Apple's sleek upgrade

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/technology/personaltech/27pogue.html?_r=1&ref=technology

by dzlobin • 17 years ago

41 45 17 years ago

dzlobin3• 17 years ago

I've read about snow leopard but this is a fairly clear representation of just how much faster and smaller OS X should be with snow leopard

cakesy• 17 years ago

Looks nice, but I have CS3, and i am not going to pay for CS4. So looks like I am going to skip this one.

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

According to this

http://www.pcworld.com/article/170843/adobe_responds_to_snow...

CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard.

cake• 17 years ago

Same here, there is no stable version of 1Password yet for Snow Leopard.

It's the first time I don't feel in a hurry to upgrade, I mean snapiness is great but if it's in the same range as the 10.5.x upgrades, it can wait.

I havn't heard anyone saying he was really really impressed by how faster Snow Leopard is.

dcheong• 17 years ago

For non-subscribers:

Page 1 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/2...

Page 2 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/2...

windsurfer• 17 years ago

Thank you!

taitems2• 17 years ago

"Buggy plug-ins (Flash and so on) no longer crash the Safari Web browser; you just get an empty rectangle where they would have appeared."

Yeah they nailed this one...

It's a good article, Leopard seems pretty impressive (half the size, twice the speed etc) but the author is very easily impressed.

mcav• 17 years ago

I will be thrilled if Flash stopped causing Safari to crash.

I'd be even more thrilled if Flash didn't make the CPU fans roar like a jet engine.

timdorr• 17 years ago

I'd be thrilled if Flash played back video without jumping and jittering.

wheels2• 17 years ago

> 64-bit software, a geeky term that, for now, pretty much means “faster.”

Ouch.

In general there's way too much fanboyishness in this article. I mean, seriously, it closes on a note of, "You can't see any improvements so JUST IMAGINE how much they've done under the hood!"

brandnewlow• 17 years ago

Can someone explain what it does mean? Every time I download a Windows update and it asks me to pick from one of 10 options to download, I get angry. How am I supposed to know what bit of Windows I'm using?

wheels2• 17 years ago

What 64-bit means?

This is a good start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit#Architectural_implicatio...

The most obvious improvement is that 64-bit programs can address more memory -- more than 4 gigabytes of virtual memory in the same process. The less obvious bit that sometimes makes things faster is that when an x86_64 CPU is running in 64-bit mode it has access to more registers (basically the ultra-mega-low-latency memory for numbers and memory addresses and stuff that everything computed must pass through).

However, since pointers to blocks of memory are twice as large on 64-bit programs and many programs use lots of them, 64-bit programs usually use more memory, which means that there are more cache (the slightly less, but still ultra-low-latency memory that's between the registers and usual memory) "misses" -- i.e. things have to be grabbed more often from main memory, which relative to registers and cache is slow ... meaning that it eats some of the performance benefits of the extra registers.

In a nutshell, 64-bit programs are different. They're not "faster". The difference in bit-width really isn't something that makes a lot of sense if you don't know how CPUs work and can't be reduced to "faster".

bbb• 17 years ago

x86_64 == more registers available than on i386

more registers == fewer spills

For the average compiled program, fewer spills == faster.

=> Average programs run faster under x86_64.

axod2• 17 years ago

And use about twice as much Ram. Personally I think 8 bytes for every single pointer seems wasteful for most programs.

litewulf2• 17 years ago

I believe in practice register renaming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_renaming) largely negates the difference in performance. Notice the mention of some CPUs having MORE registers than are nameable in the instruction set.

I am not a hardware engineer though, so YMMV.

mhansen• 17 years ago

Your program is much larger due to 64-bit pointers.

The big speed drops will occur with cache misses. Your L1 and L2 cache are only so big, and every cache miss will set you speed back about an order of magnitude.

jsonscripter• 17 years ago

That's like saying extending a road from 4 miles to 4 million miles makes your car go faster.

dkokelley2• 17 years ago

Off topic, but:

There are hundreds more little tweaks. In all, Apple says that more than 90 percent of Leopard’s 1,000 software chunks were revised or polished. Many are listed at bit.ly/U1DzS

bit.ly/U1DzS > http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/enhancements-refinem...

That's a NYTimes fail, in my book.

dzlobin3• 17 years ago

I'm sorry, am I not seeing it? Where's the fail

erso• 17 years ago

bit.ly/U1DzS

dkokelley2• 17 years ago

The fail is the fact that they used a link-obscurer/shortener for no benefit to me. Even the text around it doesn't give me any hint that I will be going to apple.com. The location isn't extraordinarily long, so it wouldn't have necessarily damaged the page layout, and they could have easily coded the link inside the text 'Apple's website', which would have given me a lot more information, and helped me in my decision to explore that link.

Finally, the link isn't even clickable to me. I had to copy it into the address bar.

I don't believe link-shorteners are inherently evil or destroying the internet, but seriously, why use them in an article like this? How does it help anyone (me, specifically)?

jsz0• 17 years ago

One of the neatest features of SL I've found so far is the changes to the Services menu. It's now context sensitive so it will only show the services that are applicable to the data you have selected. Select text and you get text services. One of these text services is the ability to select any text and export it to iTunes as a spoken word track using the OSX speech synthesizer. I've been using it to select long articles, export them to iTunes, and sync them with my iPhone to listen to in my car. The OSX speech synth is good enough that it's a fairly pleasant experience.

johnfn• 17 years ago

Is it just me, or does this come off as an advertisement more than an article?

GHFigs2• 17 years ago

It reads like any other newspaper technology column I've ever read.

Tichy• 17 years ago

"The menu bar can now show the date, not just the day of the week."

Oh joy, oh joy!!!! Maybe I am going to upgrade after all (this really bothered me).

gcv• 17 years ago

MacPorts Snow Leopard compatibility list: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/snc/snowleopard

I'm pleasantly surprised that, of all the things I care about, only ghc is broken.

Apple's sleek upgrade

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