Apple putting Snow Leopard on crash diet?

Key applications in the next version of Mac OS X could be smaller than they are in Leopard, according to one report.

(Credit: Apple)

One of the "under the hood" improvements that Apple might be planning for Mac OS X Snow Leopard might involve a crash diet for key Mac applications.

Roughly Drafted reports, in a long list of features expected to appear in Snow Leopard, that Apple is working on reducing the footprint required by many of its key applications, such as iCal, Mail, and Preview. The report also says the size of the Utilities applications could be dramatically reduced, from 468MB to 111.6MB.

Smaller applications could make Snow Leopard more snappy and more stable, as Apple prunes out unnecessary code and features. This would also make Snow Leopard more friendly for computers with solid-state drives, like the one found in the MacBook Air, Roughly Drafted suggests.

Snow Leopard is expected next year, and 64GB flash memory drives like those found in the MacBook Air will be still very expensive at that point. And flash drives north of 100GB, as most hard drives are these days, are out of reach for just about everyone.

This could also make Mac OS more mobile-friendly. Apple's operating system development is headed down two paths at the moment, for the Mac and the iPhone. However, we know OS X iPhone and OS X Leopard have an awful lot in common, and if Snow Leopard has a smaller footprint it could extend battery life in a mobile device.

Apple discussed Snow Leopard in front of its developers two weeks ago at the Worldwide Developers Conference, but hasn't said all that much about the next operating system in public. The company has said it plans to focus on improving the internal structure of the operating system rather than focusing on new features, specifically revealing plans to improve support for multicore processors and graphics chips.

[W Macaulay]

Now, if Microsoft (or any software developer) could just learn to do this, we'd all be happy.

[chris_d]

PowerPC support. That's where a lot of it is coming from. In true RDF style, Jobs said you'd have more space available. If your machine has an Intel processor that is. If you have a PowerPC machine, no Snow Leopard for you.

[Perry_Clease]

I have a G3 iBook and no Leopard for me much less Snow Leopard. My G5 iMac will probably run Snow Leopard, but maybe not what ever come after that version. Eventually if you want to run the latest OS be it OSXI or Vista you may need to get new hardware.

[open-mind]

Sorry but you're wrong. The actual code is a very small part of an app package, so dropping PPC will have little affect in size.

[amandachuck]

Yes, Leopard is a bloated beast to be sure. It takes up too much space on the HD and in active memory. In many cases, doing the same tasks I did in Tiger, I'm using twice as much memory and have no improvement in performance. Leopard is truly a Microsoft style OS release. Except that is is relatively stable for all the bloat.

[Thomas, David]

LIES, AND FUD.

Funny, if this were true, your so-called claims would have been news upon its release.

[sandor_f]

to quote straight from apple (re in-active memory):

"nactive memory
This information is no longer being used and has been cached to disk, but it will remain in RAM until another application needs the space. Leaving this information in RAM is to your advantage if you (or a client of your computer) come back to it later. "

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342?viewlocale=en_US

in other words, in-active memory is just apple's way of saving you time and CPU cycles if you want to open something that you recently closed. it is cached items, and the memory will be given up freely as other applications need it. it is **NOT** a sign of bloat, rather a sign of better OS memory usage patterns.

[Groucho6]

Oh please. Leopard is anything but bloated. Leopard is made to run PPC or Intel chips. Every Universal Binary is effectively two separate applications in one wrapper. Snow Leopard will be Intel only, so all of that PPC code will be absent. You can expect every Apple application contained in Snow Leopard to be approximately 1/2 the size of its current iteration.

And Tom -- You shouldn't have to be told this. It's pretty obvious ;-)

[dmtien]

The best way to test this theory is to run XSlimmer on the Utilities folder to see what an Intel-optimized build takes up.

[johnericanderson]

Welcome to the world of writing software for different platforms, and expecting it to work on all of them. And this trouble with only 2 Mac platforms, both from in-house.

[st.walters]

Well this is an obvious one. Reducing HD and memory foot print of an OS gets much easier when you discontinue legacy support for older systems.

OR

They could elimnate all those extra programs that it's illegal in most of Europe and was actually the root of the United States v Microsoft antitrust suits from their OS. Yes Mac people, Apple is doing exaclty what MS was sued for doing by providing their own version of commerically avilable programs. So why arn't they being sued? Because they're the only viable competator to MS, and because the government wants to help them stay on equal footing with MS, they're allowed to violate the same laws that MS is currently paying fines for. Of course, as soon as somone comes into the feild and wants to put their OS on clone machines... what happens? APple files for injunctions to try and prevent the sale of the competators machines.

I'm looking forward to 10.6 myself, just so we can see the "Well to upgrade to the new OS, you'll need to buy all new hardware" commercials.

Why not buy a clone... oops sorry.. you can't Apple doesn't believe in real competition... Yeah that's right I said it.. the new OS, just like Vista, will require new hardware from any non Intel mac owners, and low end mac owners will likely need other upgrades to get the "performance" gains they're saying you'll get. In the end 10.6 will be better than 10.5... just like in the long run Vista ends up being better for PC's that want to support advanced hardware that XP is not physcially capable of supporting because of memory management, or kernal level problems that prevent the adoption of new hardware.

(Vista OS.... number of "beachball of death" crashes 0.... number of problems with Vista... 0.... number of times I"ve had to reboot because the program froze... 1 over 1.5 years...number of times I have to explain to Mac people why their new Dell runs Vista like crap... 100's... )

[open-mind]

Difference between Apple and Microsoft: One is a monopoly, one isn't. So different rules apply.

[kcotham]

Troll!

[open-mind]

I know you would all like to believe that the Intel-only binaries will be making the apps a lot smaller, but that's simply incorrect. These days, most of an application is NOT CODE. It's resources, like graphics files, interface files, and string tables. Dropping the PPC code will barely make a dent in that. If you don't believe me, ctrl-click one of your application packages and view the content yourself.

[pilaa]

Kids, always remember to stay off drugs or you too will become an airhead like this guy...

[jmdunys]

Well, in fact open-mind is right. Roughlydrafted's article explains quite clearly that the diet will come in new code optimization, and raster graphics instead of bitmaps, due to the upcoming QuicktimeX

[tipoo_]

i saw a Leopard VS snow leopard application memory graph on another website, some of the memory shrinks are massive. i realy wonder how they can cut some applications memory useage by 2/3'rds without affecting usability.