Could we meet 10.5 at Macworld 06?

Leopard going to look more like Apple's web site than the Finder does in Tiger - Spotlight has all but killed hierarchical OS structures forever. I'd like to see better consistancy between Apps though. I would expect Leopard to be offered only once all machines have gone over - although a preview is more than likely.

In two words: who cares?

Why should I, or anyone, start lusting after an updated Mac OS when 10.4 is running very well? Can we please stop asking for the "next release" just for the sake of asking for the "next release?" Maybe if specific reasons (i.e. examples of what's lacking in 10.4) why one is seeking a "more powerful, more refined, more everything version of OS X" were given... I'd bother wondering if an announcement was forthcoming.

Making it "snappier" doesn't count. ;-)

A few points on this - I'm relatively new to the Mac world (PowerBook owner, and loving it), but I've been a Windows developer for a long time, and I now run the IT department for a company with 85+ Wintel boxes and 5-6 Macs.

First of all, and this has been mentioned many times - Apple aren't interested in Intel's current offerings. They're interested in the Merom and Yonah CPUs, the performance and power characteristics of which are frankly mind-blowing. A dual-core Yonah that happily keeps up with an AMD Athlon X2 4400+ drains laptop-like amounts of power. There's a preview up at http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2648 (that's part 2, but it gives more info than part 1).

Secondly, Apple are going to have to make a fairly big decision about Leopard. For years they've been way ahead of Microsoft on the OS front - but the latest Community Technology Preview of Windows Vista is looking impressive, to say the least. Yes, Windows Mail still sucks against Mail.app, but the core of the OS is looking quite spectacular, and the main thing I've seen so far is that it's FAST. It's snappier than XP on the same box, and I've always found XP to be more responsive on my 2.4GHz P4 than OSX is on my 1.67GHz PowerBook (yes, I know that's unfair, but we're talking orders of magnitude here).

I can see that Apple will go one of two ways, and I don't know the market well enough to say which.

Either, they'll push Leopard out early and ride the hardware wave to improve performance etc (which should work; Apple are ahead of Microsoft on multithreading, at least on their desktop OSes) - my suspicion is that Quartz 2D extreme will be enabled for Leopard and that'll give a nice boost.

Alternatively, they could push out a big-ish Tiger update, including the Intel version, QE2D etc, and leave Leopard for late 2006-early 2007. That would allow them enough time to get some mind-blowing features out there.

The problem with the first strategy is that a lot of longtime Apple owners won't be happy about buying an OS upgrade so soon.

The problem with the second strategy is that being "first to market" on a product or generation of products has a large perceived benefit, and losing that momentum against MS could be bad for market share.

Personally, I'll be using both OSes as they're released, but that's just because I get Vista as part of my MSDN subscription ;)

I suspect that if intel Macs are introduced, 10.6 will also be introduced. "Rosetta", the software that lets them run software compiled for PowerPC's, is supposed to be part of 10.6; thus, if there are intel Macs, MacOS 10.6 will likely be released as well.

That would be ahead of schedule. Apple rocks already, but if they got 10.6 out this early, they rock even harder.

"If 10.5 is supposed to be out before Vista which is to launch in the Fall, Apple would likely start showing it anytime now."

10.5 is not supposed to be out before Vista, though, so I doubt Apple will start showing it until summer. Leopard was supposed to be out in late 2006 at the earliest. Jobs made a crack that the way Vista is going, they might beat it, but that wasn't a promise.

It would be a pretty bad business decision to pre-announce Leopard a year ahead of time at the MWSF. Let Tiger keep selling until there's a good reason to announce Leopard (ie. WWDC so developers can develop for it), and let things that are actually for sale catch the limelight.

I think it won't happen, but i'd love it if it would. I think Apple won't do it anyways, cause then people will start to get far too excited and to hurry things up, just making the release crappier because it lacked real world testing and bug crushing, pretty much Tiger's case (and then the same folks who pushed Apple will be the ones whining about Leopard's flaws)

Apple has verified that they're slowing down the dev cycle of their OSes because, frankly, IT departments couldn't keep up. If they wanted to see success in the business sector, they had to slow down the release of OSes. One a year is crazy talk!

Add to that the fact that there's always a huge amount of hype around an OS release, and we can see pretty well that the OS isn't gonna drop next month. Yeah, I think we'll probably learn some features of Leopard, but it isn't dropping. Just isn't. No. Stop hoping. You're only gonna be sad later! Fine! But, don't way I didn't warn you.

Well considering you don't know for sure, "heard it here first" doesn't really count. I've been predicting for months that Apple would show Leopard at MWSF.

No. Why would they rush a new OS out the door when people have not yet caught up with the old version?! Doesn't make sense. 10.4 is extremely well suited to be used for Intel machines as well, and there's just so much more technology under the hood that 10.4 enables to make programming easier. Much of that hasn't been fully enabled by apps yet. Apple wants the programmers to catch up some more before they blast way into the future again with 10.5.

For a fabulous example of a program that leverages very much of Core OSX technology (like CoreVideo and CoreData) check out www.kinemac.com and try the demo. It's AWESOME. Sorry to all the Windows users. This would simply take 2 years to get to beta in Windows XP without the support of the underlying OS and Frameworks.

Having been in the industry since the 70's, as a tech/engineer/programmer working with bit-slice processors, and microprocessors from Zilog/Fairchild/Motorola/intel/Cyrix/AMD, etc., it saddens me to see Apple going along with the pack and moving over to the SLOW/POWER-HUNGRY/HEAT-PRODUCING inferior Intel chips.

Far from it being about the chipset, or the software, individually, the truth is it is the combination of both that produces the best systems.

The years have proven theat the IBM/Apple combination is much better than anything produced by the industry in the last decade and a half.

Why would anyone want to break up such a successful team just to make a few bucks profit? The Apple computers have always been, and will no longer be the cutting edge machines we have come to love and respect.

If we wanted, we could have an Intel based machine, running any flavor of Unix/Linux that is out there. We would still spend an inordinate amount of time waiting for the system to finally boot up. Personally, I prefer the 12 to 15 seconds it takes this old G4 to be useable to the two minute or so waiting period of my intel based machine, and that doesn't even include the time it takes for the individual apps to load.

No, this is the WORST idea the thinkers at Apple came up with. We are now going to see the Apple go from the consummate computing machine to just another run of the mill overpriced calculator!