Why Snow Leopard Is Truly Disruptive

Forbes Magazine ^ | 08.27.09 | Brian Caulfield

[Swordmaker]

Reviewers who shrug at Apple's latest update to OS X are missing the point.

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- The reviews for Apple's latest Operating System, OS X Snow Leopard, have been written. And, well, they've missed the point.

Most have noted that Snow Leopard offers a few new features, performs a little quicker and then go on to spend a few hundred words delivering the written equivalent of a shrug. "It isn't a big breakthrough for average users," The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg writes.

Here's the breakthrough: Apple's ( AAPL - news - people ) OS X, Snow Leopard, which goes on sale Friday, uses less code than its predecessor to do the same job. It's a remarkable act of discipline that has broken a decades-long trend toward ever more bloated operating system software.

To be sure, that's possible because Snow Leopard marks the end of Apple's migration from PowerPC processors to Intel ( INTC - news - people ) chips. That means Apple could tear out all the code used to support those older processors.

What's telling, however, is what Apple didn't do: It didn't load up its new operating system with new features. To be sure, OS X allows programmers to speed up an application's performance by delegating work to a computer's graphics chips, or chopping work into small bits so it can be chewed up more efficiently by today's multi-core processors. The user experience has also been refined in scores of small ways that users will be stumbling upon for months.

What they will notice first, however, is that Snow Leopard takes up less hard drive space and performs tasks more quickly on the same hardware.

[Swordmaker]

Why Snow Leopard is a big thing... from Forbes Magazine —PING!

Mac OSX.6 Snow Leopard Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[savedbygrace]

Even though it’s advertised as an Upgrade, it’s actually a full retail install disc. That means you can install Snow on a freshly formatted Mac OS Extended volume without a previous OS installed on it.

Snow comes with QuickTime X, but if you do a custom install, you can check the box to install QuickTime v7.6.3, which you will want to do if you run Final Cut Studio, which needs QT7.

[altair]

Um, considering how X11 got broken in 10.5, the last word I want to see describing an upgrade is “disruptive”.

[Terpfen]

Even though it’s advertised as an Upgrade, it’s actually a full retail install disc.

Of course. It's not an upgrade in the Windows sense of the word.

[SunkenCiv]

...uses less code than its predecessor to do the same job. It's a remarkable act of discipline that has broken a decades-long trend toward ever more bloated operating system software... because Snow Leopard marks the end of Apple's migration from PowerPC processors to Intel... It didn't load up its new operating system with new features... OS X allows programmers to speed up an application's performance by delegating work to a computer's graphics chips, or chopping work into small bits so it can be chewed up more efficiently by today's multi-core processors. The user experience has also been refined in scores of small ways that users will be stumbling upon for months... Snow Leopard takes up less hard drive space and performs tasks more quickly on the same hardware.

Smaller code wouldn't be from dropping PPC code, apart from the size of the installer needed.

[The Great RJ]

A big difference from Microbloat’s new operating systems that almost dim the lights in your home while running. Just consider the minimum RAM required to run Microsoft’s OS evolutions. Windows 98 would run comfortably with 128 MB of RAM, Windows XP needed about 1 GB, Windows Vista ...moves like rigor mortis without 3 GB of RAM.

[dayglored]

> Um, considering how X11 got broken in 10.5, the last word I want to see describing an upgrade is “disruptive”.

Yeah, I had exactly the same initial reaction to that headline. "Oh, cr@p, not this again!"

I read that Apple removed the System Pref control of firewall logs, including viewing. That kind of "you don't need to know that any more" stuff is annoying too, and Apple does it a lot.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"I read that Apple removed the System Pref control of firewall logs, including viewing. That kind of "you don't need to know that any more" stuff is annoying too, and Apple does it a lot."

I'd prefer they put things like that in an "advanced" control panel available only to admins, or something. But they remove stuff like that because of their prerogative to control their own support costs. Most users have no idea what such logs are all about, and from what I've seen the notion of a firewall is nonsensical to too many users. If the urban legends are true of people calling computer manufacturers to complain that their computer's "cupholder" (CD drive tray) broke, I can sympathize.

Maybe they figure that anyone capable of understanding these issues can find their way around a Unix system and don't need a GUI to hold their hands. Who knows.


...Meanwhile, I installed Snow Leopard yesterday, and there is a palpable difference on my three-year-old Macbook Pro. Nothing broke, by the way. Everything works, just a smidgen better. The difference is mostly in the moment-by-moment fluidity of the system. The GUI is a little snappier (though it was already snappy), a little more fluid (though it was always fluid), a little more thoughtfully put-together (though that of course is something for which the Mac has always excelled). Heavy-duty processing is no faster on my 32-bit Core Duo machine than under Leopard, though in 64-bit mode on a Core 2 Duo or Xeon unit there might be a difference in high-horsepower operations, assuming the user knows how to boot into 64 bit mode (IIRC, hold down the "6" and "4" keys during bootup).

The bigger differences differences will come as applications are updated to take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch, the low-level enhancement few pundits mention that manages and leverages multicore architectures. That's something that authors such as this ignore completely since they aren't seeing it in action yet and basically have no clue as to its import in today's multicore world. In my eye, it is the single most disruptive thing about Snow Leopard. As developers start to play with that, stand back.

As someone who has been using Win7 for several months on several machines, along with WinXP of course, my sense is that Snow Leopard is well ahead of the Windows architecture in all respects, and it will pull farther ahead in the coming months as developers take advantage of its new under-the-hood architecture. Snow Leopard is a much bigger step forward in personal computing than it might have seemed on the day of its introduction. Just watch.

[VRWCRick]

I am running Snow Leopard on this Mac. I installed it last night. It took just over an hour to upgrade from Leopard on this 2Ghz Mac Mini and everything works just great. It cost me all of 25 bucks.

Try doing that with Microsoft anything!!

[Question_Assumptions]

Never upgraded to 10.5. I think this might be a good time to upgrade. I’m supposed to buy the upgrade box with iLife and iWork and I’m probably going to do that once I get a sense of how well Canvas X works. Since the owner of that software is no longer maintaining their Mac version, I can’t count on them fixing bugs caused by the new OS but, so far, it sounds like it’s usable.

[stripes1776]

The bigger differences differences will come as applications are updated to take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch, the low-level enhancement few pundits mention that manages and leverages multicore architectures...In my eye, it is the single most disruptive thing about Snow Leopard.

Why is this a big deal? Don't other systems offer the resources of a multicore architecture?

As developers start to play with that, stand back.

How are these changes going to effect the user's experience of these programs?

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Why is this a big deal? Don't other systems offer the resources of a multicore architecture?"

Not really, not for general purpose computing. Until now there has been very limited and inefficient use of multicore resources. Parallel processing is not mainstream yet. No less than Bill Gates has spotlighted the programming challenges of multicore processor architectures as the next big thing in programming, for example in http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800464229_499495_NT_1f5f65bc.HTM. He's right. There are very few programming environments which do parallelism in any sane manner or make it accessible to everyday programmers. LabVIEW is one, and pretty much reserved to the scientific and technical communities. High-end PC graphics processors have multiple parallel processing units at work on their chores, too. But so far I can't have a core or two at work running Windows and a core or two at work running Mac OS X on my laptop. Shortly, that will be possible. Right now a chore like that (which describes my laptop's activities as I type, as I'm a heavy user of virtual machines in my work) is handled by time-slicing, leading to contention and other issues. The same is true for other multitasking you enjoy everyday. Once the software is in place to really leverage multiple cores as if they were separate computers, all sorts of cool things will become possible.

"How are these changes going to effect the user's experience of these programs?"

Well, for starters, note that CPU clock speeds have plateaued in recent years. There are physical reasons for that; heat generation and interference between traces on the chip and capacitance and yield issues in the fab and... all sorts of stuff. Much easier to double the processing power of a microprocessor by putting multiple cores in it. Or quaduple it. Or octuple it. But, as I mentioned, the software isn't quite there yet-- doubling the cores doesn't come close to doubling the throughput, yet. That will change, and the astonishing ramp-up in PC capabilities that we've all enjoyed over the past two decades will kick up a notch. You'll see things like immersive-reality-based entertainment and personal genomic medicine as a result. It'll be wonderful, assuming Obama doesn't have us all in bread lines in six months.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"I’m supposed to buy the upgrade box with iLife and iWork and I’m probably going to do that once I get a sense of how well Canvas X works."

That's the party line, but the $29 upgrade is a full install of OS X itself. You don't absolutely need the box with all those bells-and-whistles apps in order to benefit from Snow Leopard's other advancements. If you're running pre-10.5, that would include Time Machine for you. A wonderful backup utility. Saved me arse a couple days ago when I whoopsed an important file.

[altair]

I read that Apple removed the System Pref control of firewall logs, including viewing. That kind of "you don't need to know that any more" stuff is annoying too, and Apple does it a lot.

Yeah, but "firewall" is a misnaming. You can't have a firewall on-host and it isn't anywhere near as secure as a real firewall (dedicated host between the local net and the internet that provides network policy and logging).

The Cisco VPN client doesn't play nicely with the logs. This matters to me, because it makes the logs essentially useless, but ...

[altair]

No less than Bill Gates has spotlighted the programming challenges of multicore processor architectures as the next big thing in programming

Um, considering all the history of Microsoft and how Gates had to be dragged kicking & screaming into the networked world (thankfully "inventing" a system that would bring about botnets, zombies and DDOS attacks), I'd consider him one of the least qualified sources to look for insight into the road ahead.

As a comparison, as of about a year and a half ago, the Linux kernel was running on systems with 4096 CPUs.

[stripes1776]

Until now there has been very limited and inefficient use of multicore resources. Parallel processing is not mainstream yet...

OK, I understand that there are different ways to write a multi-threaded program. One is time-slicing as you say. This gives the illusion of several things running at the same time. But a single processor is just jumping back and forth rapidly between processes. The timing is still linear.

And then there is the parallel processing that you are talking about. Multiple processors are running at the same time. But it is my understanding that it is very difficult to write a program to take advantage of this parallel processing. Is that true?

You'll see things like immersive-reality-based entertainment and personal genomic medicine as a result.

What is immersive-reality-based entertainment? What is person genomic medicine?

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"And then there is the parallel processing that you are talking about. Multiple processors are running at the same time. But it is my understanding that it is very difficult to write a program to take advantage of this parallel processing. Is that true?"

With the exceptions I've noted, yes. That's pretty much what Bill Gates was talking about. Steve Jobs also once complained that nobody knows how to program these things. (Both are wrong, though: the problem is the linear, textual programming paradigm. I mentioned LabVIEW before... it's a graphical programming environment, and you code your logic in a flowchart-like way that makes branching and parallelism very easy to configure. It's pretty astonishing stuff... and it's been around for more than 20 years. Now that multi-core processors are here, they plug right into that paradigm. But, to date, it's been reserved for scientific, technical and instrumentation programming.) Grand Central Dispatch provides functionality to distribute processes among the CPU cores (chips-within-a-chip) for general purpose applications.

"What is immersive-reality-based entertainment? What is person genomic medicine?"

Immersive relatity means a mash-up of 3D, tactile feedback, surround sound, etc. Games and movies you're present in and interact with. Think baby-steps towards the holodeck in the Star Trek series. Needless to say, advanced gaming is highly compute-intensive and will stay that way as richer and more lifelike simulations are programmed. Personal genomic medicine refers to recent revelations that many diseases have their basis in genetic function. Right now, if you get (for example) some forms of lung cancer or leukemia, it's a crapshoot which therapy will work best for you with the least side-effects. Individualized genetic fingerprints, correlated on a vast scale with others', can illuminate which therapies are likeliest to work for your particular case. The technology is almost there but is extraordinarily compute-intensive. In a couple years, 32-core CPUs will be common, and the associative analyses necessary to make this happen will be much more tractable thanks to software like Grand Central Dispatch. These are just a couple of examples that come to mind... and if there's one thing we've learned from the personal computer experience, it's that the future will always surprise us.

[Richard Kimball]

Sword, I just upgraded to Snow Leopard on my main 24” iMac and am upgrading a Macbook as I type.
A couple of things:
First, when I got done upgrading the 24”, I had about 30 gig more HD space. I don’t know why, except possibly it deleted temp files in addition to having a smaller footprint.
It’s faster.
The upgrade was painless. Put the disk in and install. It asks about three questions and rolls. Takes about an hour and you don’t have to tend it. This is a big change from my days upgrading Windows (note, I haven’t upgraded a Windows machine in about five years) but MS used to drive me crazy upgrading cause they would have pop up screens every ten minutes or so that would say stuff like “Windows will now install drivers” with a single button popup that said “Okay.” You couldn’t do anything but click okay, but you still had to sit there and watch the installation, as it would come to a grinding halt until you clicked okay.
Biggest thing: On all the blogs, I’ve been reading that you could only upgrade from Leopard with the $30 package. This is wrong. My laptop has Tiger, and it upgrades fine with the $30 package. I bought it from Best Buy, and the Geek Squad guy said it would install on a blank HD also. I questioned this, as all the blogs said so. When I checked the package, though, it didn’t say upgrade anywhere, and it installs fine.

[stripes1776]

...the associative analyses necessary to make this happen will be much more tractable thanks to software like Grand Central Dispatch.

OK, thanks for the explanation.