Apple Media Event: Back to the Mac (Here comes Lion!)

[FanIn80]

The invitation also contains an image of what appears to be a lion peeking out from behind the Apple logo, hinting at discussion of Mac OS X 10.7. "Lion" has been one of the most commonly-suggested "big cat" names for the next-generation operating system.

It's about time. Snow Leopard is great and all, but I'm pretty interested in seeing what's in store for the next OS. Will we finally see the oft-rumoured Marble UI?

Interesting that their stock broke $300 this morning...


Edit: Forgot to mention the date. Wednesday, October 20th at 10:00 AM... two days after they announce their 4th quarter 2010 results.
Edit: Forgot the link, too. Yeesh. http://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/13/...n-october-20th

[HotHotHeat]

They're milking this cat thing for all it's worth.

[Titan]

Originally Posted by HotHotHeat

They're milking this cat thing for all it's worth.

That sounds really horrible for some reason and I can't think what it is.

Is it the mental image of milking a cat? No.

Not sure but I think there is a really dirty joke in there somewhere.

[MickMcGeough]

TRIM support?

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

TRIM support?

Maybe, though I've heard some people question if it even needs it (I don't know enough about how drives work to go either way on this, although my spider-sense tells me TRIM would be good).

[KTrain]

I'd love to be able to run some of my iPhone/iPad apps on my desktop.

Obviously not all of them would work without the touch screen but it would be cool for some.

[sclitheroe]

In other news, channel inventory of the Macbook Air has all but dried up, so its highly likely that there’s a refresh of Apple’s take on the netbook on its way too.

[Locke]

Any odds on an increased capacity iPod touch? Like 120GB or something?

[GreenTeaFrapp]

Originally Posted by Locke

Any odds on an increased capacity iPod touch? Like 120GB or something?

Pretty much nill since they did their iPod refresh last month.

[HeartsOfFire]

Originally Posted by HotHotHeat

They're milking this cat thing for all it's worth.

Originally Posted by Robert deNiro (As Jack Burns)

I have nipples, Greg. Can you milk me?

Priceless.

[Barnes]

Finally something on OS X. There hasn't been a significant update to it since 2006.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Barnes

Finally something on OS X. There hasn't been a significant update to it since 2006.

NextStep 3.3 was released in 1995, not 2006

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Maybe, though I've heard some people question if it even needs it (I don't know enough about how drives work to go either way on this, although my spider-sense tells me TRIM would be good).

I ran XBench shortly after installing my X25 SSD. Most the benchmarks are the same, but the random writes take a big hit.

Uncached random writes before drive has been written at least once:
4K blocks: 74.36MB/s
256K blocks: 78.59MB/s

After being written to at least once:
4K blocks: 17.21MB/s
256K blocks: 28.35MB/s

That said, I don't know if I've noticed it? Reads are the same speed, and sequential writes are nearly the same. This is a synthetic benchmark and from what I've read real-world performance doesn't take a huge hit, but the performance hit is definitely there.

Problem with TRIM support is, I'm guessing you'll have to wipe the entire drive completely clean and start over to enable it. Time Machine FTW?

[Bob]

Problem with TRIM support is, I'm guessing you'll have to wipe the entire drive completely clean and start over to enable it. Time Machine FTW?

Intel SSDs can run TRIM on-demand (at least on Windows), so no wipe should be needed.

[silentsim]

The drive I got from Apple (SSD) installed in my i7, has no degredation after 5 months of use, using xbench and geekbench before and afters.

[Barnes]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

NextStep 3.3 was released in 1995, not 2006

Speaking of NeXtStep, this Dec 25th it will be 20 years since the first webpage was made and served on a NeXTcube, the first webserver.

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by silentsim

The drive I got from Apple (SSD) installed in my i7, has no degredation after 5 months of use, using xbench and geekbench before and afters.

You probably haven't written to the entire thing yet, then. I can't see how reading the block, storing the block in memory, erasing the dirty cells, modify the block in memory, then write the block back to the cells can be as fast as writing directly to the cells under any circumstance.

[FanIn80]

I missed the whole NeXT timeline while it was happening, as I'm pretty late to the computer world... but a lot of this stuff is really interesting. Was NeXT really as influential as it sounds?

Next, Inc. (later Next Computer, Inc. and Next Software, Inc. and stylized as NeXT) was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets. NeXT was founded in 1985 by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs after his forced resignation from Apple. NeXT introduced the first NeXT Computer in 1988, and the smaller NeXTstation in 1990. Sales of the NeXT computers were relatively limited, with estimates of about 50,000 units shipped in total. Nevertheless, its innovative object-oriented Nextstep operating system and development environment were highly influential.

NeXT later released much of the NeXTstep system as a programming environment standard called OpenStep. NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993 to concentrate on marketing OPENSTEP, its own OpenStep implementation, for several OEMs. NeXT also developed WebObjects, one of the first enterprise web application frameworks. WebObjects never became very popular because of its initial high price of $50,000 but remains a prominent early example of a web server based on dynamic page generation rather than static content. Apple purchased NeXT on December 20, 1996 for $429 million, and much of the current Mac OS X system is built on the OPENSTEP foundation. WebObjects is now bundled with Mac OS X Server and Xcode.

The NeXTcube was a high-end workstation computer developed, manufactured and sold by NeXT from 1990 until 1993. It superseded the original NeXT Computer workstation and was housed in a similar cube-shaped magnesium enclosure. The workstation ran the NeXTSTEP operating system. It is famous as the world's first Web Server, used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN to create the first web page on December 25th 1990.

Despite NeXT's limited commercial success, the company had a profound impact on the computer industry. Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXTcube and NeXTSTEP, when other companies started to emulate NeXT's object-oriented system.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

You probably haven't written to the entire thing yet, then. I can't see how reading the block, storing the block in memory, erasing the dirty cells, modify the block in memory, then write the block back to the cells can be as fast as writing directly to the cells under any circumstance.

It’s also possible that OS X doesn’t produce enough native throughput to expose the write cycle as a bottleneck.

The drive itself could also maintain a rotating set of cells that it pre-trims in the background and re-maps on demand. This would eliminate the up front need to perform the erase cycle on demand. I’m not sure if any drives do this, but it seems reasonable to assume this is a trick that drive controller manufacturers have already exploited to improve general write performance.

[mykalberta]

NEXT might have been influential but it was a flop of a company if it wasnt for Xerox or Canon or whoever who bought them.