Several Mac websites are already bemoaning Apple's announced
delay of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) until October. At Low End
Mac, we're not at all disappointed.
Apple claims the delay is because they reassigned some of the
OS X staff to make sure the iPhone is ready for release in
June - a worthy goal, as this is yet another new market for
Apple.
OS X Prehistory
Mac OS X has its roots in NeXT Computers, a company founded by
Steve Jobs after leaving Apple in 1985. NeXTstep, the NeXT
operating system, in turn was rooted in the Mach kernel and
BSD
Unix, so its roots go back to the early 1970 when Bell Labs had
Berkeley students help build and tweak Unix.
NeXTstep was quite revolutionary, as it combined a Unix
operating system with a Postscript-based display engine and object
oriented programming on a personal computer. This was a huge step
away from the single-user operating systems with bitmapped displays
that everyone else was using in the mid-80s.
NeXTstep
first ran on the NeXT Cube, a 25 MHz
68030-based computer with a 4-shade grayscale display. This made it
comparable in power to the Macintosh
IIci, Apple's most powerful computer in 1989.
NeXTstep evolved and was eventually ported to Intel x86
architecture, and at the end of the NeXT era, there was a project
underway to port it to the PowerPC as well.
Looking to replace the aging "classic" Mac OS and running into
all sorts of problems with its in-house projects, Apple acquired
NeXT in 1996, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company he cofounded
and making NeXTstep the core upon which the new Mac OS would be
built.
The OS X Timeline
There were two primary projects that had to be undertaken before
OS X could be launched. First, it had to be compiled for the
PowerPC CPUs used in Apple's Macintosh computers. Second, there had
to be a way to run programs written for the classic Mac OS.
By late 2000 (less than four years after Apple absorbed NeXT),
Apple was ready to release a preview of OS X. The US$30 public
beta showed off new technologies such as the Quartz rendering
engine (rather than NeXT's display Postscript), the Aqua interface,
the Dock, and Classic Mode, which allowed OS X users to run
pre-X applications.
The beta had some rough edges, and Apple paid attention to user
feedback. The first release version of OS X, 10.0 (a.k.a.
Cheetah) came to market on March 24, 2001. Cheetah was robust,
showed OS X's potential, and wasn't quite ready for prime time. It
was slow, incomplete, and there were few apps available for it.
Six months later, Apple released Puma (OS X 10.1), which was far
more responsive, added features such as DVD playback, and was
available as a free upgrade to those using 10.0. Puma was the first
really usable version of OS X, and Apple acknowledged this by
making it the default OS on Macs beginning in January 2002.
The OS X Era
We can consider that the beginning of the OS X era, as until
then Mac users had to choose to boot their new Macs into the new
OS. In 2002, users had to choose to boot Mac OS 9; OS X
was the default.
In August 2002, Apple released Jaguar (OS X 10.2), which made
several improvements. Quartz Extreme
improved graphics rendering on Macs with at least 16 MB of
dedicated video memory and AGP graphics. Address Book and iChat
were new features, and the first version of Safari was designed to
run on 10.2.
Although some people still use Puma, for the most part it has
been replaced by Panther as the low-end version of choice for
OS X users.
It was 14 months later that Apple released the next major
update. Panther (Mac OS X 10.3), unleashed in October 2003,
further improved system performance, toned down some of the Aqua
graphics, and included Safari as the default browser. iChat gained
video support, Fast User Switching allowed multiple user sessions
to be open concurrently, and Exposé made it easier to find
buried windows.
Panther is generally considered the most efficient version of
OS X, as 10.4 added some resource hungry features. Panther was
also the first version of OS X to drop support for some older
Macs: the beige Power Mac G3 and
WallStreet PowerBooks.
Tiger Today
From 10.0 to 10.1 took six months. From 10.1 to 10.2 required
11. From 10.2 to 10.3 spanned 14 months. And Tiger (OS X 10.4)
replaced Panther in April 2005, 18 months after Panther had been
released.
Tiger added a lot of new features: Spotlight to index your
files, the Dashboard with its widgets, smart folders, Automator,
Core Image, and Core Video among them.
Apple dropped support for Macs without built-in FireWire ports
and only provided Tiger in DVD form. This meant that the tray-loading iMacs, Lombard PowerBook, and early clamshell iBooks were not officially
supported.
A lot of longtime Mac users who migrated to Tiger wondered what
the big deal was. Spotlight and Dashboard hogged resources, and
several programs were written to disable them. Although Tiger added
a lot of powerful new features, in some ways it was a step
backwards for performance.
The Intel Transition
In 2006, Apple moved from PowerPC processors - which it had used
since 1993 - to Intel Core processors. At the same time, Steve Jobs
revealed that Apple had been developing an Intel version of
OS X for as long as Apple had owned NeXT.
The new Intel processors, most of them dual-core, provided a lot
more power than the PowerPC G4 and G5 processors, and OS X
10.4.4 was the first release version of the Mac OS to support Intel
CPUs.
Spotting Leopard
The big question since the Macworld Expo in January (and even
before that) was when Apple would release Leopard (Mac OS X
10.5). Many speculated that it would come out in May - or perhaps
in June or July to coincide with Apple's Worldwide Developer
Conference.
Today we finally know when Leopard will be released: October
2007. That's 30 months after Tiger. Two-and-a-half years. That's
the longest time between major OS updates in Apple history.
The benefit of this is that Tiger has become the dominant
version of OS X, and by sticking with the same version through
the Intel transition, Apple has made it that much easier for
developers to port existing apps to the new hardware.
The benefit to longtime OS X users is that we'll have avoided
Apple's US$129 "OS X tax" for 2-1/2 years.
Then there's the six of one, half dozen of the other reality
that we're seeing more and more apps and utilities that require a
version of Tiger, which has forced many Panther users to make the
switch (or else be left behind with older versions of their
software).
Leopard will introduce some big changes and some new features
that developers are already very excited about. Just as we now have
many apps that require Tiger, there will be Leopard-only apps as
soon as 10.5 ships.
We're looking forward to that, but we're also wondering what
hardware Apple will leave behind. This is Low End Mac, after all,
and we'd hate to see the blue & white
G3, slot-loading iMacs, and
PowerBook Pismo left behind. (Along
the the FireWire iBook, these are the models most likely to lose
support.)
Time will tell.
But the best thing is that Tiger will still work on the Macs it
works on today, and all the apps being used on Tiger will still
work on Tiger in the years ahead, so if your hardware isn't
supported with Leopard, you've lost nothing.
And then there's Ryan Rempel, who has been developing XPostFacto
for years as the best tool for letting older Macs run versions of
OS X that Apple no longer support. Keep up the good work,
Ryan!
Parallels
I hate to say this, but this parallels Microsoft's development
cycle for Windows. Windows 1.0 shipped in 1985, 2.0 in 1987, and
3.0 in 1990. Windows 3.1 came out in 1992, and Windows 95 arrived
in August 1995. Then came Windows 98 in 1998, followed by a Second
Edition in 1999. The final version in this family tree was Windows
Me (Millennium Edition), an incremental improvement to Win98SE that
was released in 2000 and adopted parts of the Windows 2000
interface.
Microsoft also developed a pro/server version of Windows, and
Windows NT 3.1 was released in 1993. NT 3.5 arrived in 1994, and
4.0 in 1996. The next product in this line was Windows 2000 shipped
in February 2000.
Win2K was superseded by Windows XP in October 2001, and it
remained the shipping version of Windows until this winter, when
Windows Vista was released (Nov. 2006 to manufacturers, Jan. 2007
to consumers). There was only one significant improvement to XP
during its five years on the market; Service Pack 2 was released in
August 2004.
Microsoft moved from a short development cycle to increasingly
long ones. 2-3 years between major upgrades turned into 5 years as
Vista development dragged out longer and longer. And Apple's
OS X development cycle has lengthened in the same way,
although not to the same extent. Instead of 5 years between
versions, Apple will have only 2-1/2 between Tiger and Leopard.
Still, it shows how much work it is to create a major OS update
as operating systems grow more complex and feature-laden. Will it
be 3-4 years beyond Leopard before OS X 10.6 arrives? And will
Vista be the default version of Windows for 7-10 years?
Whatever, we're happy with what we have. Panther was wonderful,
and Tiger is doing just fine by us. As nice as it will be to see
Leopard ship in October, we're content with the status quo. Our
hardware, software, and OS are all working just fine, thank you
very much.
Sure, we'll buy a copy of Leopard - maybe even another family
pack - and we'll have a lot of fun exploring the new features, but
our old Macs are nice and productive with what we already have.
Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986,
sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and
has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.
