Snow Leopard: The price is right!

You idiots apple fanboys pay the full price of an OS for an upgrade that should be free. microsoft release those upgrade as a service pack. Seriously You Guys are stupids.

You spent a few minutes googling and I've spent a year programming in CUDA and learning about OpenCL and DirectX's computer shader. My biggest problem with the DX compute shader is that it doesn't have the capability that OpenCL and CUDA have, I won't go into the specifics, but it really comes down to the DX compute shader being a crippled GPGPU API. Also, OpenCL and CUDA are very cross platform friendly, working on Windows, OS X, Linux and even cell phones. Oh, and as far as CUDA vs OpenCL, if you were actually paying attention to the GPGPU "scene", you would have noticed that Nvidia, who makes CUDA, is fully supporting OpenCL and is even partnered with Khronos working on OpenCL.

And as far as the Direct3D thing goes, look at games and applications that use OpenGL vs Direct3D. Windows still supports OpenGL and just because there are more computers that are capable of running Direct3D, doesn't mean that there are overall more apps. Even then, you would be surprised how many of those games you play that need DirectX are actually using OpenGL for the graphics and DirectX just for sound and input. Not to mention all the apps out there that are transparently using OpenGL. This is a huge argument that there really is no winner to, I'm just saying you can't say that Direct3D beat OpenGL, OpenGL is still around and is still a major competitor. As far as the actual OpenGL vs Direct3D argument, as a graphics engineer, I still like working with OpenGL more then Direct3D and feel it is easier to work with and can be more powerful at times. Though when it comes down to it, its really a argument in usability, as in the end OpenGL and Direct3D are still making the same system calls.

Oh and lastly, you say that OpenGL portables only make up a single digit in the market, last time I checked Windows Mobile only had less than 10% of that market share, and the iPhone and iPod touch were both doing pretty good, both supporting OpenGL. Not to count out the DS and PSP

Thanks for the tip on the icon-size slider. I hadn't heard of that yet. It'll make me feel like I'm running SGI's IRIX from the mid-90s, which had the same thing. http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filemanager/irix53-1-1.png (left side)

I'll actually probably enjoy the feature a lot, but the mention immediately took my memory back to IRIX.

Things like this article make me ashamed to be a Mac owner. Especially the comment about getting rid of Vista. Things like that show nothing but ignorance and are playing right into the hands of the fanboys.

In the end, Vista is a great OS. Its still doing things that OS X can't, like full bitstream decoding of video.

In all honesty, Snow Leopard is a service pack. OpenCL? CUDA has been available for all platforms for years now and has some pretty decent support. Plus Windows 7 will have DirectX Compute. A little over 10 years ago OpenGL went up against DirectX. Remember which one won? Yeah, same thing will happen this time around too.

Grand Central? Windows had proper support for dual core processors years ago. Let's not forget that Windows actually had SMP support before Mac OS did back in the 90s.

"Hardware accelerated video playback"? Yeah, welcome to the 90s Apple. Windows offers full bitstream decoding for any video codec supported by your GPU. OS X, on the other hand, has HWMC and iDCT support for MPEG-2 and H.264 only. Everything else, including de-interlacing of DVD video, is done in software. On top of that, Apple is limiting this support to newer generation hardware even though plenty of older GPUs, like the 8600M GT, support it.

Let's not forget that Apple is intentionally limiting 64-bit kernel support as well. Which is incredibly ironic. Why? Well, my unibody MacBook came with drivers for 64-bit Windows. I can boot up and fully run, with no problems, 64-bit Windows (which has a fully 64-bit kernel and 64-bit drivers), yet it's basically been confirmed that the same MacBook won't boot with a 64-bit kernel. I'd also like to know why Apple limited the first round of 9400M systems (as well as the current plastic MacBook and Mac mini) to 4GB of RAM when the 9400M chipset supports 8GB.

It amazes me that Apple can get away with being so anti-consumer, and yet blogs like this praise Apple for their actions. Even Microsoft isn't as bad as Apple when it comes to control and being anti-consumer and forcing upgrades and coming up with BS reasons as to why older hardware that is perfectly capable of supporting new features won't get those new features and all of their competitors are adding those new features free of charge via software updates, yet Apple claims they have to charge for new updates! Yeah, run on sentence, I know.

> Dock Expose is just a gimmick to compete with Window's 7's dock-like taskbar, and I don't get it at all.

Have you used it? It's my favourite UI change in Snow Leopard, and is much more useful than it seems from a demo. What one might miss from the demos and reading about it is that minimized windows are also shown while making it clear that they're minimized instead of buried, and how moving from app to app in the dock to pull windows from that app works fluidly from showing all windows in expose.

It's a feature that has to be used to be appreciated, and if you do use it you'll see that this is more than a gimmick, it's what happens when a company actually watches how interaction happens and commits resources to improving it.

> I think Apple may, just may, be "getting it" when it comes to pricing lately.

Lol, I think Apple has been pretty savvy to what it can price things at. The may, just may, have figured out long ago that they can ignore the hoots of the informercial audience types who catcall and demand more for less money until everything costs $19.95 and has all the panache style of the slap chop :)

Out of all this I'm still waiting for a Snow Leopard review that doesn't just sound like an Apple announcement...
What does the so heard OpenCL change concretely ?
HOW MUCH is Quicktime X faster ? Will my MBP finally be able to read 1080p movies using 7% of the CPU as it does on the windows side, or is it just "better" that what the shameful Leopard video driver was doing ?

Please don't assume every Apple consumers will spend their money on things just because Steve said they were cool.
Would it be possible to have a real review in a few days (please) ?

"I'd happily pay $XXX to be rid of Vista!"

Seriously?? LAME. This type of nonsense needs to stop. Vista sucked 2 years ago, and Windows 7 is probably the best operating system I've ever used.

ok, ok, now I have to ask...

What's the big deal about Expose' on the dock?

I am a fairly new Mac(Book) user (since March), and so far, the most use I've gotten out of Expose' is when my son comes up to me and asks, "Daddy, can I press that button, please?" So I let him press F3, and he happily counts all of the windows that I have open. If I have been working at home for a while, with multiple PDF windows, perhaps a WORD document and/or a spreadsheet or two, the number of windows can be quite astounding.

I guess I've gotten pretty used to using command-tab and command-` to pop back and forth between applications and windows for a single application. But I feel like I'm missing the point for Expose'.

...and now I hear/read about folks who are excited to get Expose' on the dock.

Please tell me what I'm missing :-)

--wpd

Oh come now. Open CL support, Cocoa Finder, 64bit kernel support, and Grand Central are some of the biggest changes since the initial release of OS X. No service pack has implemented those kinds of changes to Windows. I suggest you read up on these changes if you're unaware of their importance.

I bought the family pack too, even though we have just two Intel Macs.

Sadly, I suspect the vast majority of 10.6 users will simply get the $29 single-user version, regardless of their current Mac OS X version or how many Macs they're going to use it on and not care.