue reading “In Which Microsoft Ruins XBLA”