Is Snow Leopard is designed for an Apple Tablet…

Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun Times wrote this slightly comical post stating that OS X 10.6 is actually designed with the Apple Tablet in mind. Here is his article.

Frankly, I’ve grown bored with discussing the same tired old Apple Tablet rumors over and over again. So let’s start some brand new rumors, based on features and details from Snow Leopard. Wild ones, based on nothing but reckless and irresponsible personal speculation and the fact that I didn’t get much rest last night and I don’t want to waste this lingering buzz of caffeine and sleep depravation.

So slap on your tinfoil hats and come fly with me:

“Apple intends to transition its MacBook line into solid-state drives.”

Why? I’m intrigued by the fact that Snow Leopard takes up seven gigabytes less space on your hard drive than Mac OS X 10.5.

They accomplished this by removing a whole bunch of unnecessary printer drivers and other content (which the OS will simply download and install automatically if it’s needed), as well as some compression.

Great. And more free space on your hard drive is more free space on your hard drive. “Who doesn’t want room for another 1500 songs?” Apple told me, when I asked about it.

But look: my MacBook here has a 500 gigabyte internal drive. Most of the folks I know have 256 or 320 gigs. Even the cheapest portable comes with 160 gigs.

Is an extra 7 really worth all of that effort? Particularly given the unstoppable trend of more hard drive space costing less money year after year?

It sure would if Apple intended to standardize on solid-state drives. The money I spent on 500 gigs of storage won’t even buy 64 gigs of solid-state; every scrap of space is at a high premium.

Assuming that Apple’s even interested in MacBooks. Is there a future consumer device on the horizon that will run a flavor of Mac OS 10.6 (though possibly not Mac software) and will need to run inside an even smaller footprint … as small as 32 gigs of DRAM?

“Apple intends to sell an ambitious line of home-theater Macs.”

Why? Because Apple TV clearly is getting no love from Apple or consumers. The Mac Mini is a superior candidate as a media PC, even though you can only get there by configuring it with a boatload of open-source software that Apple can’t control.

It’s the new, slick interface to Snow Leopard’s new QuickTime X that put this bug in my ear. In most respects, it’s actually a more sumptuous experience than iTunes provides. It’s slick, it’s liquid…more than anything, it’s what you’d expect a set-top box to pour into a 50” HDTV to play premium content, not what you’d use to play dinky little home videos your sister emailed to you.

So: a slimmed-down, Jon Ive-designed little saucer with a glowing white seam separating its two halves and a single HDMI port for output. Running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, even though the user only sees a suite of very slick media playback apps?

“Apple intends to increase the mobility of the MacBook line with new models that are even more portable.”

Please explain Location Services to me.

(“Well, Andy, under 10.6, your Mac can get a rough fix on your location by identifying nearby WiFi base stations. Then …”)

No, no. I know how it works. I just don’t see the point.

There are times during a briefing when I sound like a damned idiot. When it’s intentional, it’s because I honestly don’t think I’ve understood something and I need to break the information into individual molecules.

This was the case when I started asking about Location Services.

I assumed that it had greater function than simply setting the correct time zone automatically. But no, it does not. It’s a system-wide service, so developers can find their own ways to use Location Services. But that’s really all it does out of the box.

Okay, well, then it’s a new infrastructure to allow a new generation of mapping and navigation apps to flourish, right? Apple’s not about to start putting GPS into every MacBook. But it’d be a big boon if I could buy just any Bluetooth or USB GPS device I want and be assured that it worked with any mapping app I choose. The GPS hardware gives Location Services my location within a few feet, my nav app gets that location from Location Services without having to know or care what make or model GPS receiver I’m using.

Cool. But no. It won’t work with any GPS, nor is that a third-party opportunity.

Again we see something that took a lot of trouble to add to Snow Leopard, and which seemingly offers very little in return.

It seems as though two different explanations are possible:

(a) Someone on the development team thought this would be a cool feature that really wouldn’t be all that difficult to set up. And Snow Leopard is the release in which the dev team had a chance to tackle bucketloads of little ideas that have been on the whiteboard for years for lack of project time.

(b) The infrastructure and APIs need to be in place so that when The Mac OS X Device That Really Needs Location Services finally appears, then this feature has already seen fire and rain.

“Apple is planning a future product service that will be intensely performance-heavy.”

Why? OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch … and the $29 upgrade price.

OpenCL and GCD are no minor tweaks. Grand Central, particularly, is revolutionary. It’s as though someone did a whole bunch of math and realized that 17 letters of the alphabet are absolutely superfluous and only serve to cap the bandwidth of verbal communication. And then they rewrote all the rules of grammar to support this new scheme.

I reassure you that all of this is happening behind the scenes and the user doesn’t need to know about it nor understand it. I’m just making the point that this is a very big deal.

Why would Apple bother?

Easy answer: because it makes the machines a whole damned hell of a lot faster. And Faster Is Gooder

.

Duh!

Okay, that’s a good point and I’m glad you brought it up, me.

But these enhancements have a couple of other big bonuses:

1) Existing Macs get a huge performance boost “for free.” Let’s say that Apple had an idea for a hugely ambitious new OS feature that absolutely beat a CPU to Hell. I’m trying to come up with an obvious example so let’s go with true intuitive voice interaction, or extensive realtime analysis of recorded and live media (“If anything on these three channels look like a magic trick, record it”).

Could they reasonably ask the whole Mac community to upgrade their hardware just to take advantage of it?

Or would they move Heaven and earth to find a way to boost performance of existing Macs by 50 percent or more?

Which brings us to the $29 price point. I’m fairly sure Apple chose it because they know that Snow Leopard doesn’t have any Vegas showgirl-scale flashy new features …also, because they knew that Windows 7 would be released just a handful of weeks later and they wanted to make sure they had plenty of bullets when they walked up to that particular barrel.

But it’s possible that they’re setting the stage for the speculative Something Big and want to make sure that as many Mac users as possible have the right processing muscle to use that new feature or service.

And then there’s the second bonus that Grand Central and OpenCL bring:

2) They allow slower, cheaper processors to run as well as faster, more expensive ones.

It makes you think back to the Apple corporate line on netbooks: they’re too weak to be “real” computers.

Maybe the point of these new technologies isn’t to make current processors work even better. Maybe they’re here to get full desktop-level power and performance … out of a mobile CPU. The ones that need to be small, and inexpensive, and consume very little power while generating very little heat.

We’ve had a lot of fun here, haven’t we? How marvelous that we can still laugh, even in this tough economy. Wild, reckless speculation is all it was.

No, honestly. Don’t take a gram of this seriously. Here, let’s put all of these reckless Snow Leopard observations together into one pile, just to make them seem even sillier, if such a thing is even possible:

Apple making a new device that runs some flavor of the latest Mac OS. It uses lower-capacity solid-state storage instead of a hard drive. It’s mobile enough that it needs to know its precise location. It needs a more full-screen-ish, consumer-electronic-ey way of slickly playing media, to the extend of needing to run the actual desktop app. And it needs to tease as much power as possible from a low-power, perhaps mobile-ish … processor …

…

Oh, and I forgot to mention that another new core feature of Quicktime X is its robust support for brand-new HTTP Internet streaming protocols.

…

Oh.

Damn.

This turned out to be a column about Apple Tablet rumors after all.

It’s definitely time for me to get some sleep.