'Snow Leopard' spotted [u]
June 4th 2008
Ars Technica has confirmed most of the details on yesterday's OS X 10.6 report: final delivery at Macworld San Francisco and no support for legacy PPC Macs, Intel only.
[T]he release is heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability. With Apple's current (and future) focus on smaller, thinner, and more mobile devices, this move makes perfect sense. Things like the MacBook Air, iPhone, iPod touch and other mysterious devices that have yet to be announced need better performance for better battery life, and that's definitely something Apple wants to excel at in the years to come.
Here kitty, kitty, kitty.
Source: MaxWaugh.com
Ars unnamed source did not confirm initial release or even discussion of OS X 10.6 at next week's WWDC, though it stands to reason that the company will at least talk about it.
Ars does add, however, that the next release of OS X will be named "Snow Leopard," and that Carbon could be on its way out and that Apple "may eventually wrap everything in Cocoa."
[u] Daring Fireball adds some perspective to Ars' Snow Leopard write up:
The "pure Cocoa" stuff is about additional Cocoa wrappers for APIs that currently are only available in Carbon (and/or at the BSD level) -- more stuff that developers can do using Objective-C APIs. It is not about dropping Carbon from the OS, which would make no sense. It's a message for developers, not a description of Snow Leopard. [u]
Editor's note: All very reasonable and understandable. Nevertheless, unceremoniously "dumping" PPC users, of which there are millions, will certainly raise howls of protest.
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