Steive said that the os x upgrade cycle is like a clock, right? And 10.1 is 6 o'clock, right? Didn't he say that 10.2 is 9 oclock which would put 10.3 at 12 o'clock. And then, at v10.3, OS X would be ready for mainstream market. (default on startup, advertizing blitz, ect.)
So, my question for the community is: What does apple have in store for the next two major upgrade cycles? I doubt it is only optimizations and bug fixes. What is the OS X team working on right now? Any takers?
My ideas for a kick-a$$ upgrade in the coming months/years are:
It would be cool to have a framework for distributed computing built into the system. Imagine Maya for mac release 2 adding support for this. See Maya. See maya run. See Maya run on 20 G5s at once. See Joe the 3D Artist see Maya. See Joe sh*t his pants. See Joe tell his boss. See Joe's boss buy 20 more Macs for thier network.
Or instead of logging into your computer via terminal (text based), it would be pretty sweet to log in and be presented with your desktop in a window (maybe rendered at half size or as full screen). As you moved your mouse around in the window, all of your clicks would be sent back to your server computer. You could run programs on your computer remotely, or you could have 2 or more ppl log in at once as differnt users and do thier work on your high powered computer (so each person dosent have to buy one). Normal displays are bitmapped (high bandwidth), but because the window drawing in OS X is Quartz based (pdf), you could even log in over a 56K connection and have a reasonable user experience.
That said (pdf based termnal) Apple could give rise to a new business and educational machine. It would have the form factor of a cube, but it wouldn't have a hard drive, it would net boot to a server (remember that demo Jobs gave a while back of 50 iMacs without hard drives all netbooting at once?) From there a kid (educational) or a secertary (business) could launch word and punch out a report or whatever. The actual program would be running on the server machine, but the Quartz data would be streamed out to the client machine to be rendered there. How many instances of word do you think a high end G4 could currently run w/o slowing down. The main advantage of doing it this way is the price of the client machine. All it needs is a proccessor, 64 MB ram, mother board, and a low end graphics card (if you need to use a cd, pop it into the server). This machine would have no moving parts. You could sell these babies for $399 (less if you dont include the keyboard or mouse). Imagine a school or business trying to equip a computer lab with 25 computers. You could currently do this with $999 Dells (pulled out of a$$ number) or $399 Macs + $1700 server. The Dells will run you $24975 + monitors, and the Macs will run you $11675 + monitors. If you are worried about speed ('comon how much processor time does word or explorer use anyway??) you could throw a dual processor Mac in for an extra $2K. Say you want everyone in the class to watch a Quicktime movie, you could offload the decompression (Quicktime layer of OS X) onto the client machine too. Last time I checked, Quicktime streaming server can handle over 1,000 simultanius streams. Summery, make a cheap client machine that only needs to handle the drawing layers of OS X (Quartz, Quicktime, and OpenGL).
One last idea: Enable an auto syncronize across airport networks. Imagine a automatic sync PalmPilot style except over wireless networks. Example: Apple puts a Airport on a street corner in your city. You drive by and your computer automaticly hotsyncs with your email and downloads it for you. Or the weather. Or the news. Or your computer backs up a text document that you have been working on to your remote home computer. You could do some neat stuff.
OK, there are my ideas.
Questions?
Comments?
Additions?
So, my question for the community is: What does apple have in store for the next two major upgrade cycles? I doubt it is only optimizations and bug fixes. What is the OS X team working on right now? Any takers?
My ideas for a kick-a$$ upgrade in the coming months/years are:
It would be cool to have a framework for distributed computing built into the system. Imagine Maya for mac release 2 adding support for this. See Maya. See maya run. See Maya run on 20 G5s at once. See Joe the 3D Artist see Maya. See Joe sh*t his pants. See Joe tell his boss. See Joe's boss buy 20 more Macs for thier network.
Or instead of logging into your computer via terminal (text based), it would be pretty sweet to log in and be presented with your desktop in a window (maybe rendered at half size or as full screen). As you moved your mouse around in the window, all of your clicks would be sent back to your server computer. You could run programs on your computer remotely, or you could have 2 or more ppl log in at once as differnt users and do thier work on your high powered computer (so each person dosent have to buy one). Normal displays are bitmapped (high bandwidth), but because the window drawing in OS X is Quartz based (pdf), you could even log in over a 56K connection and have a reasonable user experience.
That said (pdf based termnal) Apple could give rise to a new business and educational machine. It would have the form factor of a cube, but it wouldn't have a hard drive, it would net boot to a server (remember that demo Jobs gave a while back of 50 iMacs without hard drives all netbooting at once?) From there a kid (educational) or a secertary (business) could launch word and punch out a report or whatever. The actual program would be running on the server machine, but the Quartz data would be streamed out to the client machine to be rendered there. How many instances of word do you think a high end G4 could currently run w/o slowing down. The main advantage of doing it this way is the price of the client machine. All it needs is a proccessor, 64 MB ram, mother board, and a low end graphics card (if you need to use a cd, pop it into the server). This machine would have no moving parts. You could sell these babies for $399 (less if you dont include the keyboard or mouse). Imagine a school or business trying to equip a computer lab with 25 computers. You could currently do this with $999 Dells (pulled out of a$$ number) or $399 Macs + $1700 server. The Dells will run you $24975 + monitors, and the Macs will run you $11675 + monitors. If you are worried about speed ('comon how much processor time does word or explorer use anyway??) you could throw a dual processor Mac in for an extra $2K. Say you want everyone in the class to watch a Quicktime movie, you could offload the decompression (Quicktime layer of OS X) onto the client machine too. Last time I checked, Quicktime streaming server can handle over 1,000 simultanius streams. Summery, make a cheap client machine that only needs to handle the drawing layers of OS X (Quartz, Quicktime, and OpenGL).
One last idea: Enable an auto syncronize across airport networks. Imagine a automatic sync PalmPilot style except over wireless networks. Example: Apple puts a Airport on a street corner in your city. You drive by and your computer automaticly hotsyncs with your email and downloads it for you. Or the weather. Or the news. Or your computer backs up a text document that you have been working on to your remote home computer. You could do some neat stuff.
OK, there are my ideas.
Questions?
Comments?
Additions?
