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Apple confab focuses on iPhone and next OS X


By P. J. Connolly
July 1, 2008 — 
SAN FRANCISCO — Apple was riding tall in the saddle when its Worldwide Developer Conference rolled into town on June 9, with a first-ever sellout of the event. By the end of the day, it was hard to tell what was causing more tongues to wag: the long-awaited debut of the 3G iPhone, or news of another update to Mac OS X, one far enough along to be called a developer preview.

As expected, Steve Jobs, with help from senior vice presidents Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall, used the conference keynote to confirm that the next iteration of the iPhone would become available July 11, and to support it, Apple will also debut the same day its App Store for iPhone-native applications, as well as a software update for the original iPhone and iTouch that will allow them to access the App Store as well.

The next-generation iPhone will not only be able to access a faster network, but will also include GPS and a much lower price tag than the first model: US$199 for a 3G iPhone with 8GB of memory and $299 for one with 16GB.

And as it turns out, the App Store will be but one of a number of ways developers can make their applications available. For ad hoc, educational, casual and other types of developers, Apple’s plan is to allow direct loading to as many as 100 devices through iTunes, presumably after ponying up $99 to join Apple’s iPhone developer group. Likewise, businesses will be able to authorize iPhones to install corporate iPhone applications over a company intranet; corporate memberships in the developer group cost $299.

But one subject—Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the 10.6 release—got swept under the rug of Moscone West during the keynote, although as the week unfolded, a few details would emerge. Perhaps most critical for developers, one would assume that Snow Leopard won’t support the venerable PowerPC platform, with the older G4 processors having been left on the roadside with the Leopard release at the end of last year. The developer preview of Mac OS X 10.6 is said to work only on Intel-based Macs.

Although Apple refused further comment beyond the sketchy details posted on its press information site, some things are already clear—the server version of Snow Leopard will indeed offer the ZFS file system, and this might prove to be the most Microsoft-friendly version of Mac OS X, with Web service-based connectivity to Exchange servers built into the release.

Snow Leopard is due in about a year, and for now is being pitched as focused on stability and reducing the overall footprint of the operating system, but the feature set won’t be totally neglected. Multicore support is being expanded in Mac OS X 10.6 through the Grand Central set of technologies, while developers wishing to tap into the increasing power of graphics processors will be able to turn to OpenCL (Open Computing Language), which makes Mac GPUs accessible to general-purpose applications.


Related Search Term(s): Mobile development, multicore, Apple


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