Snow Leopard and the future is now! Apple is releasing Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 on August 28, 2009. For most of Carbon's customers, Snow Leopard will be a hard product to understand. There is no list of 100s of new features. There is no standout new feature such as Time Machine or Spotlight. There is no drastic visual difference or function of the Finder. But what is under the hood and what is being prepared for the future is revolutionary. So not only is the future now, but the future also looks very bright.

But despite our excitement about the new release, Carbon urges patience in our customer's desire to be on the bleeding edge. Compatibility and interoperation with existing deployments will need to be tested and validated. There will be compatibility problems that require software, and in some cases hardware upgrades. In the few weeks after the release of Snow Leopard, many third party developers will release compatibility patches and more information will be available after Snow Leopard ships. Don't be the first to break your environment, especially if you are running G4 and G5 systems.

The biggest news about Snow Leopard is the limitation in hardware support. Apple is officially drawing another line in the sand... and it is a big one. Snow Leopard marks the end of OS support for all PowerPC machines (G5s and G4s). For Carbon's customers this will have significant impact in unified OS deployments and complicated Open Directory and Xsan deployments that contain a mix of legacy G4 and G5 workstations, laptops, and Xserves. This does not mean that your PowerPC will stop working on Friday, but planning network deployments and OS rollouts will get more complicated in the near term.

From the software side, the release of Snow Leopard is also everyone else's excuse to close the book on PowerPC development. Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft will now release software for Intel processors only. Apple's recently released Final Cut Studio 3, Logic Pro, and Xsan 2.2. All of these products list Intel only as the system requirement. Additionally, Adobe has already announced that the upcoming Adobe CS5 Suite will run on Intel only. Microsoft has followed suite and announced the return of Outlook for the Mac. These are all signs that the future is now and PowerPC is decidedly the past.

But what about the features? Snow Leopard is all about the things that will make the platform better (especially in the future). The list of new and beneficial user facing features is hard to list or even find. However, the list of revolutionary under the hood changes are long and include an aggressive migration to 64-bit applications and kernel, application sandboxing, memory randomization, price reduction, product simplification, and a general house cleaning of the operating system and included applications. This was Apple's opportunity to look at the last decade of development of OS X and say, "let's review everything, clean it up, make it faster and better, and create a spring board for the future." From Carbon's perspective, Apple has exceeded all expectations.

And then there is the price and the product simplification. Snow Leopard will be $29 for Leopard users! And Snow Leopard Server is simplified to a single unlimited user license for $499, half the price of the previous version. Compare this product simplification and pricing to the complicated matrix of Windows 7. There has never been a better time to be a Mac user.

Carbon's recommendation with Snow Leopard follows our consistent approach from the last few years. For customer's who maintain your own deployments, use good judgement in the deployment of Snow Leopard. Waiting will not hurt you as your environment is functioning and productive now. For customers maintained by Carbon, don't expect a migration to Snow Leopard for a number of months as we let the industry shake out the bugs, incompatibilities, and other pitfalls that befall a new OS release.

For customers interested in more information about Snow Leopard, please continue reading and review the attached links. For sales questions, please contact your Gravity Systems Sales Representative. For technical questions, talk to your Carbon Technologies Support Technician.

Technical and Feature Review

Snow Leopard is a marketing professionals nightmare. The product is exceptional in both its technical advancements and it vision of the future. But the technical advances are all abstract concepts. There are no glitzy new features. There are no fun animations to watch. No pretty colors to hypnotize the audience. Instead, it is technical details that mean nothing to most consumers.

Despite the challenge of marketing to consumers, Snow Leopard will gain many admirers in the graphics, video, medical, scientific, and software development communities. In addition, Snow Leopard will continue the trend of drawing more and more Windows users to the Mac platform. Stability, performance, exceptional hardware, and unparalleled ease of use will drive consumers and businesses to the platform is ever greater numbers. But what is the consumer and professional getting with this purchase?

Snow Leopard is all about getting the most out of your current (and future) hardware. Apple's new features, 64 bit (almost) everywhere, GPU acceleration (OpenCL) including activation of the H.264 hardware decoder, and Grand Central Dispatch are all behind the scenes features that most end users will not even know they are using. But these features set the foundation for unparalleled performance on the Macintosh platform and users of all levels will be enjoying the fruits of these features in nearly every task performed on the Mac. Below is a brief description of these new features.

64-bit Computing

There is a lot of confusion about 64-bit and what it can do for Mac users. Many don't realize that Apple started the transition to 64-bit back in Tiger (actually with the release of the G5 and 10.3.9). But it is with Snow Leopard that the transition is nearly complete. (After all, when Stickies is a 64-bit application, you know the transition is near done.) Now it is a waiting game to see Apple and third party developers like Adobe move products to 64-bit.

But what does 64-bit really do for you? The simple answer is that it allows the addressing of more memory per process (up to a maximum of 16 terabytes (!) of RAM). Current Mac Pro systems can have up to 32 GB of RAM but existing applications can only address up to 4 GB of RAM per process. For graphic designers, photo editors, scientists, and video professionals, the ability to exceed 4 GB of RAM per process will be a significant boast in performance. Imagine being able to load an entire Final Cut sequence into RAM? This is the promise of 64-bit.

All is not rosy in the 64-bit world however. Please keep in mind that not all applications will benefit from being 64-bit. So don't get caught up in a bit argument. Unless you plan on opening a 6 GB Word document, a 64-bit version of Microsoft Word will likely do you no benefit. And to Apple's credit, Snow Leopard will run older 32-bit applications right next to modern 64-bit applications with no performance penalty.

OpenCL and Graphic Cards

For long time Mac users, you can remember with pride your decade old PowerMac 8600 with 512 MB of RAM and a 300 MHz processor. Well, the video card in the latest low end iMac has 512 MB of RAM and a 1400 MHz processor! To say that video card technology has advanced is an understatement. And until recently, most of that power has gone untapped.

Snow Leopard is designed to allow developers to tap the power of the video card for more than just displaying graphics. Many tasks in the graphic design and video industries lend themselves to parallel processing tasks and the graphics processing unit is a fertile playground for handling those tasks. As new software versions are released, we can expect significant performance increases as tasks are divided across the CPU and GPU.

Grand Central Dispatch

And then there is Grand Central Dispatch. For years, Apple has been shipping either dual processor or dual core systems. As a matter of fact, every Mac shipping today has at least two cores. However, the ability to properly utilize the second, third, or eighth processor core has been elusive at best. The sad reality is that most of the machine's cores sit idle most of the time.

Snow Leopard's goal is to begin the transition to multi-processor, multi-core aware applications that efficiently utilize all of the machine resources. Grand Central Dispatch in combination with OpenCL are revolutionary steps to vastly improve utilization of existing hardware and one can only images the capabilities of tomorrows devices.

Unfortunately, it will take a number of months to see many of these technologies in play. Developers need to upgrade products to take advantage of these features. Even Apple has missed the opportunity with one of their largest applications suites, Final Cut Studio. It remains a 32-bit application and will not get OpenCL and Grand Central benefits until the next version.