I say almost, because there was still some noticeable frame dropping. But still, I could actually watch HD flash video (windowed and full-screen) without it stuttering like a slideshow. One issue with YouTube: the CPU pretty much went into overload once the video was playing, and on the third viewing I had to Force Quit Firefox to wrestle back control.

But this is good news for hackintoshes, and netbooks in general. This is not hardware GPU acceleration (limited to Windows right now), it just seems to be better CPU usage. Earlier today I also posted about AnandTech's Flash 10.1 CPU-utilization tests: they still noticed improvements under OS X, too. If you've given Flash 10.1 a try, post a comment here so other readers can see what sort of netbook you have, and if it's worth trying.

For the record, my MSI Wind U100 has 2GB of memory, a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, and integrated Intel 945 graphics. (Pic above is of the Dell Mini 9).

Specifically, Apple may have wanted a "private license" from Sun Microsystems, and Sun simply did not want to play ball. Neither side could agree on suitable terms, so support was removed. [OpenSolaris Mailing List via Daring Fireball]

On Twitter we noticed that everybody seemed to get back more space from Snow Leopard than the guy before him: "I got back 9GB, wow!" "Hey, I got back 12GB, jeez." "Holy mother, I got back 20 gigs, whoooooa!" So by now, some of you should've gotten back like a terabyte—on your 250GB hard drive. We got back around 6GB, what Apple advertised.

Battery-wise haven't noticed much of a difference compared to Leopard, but if you have, let us know and what kind of machine you're using.

[Giz's Snow Leopard Coverage]

Previously, storage was calculated using binary (base 2), which is why you wound up with hard drives that the manufacturer said were 250GB looking like they had 232GB of space in your OS. Snow Leopard calculates disk space in base 10, so your 250GB hard drive actually shows up as having 250GB of space. Check out that shot by Gina of the same 4GB Cruzer drive in Leopard, then in Snow Leopard to see what I mean:

So, a good chunk at least part of that 20GB of extra space you got with Snow ain't magic people, it's just math. [Apple via ZDNet via Smarterware]

There are minor issues with software compatibility, bugs and a virus or two. Some even reported that they lost their data during the upgrade process.

Well, how worried are you? Enough to delay the upgrade for a few weeks? Or are you going to do it the second you get home with the disc this weekend? Or somewhere in between?

Applications that won't open in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• Aperture ver. 2.1.1 and earlier
• Keynote ver. 2.0.2 and earlier
• AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow ver. 4.2.5
• Parallels Desktop ver. 3.0
• VirusBarrier X4 ver. 10.4.4 and earlier
• SPSS 17 ver. 17.1
• Director MX 2004 ver. 10.2
• EyeTV ver. 3.0.0 to 3.1.0
• Ratatouille ver. 1.1

Applications moved to an "Incompatible Software" folder during the installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• Parallels Desktop, ver. 2.5 and earlier
• McAfee VirusScan, ver. 8.6
• Norton AntiVirus ver. 11.0
• Internet Cleanup 5 ver. 5.0.4
• Application Enhancer ver. 2.0.1 and earlier
• Unsanity
• AT&T Laptop Connect Card ver. 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.10.0
• launch2net ver, 2.13.0
• iWOW plug-in for iTunes ver. 2.0
• Missing Sync for Palm Sony CLIE Driver ver. 6.0.4
• TonePort UX8 Driver ver. 4.1.0
• ioHD Driver ver. 6.0.3
• Silicon Image SiI3132 Drivers ver. 1.5.16.0

[Apple via Apple Insider]

Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. The new operating system takes the same old boring, every day tasks like opening files, for example, and makes them happen subtly faster. But that performance is not being utilized by any third-party programs right now. And there are practically no new first-party programs by Apple. Nope, mostly just rewritten old ones and dozens of little interface tweaks. Some fanboys will ask, incredulously, "This is a new operating system?!" Those people are missing the point.

On deeper inspection, Snow Leopard's inconspicuous aspects—performance squeezed from underused CPU multicores/GPUs and basic UI tweaks—are found to be the kind of refinement generally reserved for virtuosity. These speed optimizations are deep, reminding me of when a master martial artist puts the entirety of his weight behind a strike (while a neophyte would flails his limbs like a henchman in a Bruce Lee movie). The little UI tweaks are no different than when a great sculptor's chisel works to remove everything non-essential during the final steps on a statue. Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible.

And if you think that's bullshit, well, I can't say you're completely out of your mind, but there's always the consolation that this OS upgrade costs about the same as a used Xbox game.

Performance

After some benching on a first-generation MacBook Air, an older MacBook Pro 15 and a pair of current-gen 13-inch MacBook Pros, it's clear that Snow Leopard is faster—sometimes drastically—but almost never in third-party applications. Some people like charts. If you feel like skipping them, here's a summary:

• In preview, where opening six 35MB 20,000-pixel-wide images of Tokyo's cityscape each took half the time in Snow.
• Safari's javascript processing, using Snow's specific tech, is about 40% faster—useful for all those Ajax-heavy websites we all use now.
• Time Machine backed up a 1GB dataset nearly 40% faster than on Leopard.
• There was no discernible improvement in non-optimized 32-bit programs: Photoshop testing and Handbrake DVD ripping times were identical. High-def playback on QuickTime 7 (not the new QuickTime 10 version) was identical in CPU usage, too.
• Synthetic benchmark results were interesting: The aging Xbench app, which tests everything from graphics to disks to memory, took a slight performance dip, implying older software may, too. Geekbench, a multicore optimized, newer benchmark available in both 32- and 64-bit saw a lift on Snow. But the test is only focused on theoretical CPU and memory performance, which may not translate into every day use.

Here's a video of those JPEGs cranking open in parallel, rather than serial, fashion:

Impressed yet?! You shouldn't be. Well, not by the act of opening images. But you definitely should once you realize what it really shows: Apple just pulled 2X performance out of my hardware, by software alone. Tada!

How is Snow Leopard Getting Faster?

There are three fundamental reasons for these performance increases: Better multicore processor support through what Apple calls GCD (Grand Central Dispatch—which we explain here); OpenCL APIs for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing; and they've rewritten almost all the applications that ship with Snow Leopard to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. So it's making processing for today's chips more efficient and easier for developers. And giving programs a way to utilize the power of the video card when it's not playing games. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. (More on all that at the bottom of the page.*)

Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. Install size is down to 10GB from 16GB, most of that weight shed by losing printer drivers and the PowerPC part of universal binaries. (Snow Leopard runs only on Intel hardware and downloads printer drivers it needs from the net, as you need them.) Installation is also quicker by about 30% on any given piece of hardware (consistent with the smaller install footprint). And in a move that can only be categorized as showing off, Snow Leopard can finish its installation if you accidentally power it down midway through.

But I'm digressing. The bottom line on performance is that the programs included with this operating system will do just about everything faster on modern machines that support those technologies—that is, most of the multicore Macs or those running Nvidia 8600 series video cards or higher. And not just a bit faster, but faster on the scale of 25 to 50% which means there's typically a good amount of latent processing juju in your video card and CPU. Great, but to be honest, it's a bit less impressive than it sounds in real life today, because all the basic system tasks happen fast anyhow. (When was the last time you sat around while a JPEG opened up?) Again, no other apps that use GCD or OpenCL are available from software makers outside of Apple. But if the theoretical gains are here to be had via easier programming methods, I'd bet those apps will come soon.

Interface Streamlining

There are 5 major changes in the UI:

Finder
Icons now scale, courtesy of a little slider on the bottom right of the pane, up to 512 pixels wide. It sounds wasteful, except that video files can be played directly from the finder window. Honestly, I don't prefer it more than the QuickLook (hitting spacebar to popup a quick preview window) in Leopard and carried over in Snow Leopard. I don't mind the option, but I have no use for this feature.

Dock
OS X's dock has been interactive for some time. You could drag a file to an icon there to somehow get the two to interact, but you could never use the dock to select which window instance of an app to use. Now clicking and holding (empty handed or with a file) triggers Expose, Apple's window management doohickey, for that particular application. Being able to quickly pop out an app's windows and then select the right one in a single step is terrific, but you still can't use Expose to quickly find the browser tab you want within a window. That's an increasingly big problem as the time spent in browsers goes up.

Expose
Expose itself has been improved, too. When viewing all the windows for one application in Expose's zoomed-out view, the items are now arranged in a grid instead of a single, impossible to read line, and each window has a text label. (That's helpful when you're trying to recognize a particular window amongst lots of similar looking—and rendered tiny by Expose—text documents or emails.) Minimized windows are also now shown at the bottom of the screen under a faint line dividing it from other maximized windows from the same application.

Stacks
When Stacks made its debut in Leopard, the dock mounted quick file viewer was too twitchy to use. You'd try to move a file andit would snap close, offended you'd try to do anything but open a file. And the space was always too limited in fan or grid mode to display more than a few icons. Stacks improves on this by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, but by also adding a smart list view capable of showing numerous files at once. It's an improvement.

QuickTime 10
Putting QuickTime in this list is questionable, but aside from its acceleration, there are some major changes here. That is, as you mouse away, the video screen loses all borders and buttons, appearing like the video equivalent of an infinity pool or one of those ultra thin LCDs. The program has a new capture system for encording video and audio clips and even voice annotated screen capture sessions. It also borrows the trimming thumbnail line from iMovie '09. I love it.

Let's face it, in the big picture, calling these changes "major" is generous. But there are literally dozens of even smaller examples, all welcome, all reducing friction points in the OS's usage, eliminating clicks needed and making the OS less obtuse. You can read about all of these additions in the gallery below, or here on one page, if you're curious to read about them all. If not, take my word for it: They all make things better.

While it's not UI- or performance-related, one additional Snow Leopard benefit is free Exchange support, so your mail, address books and calendars can all sync through it. I don't work at a corporation, so I don't care, but you may.

Bad Things

What kind of sick fanboy would I be if I didn't mention the imperfections?

And Safari 4's ability to segment unstable browser plugins made itself useful when many more flash powered pages crashed in Snow Leopard than Leopard.

Other reviewers have discovered that Snow Leopard has disabled or quirk-ified some of their apps.

I've also noticed that Expose doesn't work as smoothly with spaces now. You sometimes select a window on another virtual spaces desktop and it won't bring the window up top.

If you've got some third part mission critical app that you need to run every day, you should double check its compatibility and wait for a new version before upgrading your OS. Look before you leap here. The OS isn't so radically new that you have to have it right this moment.

Meow

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you're looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard's biggest feature is that it doesn't have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up
the apps it comes with by relatively huge amounts

Costs $30 to upgrade

Still haven't seen any third party apps
rewritten to take advantage of Snow Leopard's speed yet

No major new functionality might turn off
some

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

*Performance Background: You May Skip This Section.
Today's chips have hovered in the 2-3.6GHz range for some time, with gains in theoretical processing power made by increasing the number of CPU cores on one chip and optimizing the silicon in those cores. Think about it as roof shingles: It's easier to protect your roof with lots of little shingles than one huge one. Unfortunately, the power afforded by the additional CPU cores has largely gone to waste, because it's difficult to write code that takes full advantage of multiple cores. The programmer has to write the application in a way that breaks down large problems into multiple smaller problems (called threads), each of which runs on a single CPU core. The application then becomes a traffic cop keeping threads in sync. If any part gets out of sync, the app crashes or hangs.

This problem is made more complex because many apps are written with a maximum number of threads in mind. While some workloads, such as video encoding or photo processing can take advantage of many cores innately, most need to have some work done to add support for more threads, so future-proofing has been difficult. I don't know if programming GCD is easier than straight-up multiple-core programming—we cover some of those details here—but the key here is that Apple's created a middleware that developers can write for, which automatically scales up to work with the number of CPU cores or other hardware in your system. The developer writes for GCD, while the system handles the gruntwork. Apple hopes more people will use this easier, more future-proofed way to tap into multiple-core power. Of course, no one has so far, except Apple programmers themselves. This explains why Finder, Preview and basically everything else that ships with Snow Leopard run faster. But in my tests, Photoshop, still a 32-bit program on the Mac and written without any support of GCD or OpenCL, showed less than 1% variation from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Still, as we can see from the system apps, there's potential here. And let's face it, the majority of us are not rendering Photoshop files all day, so this is performance you can put in your pocket today.

There's a story of efficiency here, too, however. Because GCD is better at managing resources, a program like, Mail, for example, shows less system impact (thread usage, cpu usage) while sitting idle in Snow Leopard, than on Leopard. When testing OpenCL's hardware acceleration, something Windows machines have had for awhile, by playing a 1080p trailer of James Cameron's awesome new Avatar movie, CPU usage dropped drastically when machines were using the 64-bit CoreCL and GCD supported version of QuickTime. Any modern machine can play 1080p video well, but here, we were talking about Snow Leopard causing the strain on the system to take total CPU usage from 30% to 16% on the 13-inch MacBook Pros. Other apps will eventually be able to use these GPU superpowers, but what Apple claims is the real potential for GPU processing is that OpenCL will let computers use video cards for not only 3D acceleration, video encoding, and heavy math, but more general computing tasks, too, because its written in a non-specific (C-based) programming language.

Furthermore, there have been a number of good articles questioning the speed benefits of 64-bit computing. Apple only goes so far to claim that math-based tasks benefit from the larger bus, but generally the only concrete advantage of 64-bit computing is the ability apps gain to manipulate over 4GB of RAM, a 32-bit limitation. Apple's dev docs go on to say that some apps will incur a penalty if going 64-bit. So, rewriting apps in 64-bit versions is not a surefire recipe for speed improvement.

In many cases, with many of the built-in apps, Apple attributes the performance improvements to all three core technologies above. That stuff that means not so much today, but might mean a lot tomorrow as GPUs get faster and CPUs gain more cores and there's already an infrastructure in place to take advantage of all that.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

As one might expect, the packaging features a snow leopard, staring out at the user with the same white hot intensity of, say, Steve Jobs in his Apple lair as he examines the latest prototype build of an Apple Tablet that may or may not exist.

There's also the slogan, reading: "The world's most advanced operating system. Perfectly optimized."

You know what else would be perfect? If, in the inevitable "I'm a Mac" ad that comes out to market this OS, Hodgman wrestles a real snow leopard. That scene, sadly, is not represented on the Portuguese Mac OS X Snow Leopard packaging. There's still hope for the U.S. release. [MacRumors]

The change from this version is that you have to install it from a fresh DVD/partition, so you can't just Software Update your old install like you could before. [Gear Live]

This is characteristically a maintenance update, tying up a few loose ends before 10.6 arrives. For perspective, a few of the more substantial changes: CalDav support has finally been fixed in iCal, BlueTooth and Wi-Fi stability has been tightened up, while native RAW viewing has been expanded to a few more cameras' formats. So yeah, recork that champagne. Let us know how your upgrades go in the comments—or if Apple's tucked away any surprises for us.

• Upgrades Safari to version 4.0.2.
• Improves the accuracy of full history search in Safari 4.
• Resolves an issue in which certain resolutions might not appear in the Display pane in System Preferences.
• Dragging an Aperture image into Automator now invokes an Aperture action instead of incorrectly invoking an iPhoto action.
• Resolves an issue that could prevent importing of large photo and movie files from digital cameras.
• Improves overall Bluetooth reliability with external devices, USB webcams and printers.
• Addresses an issue that could cause extended startup times.
• Improves iCal reliability with MobileMe Sync and CalDav.
• Addresses data reliability issues with iDisk and MobileMe.
• Improves overall reliability with AFP.
• Improves overall reliability with Managed Client.
• Improves compatibility and reliability for joining AirPort networks.
• Improves Sync Service reliability.
• Includes additional RAW image support for several third-party cameras.
• Improves compatibility with some external USB hard drives.
• Includes latest security fixes.

[Apple—Thanks, tipsters!]

Macrumors says there are speed fixes, battery improvements, third party system pref panes, dock menu changes and expose for multiple monitor fixes.

The thesis flags more or less every cosmetic and UI change in Snow Leopard as a move towards touch (and by extension, tablet) friendliness: the new Expose removes the keyboard and mouse from the equation, and empowers the big-buttoned dock; Stacks are now much more useful, negating the need to dive into Finder for many tasks; Quicktime controls (and editing) are poke-able; the tech behind the new (and oddly touted) Asian character input support could be extended to more drawing capabilities; and Safari 4's new Cover Flow integration is more useful as a touch interface than a traditional one.

I'll add a few more to that: Finder's new preview functions reduce clicks, and Snow Leopard's general speediness and space-savings would suit the presumably scaled-back hardware of a tablet.

It's miles from conclusive, and CNET's certainty and enthusiasm are easy to mock, but I like this. Jesus sees Apple's tablet as a bigger, more powerful iPod Touch, running some variant of iPhone OS—an solid theory, since you could argue that iPhone OS is Apple's touch version of OS X—but I've previously fingered OS X as the device's software, based on Apple patents that describe Snow Leopard-esque interface modifications to accommodate finger input. On top of that, OS X is already a decent touch OS—Cover Flow is everywhere, and the dock is, well, big.

And at minimum this story gives us one more website to commiserate with when Apple finally announces their plans to never, ever make a tablet. Thanks! [CNET]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
There's this Wi-Fi strength indicator, long overdue, in the dock.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
And when a battery is close to end of life, the OS will report that, too. (To clarify, not only a dead battery, but one that will fail to hold its charge well.)

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
Automatic spelling correction in textedit.

Among other speed enhancements, boot and shut down twice as fast as in OS X Leopard.

Of course, these are really trivial next to things like multicore and GPU processing. But refined details are something I appreciate in an operating system.

[Macrumors, AppleInsider and Mac Life]

• Snow Leopard is due out soon, so Apple needs to clear out Leopard inventory via a $30 discount
• 2TB hard drives just hit the market relatively recently, so NASes and other storage devices using 2TB are the next logical step
• ClubMac and MacMall both showed rendered box shots of a 2TB Time Capsule drive

So with the above points, it seems likely to conclude that Apple's either phasing out the 500GB Time Capsule units in order to make room for the 2TB ones, or just want to reward the people who have been MobileMe customers for a while.

That's because the "superbar"—as the taskbar is known by developers—jerks taskbar functionality in a new direction. It's no longer merely a window manager—just a place to manage open windows and by proxy, open applications. It's now a bona fide application launcher. More than that, it blends the two in ways that will remind many of the OS X Dock—apps that are running and those that aren't can live together. True, you've been able to launch apps from the Windows taskbar's Quick Launch ghetto for ages, but that's been demolished so that Microsoft could completely and seamlessly integrate the launching of new apps and the managing of running ones.

Managing Apps and Open Windows

The OS X Dock operates from a similar standpoint, but Windows 7 takes this (not to mention the translucency gambit) a step further: The visual signification of a running application (versus one that's not and merely "pinned" to the taskbar) is exceptionally subtle—a kind of "glare" appears on the top left corner of the icon and it's faintly outlined. It borders on actively encouraging you to forget the distinction, which as computers become more powerful and applications launch more quickly, matters less and less anyhow.

The flashing colored glass effect when an app is trying to get your attention, however, is nice, and though way less ostentatious than the old blinking button, definitely obvious. Unless you have the taskbar set to auto-hide, then the notification is barely visible as a flashing line of color on the bottom of your screen. The Mac Dock's bouncing icons definitely works better there.

These aesthetic similarities aside, what actually makes the superbar superior to the Dock is window management—including, by extension, application management. I can easily find, access or close any window I want from the taskbar nearly instantly, thanks to the combination of live thumbnails and Aero Peek. Rolling over an icon in the taskbar pops up live thumbnails of every open window of that app. If that's not enough to tell which one you want, rolling over a thumbnail brings that window to the front, full-sized, and makes every other window translucent. And it's easy to move from app to app in one motion to bring up the window you want, or close it. This is not just a neat visual trick, like Flip 3D. It's genuinely useful.

The benefit breaks down if you have more open windows of an application than the number of previews that will fit across your screen horizontally: In that case, you get a much less useful list of open windows, like old school Windows or control-clicking a Dock icon on the Mac.

The Power of the Pop-Up Menu

Right-clicking—or clicking the icon then quickly swiping upwards—brings up a pop-up menu (aka a jump list). Control-clicking on the OS X Dock does something similar, giving you a list of open windows. Some apps (like Adium) are coded for additional Dock functions, but it's not the same as the powerful visual metaphor that the superbar and Aero Peek give you. Applications still need to be coded specially to take advantage of the superbar's pop-up menu, but it's more powerful. If an app is coded to use Windows 7 jump lists—when you right-click on an icon or click and swipe upward, you have instant access to frequently used or other functions—it will erase the slight advantage the Dock currently has.

The superbar does share one of the Dock's major shortcomings as an application launcher—it's not immediately apparent how to launch a new window of an app from the taskbar. The secret as Windows evangelist Paul Thurrot points out is that you right-click the app icon, then click the app name itself appearing in the pop-up menu. Granted, from the Mac Dock, unless opening a new window is coded into the app as a Dock function, like Safari, you can't do it at all.

The superbar's biggest shortcoming—at least when you first use it—relates to the way it handles folders and document shortcuts, which is exceptionally confusing. You can only pin one folder to the bar. After that, every subsequent folder you want to pin to the taskbar is pinned to Windows Explorer. Say you have the Libraries folder pinned for quick access to Documents, Downloads, Pictures, etc. But I also want another folder (in this example, Games and Computer) pinned to the taskbar, so I drag it to the bar. There, it shares the same icon as my first pinned folder. When I click the icon, up pops Libraries. Where's the Games folder? I have to right-click on the folder icon (or click and swipe up). This gives me a jump list of pinned folders and other frequent programs. You pin documents the same way, only they're hidden in the jump menu of the application that opens them. It takes some learning before you can use it fluidly.

The View From Above

The challenge of learning a totally new Windows behavior is the cost of getting this huge step forward in UI. The superbar makes Windows way more conducive to running tons of applications, since it's actually possible to find apps and precisely the window you want in a second, no matter how bad the shitstorm on your desktop is. In this sense, it's a better application manager than the Dock, from which, generally speaking, you can't do much more than jump to open applications or close them.

It's true that it's actually less necessary for the Dock to be a superpowered wunderkind—Spaces gives you multiple desktops to work on, and Expose is pretty fantastic. It's faster, though if you've got too many windows, the thumbnails are too small to be useful. Aero Peek solves this issue nicely by letting you quickly cycle through full-screen windows. The superbar has a button in the bottom right corner that works sort of like an OS X Expose hot corner, instantly making every window transparent so you can see the desktop—clicking will actually clear everything away.

There are definitely arguments to be made against the density of the superbar, packing so many function into a single UI element—many criticisms of the Dock apply to the superbar, like the total lack of text labels, and though it sidesteps some of the Dock's issues, like the poof, it presents new flubs. It could definitely improve in some ways (especially the notification area, which I didn't even go into).

But it shows the most thought of any Windows UI element in a long time, and manages to handle the complexity and multiplicity of functions about as well as one could expect. It does more than the Dock, and for the most part, works beautifully to enable—encourage, even—serious multitasking that the default Windows UI never has before.

Here are its features:

MSI U100 MacBook Nano
Windows XP Pro + Mac OS X 10.5.5
Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz
2G DDRII
10" WSVGA LED (1024x600)
320GB SATA
1kg
MMC/SD/MS 4
Windows XP Pro + Mac OSX Leopard

[Flickr]

The phrase "64-bit" has been tossed around lately, the most it's been since the Nintendo 64. If you haven't heard it, pay attention. One of the most important steps forward in computer power is happening right under your nose, but most people don't know thanks to the sneaky efforts of Microsoft and Apple. Though fully 64-bit operating systems are the OSes of tomorrow, you can taste some of that power today with 64-bit versions of Windows and OS X. Here's why 64-bit computing is so awesome:

In a word, memory. We're not going to get super nerdy on you here (Wikipedia will gladly go there). To keep it simple, the whole bit thing (16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit) refers to how much data the computer can keep track of, or talk to, at once, and that's what determines how much memory it can handle. A processor with 32-bit memory addresses can basically roll with 4GB of RAM. A 64-bit system can rock, on the other hand, 16 exabytes of RAM. That's 16.8 bmillion terabytes. Of RAM. You're not going to get that kind of memory, not anytime soon; for now, from a user standpoint, this means there's simply no ceiling to memory expansion.

So while 32-bit hardware and software—the current norm in PC-land—limited you to 4GB of RAM (Physical Address Extension will let you have more, but 32-bit software will still only use 4GB), with 64-bit hardware and software, you can use vast amounts of RAM, which enables a whole new world of possibilities for applications, since they'll have a massive amounts of memory to work with.

The road to 64-bit rather conveniently dovetails with the multi-core processor arms race, using graphics cards for processing and growth of parallel processing in mainstream computing. In other words, in just a short generation, applications will be able to harness an exponential increase in power over what they can use today—a crapload of processors working together with a smorgasbord of memory at their disposal. With 64-bit, computers can also crunch bigass numbers way faster, so it's excellent for science-y things. So get ready for some cool stuff.

You're probably asking: Why not now? I've heard of this 64-bit stuff before. Well, the hardware has been around for a while—64-bit super computers go back decades, and AMD brought 64-bit processors to the mainstream a few years ago with the Athlon 64, for instance. The PowerPC G5 for Macs was also 64-bit. And if you buy a Core 2 Duo today, it's 64-bit. But the operating systems regular people use have essentially been slow to adopt 64-bit until recently, and won't plunge excluslively into 64-bit for another generation, Windows guru Ed Bott explained to us. Windows Vista ships with separate 32-bit and 64-bit editions, with Vista 64-bit being the first consumer-usable 64-bit version of Windows. Apple has been moving more and more of OS X over to a 64-bit architecture with every new version. Bott told us that while Windows 7 will have 32-bit and 64-bit versions, its eventual successor, Windows 8 (or whatever it's called) will likely be the first Windows that's exclusively 64-bit. Reportedly, next year's Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be 64-bit down to the kernel.

The reason 64-bit is the future and not the present is that 64-bit is a whole different architecture from the 32-bit status quo—different kernel means different drivers, application compatibility issues, that kind of stuff. A swift, clean break means lots of headaches, especially for the corporate world, which, as Bott told us, is as big of a concern for Microsoft as the consumer space. That's why Apple has been transitioning OS X to total 64-bit over time, and why Microsoft will still ship a 32-bit version of Windows 7. And likely, Bott says, an exclusively 64-bit Windows 8 would have a virtualization setup to run 32-bit apps. "Fortuitously," he told us, "an x64 system with lots of memory should scream at virtualization."

Another hitch on the path to true 64-bit glory that Bott raised is the question of "When will people outside of the specialized work software" like Adobe (Photoshop CS4 will be a native 64-bit application in Windows, though not in OS X) write 64-bit apps? With the coming wave of many-core parallel processing and ridiculous amounts of memory to take advantage of, programmers have a lot to play (and deal) with. Applications have to be re-written to take advantage of the multiple cores and huge amounts of memory at their disposable, and that transition is going to take some time. The other slight downside 64-bit Bott mentioned—and it is slight—is that hibernation will be slower, since all that memory means more to write to the hibernation file, and more to read when it wakes up.

While that awesomeness sounds like it's too be good to be the norm anytime soon, it's not. Leopard already does quite a bit of 64-bit voodoo, like having a 64-bit GUI and Vista 64-bit is supplanting 32-bit on computer maker's systems, now that the driver situation isn't so abysmal. And while four totally usable gigs of RAM in a Vista machine is a thing of beauty, 6GB and 12GB will quickly become the standard for performance machines with the launch of Intel's Core i7, since it uses triple-channel memory—three delicious sticks of RAM—so 64-bit couldn't come soon enough.

There's also the minor matter of Apple accusing Microsoft of spending money on advertising that would be better allocated to fixing Vista. The message, of course, is delivered in an expensive advertising campaign, the week after Apple released brand new, prohibitively expensive laptops. Justin Long's Mac moves on to criticize Microsoft's 'reluctance' to call Vista by its real name, which is either a misguided dig at the Mojave campaign or some kind of odd jab at the logical dropping of the 'Vista' name for Windows 7.
Everyone expects misinformation and questionable techniques in advertising, but that's not the issue here. These ads seem directed at Microsoft's corporate management, not their customers. Redmond and Cupertino are having a useless, protracted argument with each other, unaware of the fact that their shouting is going completely over everyone else's heads. [MacRumors]

What's included?

General

* Includes recent Apple security updates.
* Addresses stability issues with video playback, processor core idling, and remote disc sharing for MacBook Air.
* Addresses an issue in which some Macs could unexpectedly power on at the same time each day.
* Resolves a stability issue in TextEdit that could be found when accessing the color palette.
* Improves Spotlight indexing performance.
* Fixes an issue in which contacts might not sync properly with PalmOS-based devices.
* Improves iPhone sync reliability with iCal and Address Book.
* Includes improvements to Active Directory (see this article for more information).
* Improves Speech Dictionary.
* Fixes Kerberos authentication issues for Mac OS X 10.5 clients that connect to certain Samba servers, such as Mac OS X Server version 10.4.
* Includes extensive graphics enhancements.

Address Book

* Addresses stability issues that may occur when creating a Smart Group.
* Resolves a printing issue with address cards containing information that spans more than one page.

Disk Utility and Directory Utility

* Improves reliability when rebuilding a software mirror RAID volume in Disk Utility.
* Improves reliability of server status displayed in Directory Utility.

iCal

* Updates iCal to more accurately handle repeating events.
* Improves performance when choosing meeting attendees.
* Resolves an issue in which the "Refresh All" option may be dimmed ("grayed out") in the contextual menu for certain calendars.
* Fixes issues with read-only calendars.
* Addresses an issue that prevents an invitee from moving an event to a different calendar.
* Resolves an issue with syncing published calendars.

Mail

* Addresses performance issues related to displaying IMAP messages.
* Resolves an issue with SMTP settings for AIM, Compuserve, Hanmail, Yahoo!, and Time Warner Road Runner email accounts.
* Addresses stability issues that may occur when dragging a file to the Mail icon in the Dock.
* Addresses an issue with the "Organized by Thread" view in which the date does not appear when the thread is collapsed.
* Resolves an issue in which RSS feeds could temporarily disappear from the sidebar.
* Improves Mail robustness when sending messages.
* Improves reliability when saving drafts that have attachments.

MobileMe

* Improves overall sync reliability.
* Improves Back to My Mac reliability.

Time Machine

* Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule.
* Addresses performance issues that may affect initial and in-progress backups.
* Fixes an issue in which an incorrect alert message could appear stating that a backup volume does not have enough free space.
* Time Machine can now back up iPhone backups that are on your Mac, as well as other items in (~/Library/Application Support).

Surely, you can do better. [MetkuMods via Unplggd]

This is not going to be a super technical breakdown of parallel computing for the super nerdy, just a rough overview for my mom. Basically, parallel processing is what it sounds like: Multiple computations or processes or um, just "things," are carried out or done simultaneously, in parallel (at the same time!). Multi-core processors like Intel's ubiquitous Core 2 Duo have quickly become mainstream. They're really good are doing several things at once, since each processor core can crunch away on something—more cores, more simultaneous Captain Crunching, more faster. A brilliant consumer taste of this was actually Rosetta on OS X—on a dual-core system, one core would be "translating" the code from the PPC version, while the other ran the program (roughly speaking).

Sounds gravy right? Well, as Steve alluded in his explanation of Snow Leopard, parallel programs ain't easy to write—they're harder than sequential ones for sure, 'cause it requires the kind of math that can be broken up into little parts you can solve independently and then put back together again. Artificial intelligence, for instance, is not cakey for this. On the other hand, something like tomography—a technique for creating 3D images—totally is, because it's highly vectorizable. Or video stuff (cause you can easily divvy up the chores), videogame graphics and physics, generally.

No surprise that modern graphics cards are actually really good at parallel processing, 'cause of the way they're architected and because they usually have a buttload of cores—Nvidia's latest high-end GeForce card, the GTX 280, has 240. (It's why they're suitable for cheap supercomputers.) Nvidia, for instance, showed me some of the insane physics jujitsu the GTX 280 can pull off, it and ATI both have crazy new graphics cards (FireStream 9250 and Tesla 10P) built for "general purpose" supercomputing. Sony's Cell is sorta like this with multiple cores, but none of these are very good general processors the way stuff is designed now. (You don't see any computers running on an ATI Radeon CPU, or Cell handling the main workload on Toshiba's new laptops, do you?)

You'll note that part of Snow Leopard's feature list is OpenCL, an easy way for developers to tap the parallel processing power of graphics cards, in addition to being optimized for multiple cores courtesy of its "Grand Central" tech set. So Snow Leopard is pretty much all about parallel processing. (Microsoft hasn't been overly vocal about Windows and parallel computing.)

From what Apple has said—and the whole "Grand Central" deal (it "takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors")—it's clear that Apple is totally re-architecting Snow Leopard around parallel processing, with Grand Central acting much like the real one, organizing, assigning and scheduling a whole bunch of tasks/trains along a bunch of different paths/tracks. It's a major undertaking—Intel and Microsoft are throwing a ton of money at parallel computing themselves—and we're pretty curious about Apple is going to make parallel programming easier for programmers in a way supposedly no one's done before.

Something we missed, or you still wanna know? Send any questions about processors, prostates, Bananas or anything else to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

These mock-ups were designed by iLounge readers. iLounge held held a competition to find the best ideas for the new iPhone. Best? Worst? You tell me—there's more at Wired to bash, praise or drool over. [Wired]

Contrary to rumors that Apple would drop PowerPC architecture support with its newest OS, a tipster and possible Apple insider was able to get his hands on the most recent build of the yet-to-be released 10.6, and found some evidence that Cupertino might be keeping the chip alive.

The tipster, who asked to stay anonymous lest he incur the wrath of Jobs, found a WWDC seed release labeled 10.6. After poking around a bit, here's what he got:

• Work has definitely been done on PPC-native drivers, which means that PPC is unlikely to be dropped.
• A number of drivers didn't load on a Core 2 Duo MacBook, because it was using a 64-bit kernel and the drivers were only 32. The kernel was not only 64-bit though.
• "uname -a" reports: Darwin localhost 10.0.0d1 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0d1: Thu May XX XX:XX:XX XDT 2008; root:xnu-1286~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
• Googling that kernel reveals that there might actually be SnowLeopard releases out in the wild already, processing Rosetta@Home protein folding clients.

If the tipoff is true, then it looks like Apple's not quite ready to let go and hand over chip building to a third party. Perhaps we'll have to wait for a few more builds before we get to a completely Intel-only Mac OS X.

[Flickr via The Crunch - Thanks Mark and Mark's brother!]

If we had to guess one way or the other, this no-feature upgrade doesn't seem to be something Apple would do. They gave away 10.1 to 10.0 owners because 10.0 was lousy and needed a bugfix badly, but 10.5 Leopard works just fine. They probably wouldn't waste their goodwill on their point upgrades being $129-worthy by doing something like this. But you can't really tell what's going to happen at WWDC, really, and if there's a time to do OS news, it's at the dev conf. [Ars Technica]

Despite this Rolodex-wrecking flaw, Leopard’s update introduced plenty of other features that actually make the operating system better. Spaces now behaves like a proper virtual desktop system, and Time Machine is significantly more reliable, as well as playing nicer with Time Capsule. Mail, iChat, Airport and Automator also underwent minor refinements. Taking into consideration these enhancements as well as a number of critical security fixes, 10.5.3 is still a recommended download in spite of the Address Book goof. For those who just had to click every new radio button in 10.5.3, the same helpful reader who sent in the Gmail sync warning has posted a quick fix here.

[Brian King]