Mac OS X 10.4.9 (8P2111) Seeded to Developers

[Manic Mouse]

Exactly! Release just before Vista and the excitement lasts a few days, until Vista comes out. Release just after Vista and there will be hardly any excitement because all the focus will be on the OS 90% of the world uses. Release at least a month (or maybe two) after Vista and OS X could be the answer for the people that ended up being disappointed with Vista.

The problem with this logic is that it simply will not work in the real world. Very few people, no matter how disappointed they are with Vista, are willing to go out a few months later and drop a grand or two on a new computer (in this case a Mac). Most people buy a new computer once every five years, if even.

There will be a flurry of new purchases whenever Vista comes out, and every one of those purchases will be a lost "switcher" for the next three to five years minimum. Unless of course Apple get 10.5 out the door and have a good "new" alternative to Vista, with features like Time Machine that everyone can use and Vista lacks.

Apple need to get Leopard out before, or near, Vista and push it hard as a better alternative to Vista. People are ready to change from XP to a new OS and Apple can capitalise on this or they can miss the boat by a few months and lose a lot of potential switchers because of Vista.

 

[displaced]

Apple need to get Leopard out before, or near, Vista and push it hard as a better alternative to Vista. People are ready to change from XP to a new OS and Apple can capitalise on this or they can miss the boat by a few months and lose a lot of potential switchers because of Vista.

I'm not so sure. The bad PR of a flaky initial release for Leopard would be much worse than being released 16 or 20 weeks after Vista.

Sure, there most likely will be some spike of PC purchases after Vista's release (although the PC press are currently rather unsure about how significant that'll be). However, people who are buying a new machine specifically to obtain Vista are probably rather dead-set on owning and using Vista regardless.

From what I've seen of Vista, it's largely a catch-up with what OS X has been doing for over a year now. All of the comparisons between Vista and OS X have been based on Tiger, and Tiger's held its own. What we need from Leopard is a solid, interesting release with features that Microsoft have not put into Vista.

Upon release, Leopard needs to do three things: 1) Make those who were dead-set on using Vista feel a little green. 2) Confirm to those potential switchers who were holding off on adopting Vista to see what Leopard brought that their hunch was right, and 3) Appeal to people who simply weren't paying attention to either Vista or Leopard and show that OS X is a sound alternative.

 

[mkrishnan]

People that think that things have to stop at 10.4.9 should check out the scanner program, VueScan. It is up to version 8.3.86.

Do they have any plans to make it not suck anytime in the near future?

 

[tpjunkie]

This update can't come out soon enough - serious bug in 10.4!

At my office (a large multination corporation with HQ in manhattan) we support 150 macs (compared with about 4,000 pcs), and we have several xServes running Tiger server. Last week we discovered a major bug related to the HFS+ filesystem, which rendered a fully redundant RAID completely inoperable, and just connecting it to another machine will cause that machine to crash. The bug occurs if a journalled disk becomes too full, and the journal file becomes corrupt. At this point nothing bad will happen, although you may notice a slow down of drive performance. If you then delete a large enough file or directory (in our case, 8 GB) something wonky happens with the journal file, causing catastrophic failure on any OS X machine the disk is connected to.

We spoke to Apple about the issue, which they were able to replicate. They told us they were working on the issue with the level 1 engineers (the guys who coded the OS in the first place) and would have a fix out in 10.4.9...so for me, it really can't come quickly enough!

 

[Sam0r]

I really hope to god this update fixes the flash problems I've been having.

Seriously, adobe flash is just SO slow, I've messed with flash on a 500mhz XP machine, and it was much faster than it is on my 1ghz PB.

I've got many many more problems, but I'm buying my new laptop in january, and because of these problems, I'm tempted to buy a sony.

Another thing, perhaps core image related, that when I have my external monitor plugged in, the whole system just grinds to a halt, its useless trying to run photoshop.

Try that on a pc, and it loves it.

 

[Squozen]

...or you could try buying a modern Mac?

 

[iW00t]

...or you could try buying a modern Mac?

Why? The PDF standard has not really changed since many years ago

 

[Sam0r]

...or you could try buying a modern Mac?

I'm not buying a whole new laptop just because flash is badly coded. I've ordered myself a MBP now. But I'll probably be spending 90% of the time in windows.

 

[mkrishnan]

I'm not buying a whole new laptop just because flash is badly coded. I've ordered myself a MBP now. But I'll probably be spending 90% of the time in windows.

Do you have Flash 9 on your PB, out of curiosity? I have definitely observed that Flash is not well-optimized for Macs, but it seems a lot better than Flash 8....

 

[Compile 'em all]

At my office (a large multination corporation with HQ in manhattan) we support 150 macs (compared with about 4,000 pcs), and we have several xServes running Tiger server. Last week we discovered a major bug related to the HFS+ filesystem, which rendered a fully redundant RAID completely inoperable, and just connecting it to another machine will cause that machine to crash. The bug occurs if a journalled disk becomes too full, and the journal file becomes corrupt. At this point nothing bad will happen, although you may notice a slow down of drive performance. If you then delete a large enough file or directory (in our case, 8 GB) something wonky happens with the journal file, causing catastrophic failure on any OS X machine the disk is connected to.

We spoke to Apple about the issue, which they were able to replicate. They told us they were working on the issue with the level 1 engineers (the guys who coded the OS in the first place) and would have a fix out in 10.4.9...so for me, it really can't come quickly enough!

This is very interesting. Where they able to replicate it on both Tiger and Tiger server or just the server?

 

[Sam0r]

Do you have Flash 9 on your PB, out of curiosity? I have definitely observed that Flash is not well-optimized for Macs, but it seems a lot better than Flash 8....

Flash 9

 

[mkrishnan]

Flash 9

If you have a particularly egregious website for me to check out, I'd be happy to check one out for you. Weird.... But then maybe my impressions are just distorted. And I should also point out that adblock reduces a substantial amount of the Flash burden on my Macs... so I'm only ever seeing flash that I want to see.

 

[Sam0r]

If you have a particularly egregious website for me to check out, I'd be happy to check one out for you. Weird.... But then maybe my impressions are just distorted. And I should also point out that adblock reduces a substantial amount of the Flash burden on my Macs... so I'm only ever seeing flash that I want to see.

http://www.sonyericsson.com/walkman/index.aspx?cc=gb&lc=en
Try that, It just kills safari. Youtube, however, seems perfectly fine... Although if I watch a youtube video using flock (firefox), I get jerky playback, but thats probably just flock.

 

[mkrishnan]

http://www.sonyericsson.com/walkman/index.aspx?cc=gb&lc=en
Try that, It just kills safari. Youtube, however, seems perfectly fine... Although if I watch a youtube video using flock (firefox), I get jerky playback, but thats probably just flock.

And people have anger issues about Motorola? That site in itself is enough to make me never, ever want to own a Sony phone.

I tried it on two readily accessible computers:

iBook G4 / 800 MHz / 640 MB RAM / 10.4.8 / FF2 and Safari (mine)
HP Celeron 2.7 GHz / 1 GB RAM / XP / SP 2 / IE7 (my parents)

I take no responsibility for the setup of the HP... I had to close about six annoying things that pop up to supposedly help me on boot.

But, what I observed was that the website was comparable in terms of speed in Safari and Firefox, and I estimate only about 20%-30% faster on the PC / IE7 than it was on my computer, based both on the speed of the main rotating wheel and the responsiveness of the pop-ups and action items.

The Mac had Firefox with about four tabs and Adium running in the background while I tested it on Safari (and all of that minus Safari when I tested it in Firefox). The PC had only IE7 (single tab) plus whatever background crap my parents installed that I did not catch and stop. After I post this, for giggles, I will quit everything on my iBook, open only Safari, and just run this website.

EDIT: When I did that, I feel that the iBook was only marginally slower than my experience on the (unoptimized, again) PC with IE7. It was definitely slightly slower... I estimate maybe 10% slower? But the overall responsiveness felt fairly comparable.

I'd say this isn't bad, considering I'd expect that computer to be faster than mine anyways. I don't have my 2 GHz iMac G5 here to test.... And I have no Intel Mac.

But, it definitely wasn't substantially more bogged down on the PC than my Mac, and it wasn't unusable at all on my Mac... I mean... short of the fact that it was designed from the ground up to be a rotating cloud that kills brain cells.

So hmmm... I wonder if there's something unique to your computer?

 

[tpjunkie]

This is very interesting. Where they able to replicate it on both Tiger and Tiger server or just the server?

I'm not sure, but seeing as it's an issue with how the OS communicates with a volume it's attempting to mount, I'd imagine both Tiger and Tiger server could be affected. We also found out that while the fix should make it into 10.4.9, it most likely will not make it into 10.5.0, and will probably come out in 10.5.1 under leopard.

 

[Sam0r]

And people have anger issues about Motorola? That site in itself is enough to make me never, ever want to own a Sony phone.

I tried it on two readily accessible computers:

iBook G4 / 800 MHz / 640 MB RAM / 10.4.8 / FF2 and Safari (mine)
HP Celeron 2.7 GHz / 1 GB RAM / XP / SP 2 / IE7 (my parents)

I take no responsibility for the setup of the HP... I had to close about six annoying things that pop up to supposedly help me on boot.

But, what I observed was that the website was comparable in terms of speed in Safari and Firefox, and I estimate only about 20%-30% faster on the PC / IE7 than it was on my computer, based both on the speed of the main rotating wheel and the responsiveness of the pop-ups and action items.

The Mac had Firefox with about four tabs and Adium running in the background while I tested it on Safari (and all of that minus Safari when I tested it in Firefox). The PC had only IE7 (single tab) plus whatever background crap my parents installed that I did not catch and stop. After I post this, for giggles, I will quit everything on my iBook, open only Safari, and just run this website.

EDIT: When I did that, I feel that the iBook was only marginally slower than my experience on the (unoptimized, again) PC with IE7. It was definitely slightly slower... I estimate maybe 10% slower? But the overall responsiveness felt fairly comparable.

I'd say this isn't bad, considering I'd expect that computer to be faster than mine anyways. I don't have my 2 GHz iMac G5 here to test.... And I have no Intel Mac.

But, it definitely wasn't substantially more bogged down on the PC than my Mac, and it wasn't unusable at all on my Mac... I mean... short of the fact that it was designed from the ground up to be a rotating cloud that kills brain cells.

So hmmm... I wonder if there's something unique to your computer?

I'm not sure. I used to have a DP 1ghz G4, and funnily enough, it was worse on that... But with that I was running at 1680x1050 which bogged it down immencely.

I'll start a new thread later about this, don't really want to fill this thread up with crap.

Although, when this update is out, I'll report back and let you know if it helped flash at all.

Also, another thing I've noticed, mac's seem to suffer a lot more with higher resolutions than pc's do, at work I run a celeron 2.8 with two dell 2005FPW's, and it copes perfectly fine using Intel's GMA900 with an ADD2 card. Its pretty upsetting to see a dual 1ghz G4 struggle with one 2005fpw.

 

[tuartboy]

http://www.sonyericsson.com/walkman/index.aspx?cc=gb&lc=en
Try that, It just kills safari. Youtube, however, seems perfectly fine... Although if I watch a youtube video using flock (firefox), I get jerky playback, but thats probably just flock.

Yes, flash is bad on G4s. That site sends my CPU to 100%. 1.5 Ghz 12" PB here.

Edit: I hook up my 12" PB to a 24" monitor at 1920 x1200 and I see no performance slowdowns at all. You likely have a problem with your graphics drivers.

 

[mkrishnan]

Yes, flash is bad on G4s. That site sends my CPU to 100%. 1.5 Ghz 12" PB here.

But that's the thing I don't understand... I not only am using a G4, but a slower one with less memory (probably) than either of you.

Why is it that it doesn't tank my iBook?

 

[tuartboy]

But that's the thing I don't understand... I not only am using a G4, but a slower one with less memory (probably) than either of you.

Why is it that it doesn't tank my iBook?

Well, it doesn't "tank" my system, it just runs the CPU up to 100% and makes it really slow. It still works fine, though. Are you completely sure that it doesn't do the same thing to you? Open up activity monitor and check your CPU stats.

 

[Compile 'em all]

We also found out that while the fix should make it into 10.4.9, it most likely will not make it into 10.5.0, and will probably come out in 10.5.1 under leopard.

That is pretty bizarre. Do you have any idea why is that?. I can't find any logical explanation for why they can't put out the fix into the .0 release of Leopard .

 

[mkrishnan]

Well, it doesn't "tank" my system, it just runs the CPU up to 100% and makes it really slow. It still works fine, though. Are you completely sure that it doesn't do the same thing to you? Open up activity monitor and check your CPU stats.

With just Safari open and just this page, once the flash was fully loaded and running, the % CPU ranged from 45 to 65 percent with 10-40% idle.

Sorry to continue this discussion here... I think it's just the confound of whether things are repeatable, systematic problems that need to be addressed by bug fixes, or problems that are unique in some way to how one machine is set up. If it is true that there's something hinky about the way Flash and your two powerbooks get along, I have no idea what it is. But I'm just suggesting it might not be an explicit weakness of either Flash or 10.4.8....

 

[Compile 'em all]

Well, it doesn't "tank" my system, it just runs the CPU up to 100% and makes it really slow. It still works fine, though. Are you completely sure that it doesn't do the same thing to you? Open up activity monitor and check your CPU stats.

I have the same problem. I am on a 1.5 GHZ PB and it utilizes 100% of the CPU time .

 

[OdduWon]

iChat tech support in Leopard

i was just on the apple site looking at a mac pro, and when i clicked on the apple page, for a split second i saw this blue ichat icon above the customer service number that said chat now!!! i only flashed for a second, and when i hit the back button, it was gone.
it was a little after midnight on the 24th.

here is a mock-up of what i saw, again i only saw it for a second so i am not too sure about the lateral placement. i know there was a iTunes 7 blue colored, vector looking ichat symbol and it said chat now. I saw the icon first, and ended my glance at with my eyes moving down towards the service number, so i didn't get all the visual hierarchy digested, but it looked like an ichat tech support service, maybe the will add this to the $50k apple care for servers gets you? fro

 

[SiliconAddict]

If you're patient it does timeout after a while. I do agree the network stuff is a bit rubbish, but it is under Windows too

Whatever. I've NEVER had Windows Explorer hang on me along with the rest of the shell in XP or 2K when dealing with networking....9x is another matter. Sorry but networking in Windows is a heck of a lot better but you can thank MS's closed source nature for that. Kinda hard to make things compatible when you practically have to reverse engineer things in Windows.*shrugs* That being said it still shouldn't freeze the blasted shell of OS X.

 

[SiliconAddict]

Apple need to get Leopard out before, or near, Vista and push it hard as a better alternative to Vista. People are ready to change from XP to a new OS and Apple can capitalise on this or they can miss the boat by a few months and lose a lot of potential switchers because of Vista.

This is just a stupid sentiment. Really. So you would rather that Apple release a buggy OS that tech sites would rip apart, trash, and generally give bad reviews instead of waiting a few months and released a polished OS. Thank god you aren't in charge of OS development at Apple. Tiger was bad enough when it was released. Anyone who says otherwise didn't run it. I lost count of my friend who downgraded to Panther a month after they upgraded to Tiger when it was launched. Apple can not afford another round of this in the public eye.

Realistically Apple doesn't give a crap about Vista's launch. Apple's bread and butter is in hardware sales. All estimates right now suggest that Apple is going to sell a TON of Macs in '07. Apple isn't competing with MS because you can't just buy OS X outright for you PC like you can with Vista. They are competing with hardware manufacturers for anyone buying a new computer. The simple fact is that users are getting coupons NOW for free upgrades to Vista when you buy X or Y PC. So the idea that January is the drop dead starting date for Vista is wrong. What is going to be released in January will be the ability to buy stand alone licenses. Anyone interested in a stand alone license isn't going to spend a grand on a Mac to get OS X. So lets drop this idea that Apple is trying to nab sales from MS at launch. Where things get interesting is back to school sales and '07's holiday shopping season. Both of which are well beyond the January Vista launch. These are the time frames when people typically buy new computers. Just like the one we just went through without Vista being available and Tiger showing up XP still.
No Leopard will be demoed at MWSF and hopefully a few suprise features will show up Vista and start the rumor mill which will put some water on MS's Vista PR campaign. But it isn't going to be released.