Apple

Psystar, the clone company Apple is suing for selling generic hardware with the Mac OS pre-installed, is expanding its business to include selling software that will allow anyone to install Apple's operating system.

(Credit: Psystar)

Psystar said on Thursday that its Rebel EFI suite is available for download from its Web site. The software will allow anyone to install any modern operating system on their computer, including Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

According to the company, the software is compatible with the Intel Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, i7 or machines running the Xeon Nehalem CPU.

A demo version of the software is available for download so users can "test-drive" it before they buy. Psystar says the demo would allow users to install Mac OS X, but with "limited hardware functionality as compared with the full version."

Psystar said after downloading the software, users just need to burn it to a CD and follow the onscreen instructions. The full version of the Rebel EFI suite, removing any hardware limitations, costs $49.99.

Microsoft's Windows 7, released today, is also compatible with the Rebel EFI suite, according to Psystar.

Psystar is best known for selling clone computers and being sued by Apple for copyright infringement. A trial date has been set for January 11, 2010.

Apple on Thursday released a relatively minor update for Mac OS X Snow Leopard that fixes an issue users had with the operating system that downgraded them to an older version of Adobe Systems' Flash Player.

(Credit: Apple)

When Apple released Snow Leopard on August 28, it included an older version of Adobe's Flash plug-in that was known to have security issues. Sophos security expert Graham Cluley warned users of the downgrade and urged anyone who installed the operating system to upgrade immediately.

Snow Leopard 10.6.1 addresses this issue by updating the Flash Player plug-in to version 10.0.32.18, the most current, stable release from Adobe.

While that is the big news for Apple's first Snow Leopard update, the company did include some minor fixes as well. The new version includes improved compatibility with Sierra Wireless 3G modems and addresses an issue that caused some DVDs to stop playback.

Printer compatibility has been improved, and so has the automatic account setup in Apple's Mail application. An issue that affected Motion 4 becoming unresponsive has also been fixed.

Mac OS X 10.6.1 can be downloaded from Apple's support Web site or via the software update mechanism in Mac OS X.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard has been available for one week, and for the most part, users are reporting very few problems upgrading.

While not everyone is thrilled with the way Apple handled the release, it turns out that Snow Leopard is Apple's most compatible operating system release ever. According to sources familiar with Snow Leopard's internal testing process, Apple kept an enormous amount of statistics on third-party application compatibility.

They said that Apple not only tracked many of the most widely-used apps, they tracked many of the shareware apps, as well. If an application exhibited problems, the developers were notified of the incompatibility and were offered help to make it Snow Leopard-compliant.

It's true that Apple did not offer a public beta of Snow Leopard, but it did expand the seed program with this release. Some large and small businesses, as well as individuals were included in the beta program for Snow Leopard. Of course, developers have access to the code through Apple's Developer Program, to test their apps through the entire process.

Apple began working with developers in June 2008, according to my source. This gave developers the maximum amount of time to check their apps against the new operating system.

While complete data was not available for this story, anecdotal evidence suggests that upgrade problems with Snow Leopard are not widespread.

That's not to say there aren't problems. CNET's Rafe Needleman found several apps that didn't work with the new operating system. Apple also posted a list of incompatible software on its support Web site.

BusinessWeek's Stephen Wildstrom feels that the compatibility problems with Snow Leopard are "widespread but not pervasive."

Wildstrom says that Apple should have done three things differently: it should have released a public beta; it should have provided a pre-upgrade compatibility checker; and he feels developers weren't given enough time with the finished code.

Google released an update for Chrome to fix compatibility problems with Snow Leopard on Monday, which along with other fixes shows the gradually maturing state of the Mac OS X version of the browser.

Chrome 4.0.203.4 for the Mac is only a couple notches up the version ladder than the version 4.0.203.2 it replaces, but there are some significant changes in the developer-preview software. For Snow Leopard compatibility, programmers fixed a garbled text bug, said Jonathan Conradt, a Chrome engineering program manager, in a blog post Monday.

Google began Chrome on Windows but has been gradually moving it to Linux and Mac OS X. Those versions so far are still only developer-preview incarnations not ready for prime time yet, though I find myself gradually slipping over to Chrome on my Mac system now that it's getting mature enough for me. I suspect a beta version isn't far off.

Google is fleshing out some basic features, though. One user-interface tweak enables support for command- and shift-clicking.

Another feature coming to the Mac is support for the tab-to-search feature in the omnibox. That lets you perform a site search directly from the address bar by typing a URL, for example news.cnet.com, then the tab key, then search terms.

Tab-to-search also works with Amazon, Google, Google News, and Yahoo, The New York Times, but not Bing yet. I search a lot, and this saves me one step and waiting for a page to load just so I can click in its search bar.

The tab-to-search feature has arrived on Chrome for Mac OS X, too.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The most annoying issue I've found--and let me know if I'm missing something obvious here--is that I lose the file-upload dialog box while using Gmail with Chrome on Mac OS X if I switch away from the application while halfway through. If I don't attach a file immediately, that tab's instance of Gmail becomes useless because I can't get back to it.

Performance still is an issue with the Mac version, though. I was pleased to see some work on new-tab creation speed, with programmer Mark Mentovai using various changes to work the time from 1-3 seconds down to a fifth of a second.

Google is working hard to spread Chrome, though it has small market share at present. It's now installed as the default browser on some Sony laptops, as Endgadget noticed in July with the Vaio NW, and I heard about earlier in August.

Google has been advertising the browser as well and is at work making it the foundation of its Chrome OS.

Apple began shipping Snow Leopard on Friday, but the true importance of the Mac OS X update likely will emerge well afterward.

That's because Mac OS X 10.6 begins a longer-term Apple attempt to get ahead by cracking a problem facing the entire computer industry: squeezing useful work out of modern processors. Instead of stuffing Snow Leopard with immediately obvious new features, Apple is trying to adjust to the new reality in which processors can do many jobs simultaneously rather than one job fast.

"We're trying to set a foundation for the future," said Wiley Hodges, director of Mac OS X marketing.

Apple shed some light on its project, called Grand Central Dispatch, at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, but most real detail was shared only in with programmers sworn to secrecy. Now the company has begun talking more publicly about it and other deeper projects to take advantage of graphics chips and Intel's 64-bit processors.

The moves align Apple better with changes in computing. For years, chipmakers such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices had steadily increased the clock rate of their processors, and programmers got accustomed to a performance boost with each new generation. But earlier this decade, problems derailed the gigahertz train.

(Credit: Apple)

The next version of Apple's OS X, which is due out Friday, may bundle antivirus capabilities.

Mac security firm Intego said that the latest version of the operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, could have an antimalware feature, according to reports, in a blog post Tuesday.

The company published a screenshot which it said was of the security feature detecting a Trojan in a download, made via Apple's Safari Web browser.

Intego pointed out that the most recent Mac adverts compare Mac security favorably to PCs. However, security experts have historically been divided over the relative security of Microsoft and Apple code, while some point out that any comparison is further complicated by the differing market penetration of Macs and PCs.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

This story has been corrected. See below for details.

Apple, a company that's rarely namby-pamby about making technological changes, has put its foot down once again with its Snow Leopard upgrade to Mac OS X due in September.

When the new operating system arrives in September, it'll work only on Intel-based Macs. That means Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, will be the end of the line for those with Macs that use PowerPC processors.

Though the move led to some teeth-gnashing among those who felt left behind, it's not unreasonable in practice.

First, it was four years ago that Apple first told the world it was switching from PowerPC chips to Intel's x86 chips. Even though PowerPC models arrived afterward and the first Intel-based Macs didn't start arriving until 2006, three years is still a long time in computing history. Anyone who hadn't upgraded by now isn't the sort who demands cutting-edge technology.

Second, much of what's important about Mac OS X 10.6 isn't consumer-oriented features, but rather underpinnings to let Mac software take better advantage of new processor directions--Grand Central Dispatch for multicore processors and OpenCL to use graphics chips for general-purpose computation. Although Apple sold high-end PowerPC-based machines with two dual-core processors that could benefit from Snow Leopard's abilities to juggle multiple jobs at the same time, it's likely that many people with that large a computing demand moved on to modern machines.

Apple's Bertrand Serlet touts Mac OS X at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

And supporting new operating systems on older hardware is expensive. Bug fixes and security patches must be tested on a much wider array of systems. The expense is even higher with the complexities of supporting multiple processor families.

What will PowerPC users miss?
Mac OS X 10.6 has other features, to be sure, and Apple drew more attention to them than to the lack of PowerPC support this week at its Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. For example, Snow Leopard gets built-in support for Microsoft Exchange servers, which will make Macs coexist more easily in corporate networks and let people avoid Microsoft's Entourage software. Also arriving is a method to more easily shift among one application's open windows is another, a faster and more flexible Finder to browse files, faster backup with Time Machine, and higher-resolution video chat.

But the way I see it, those extra features are more refinements than revolution, and the new low $29 Mac OS X 10.6 upgrade price (or $49 for a household with up to five Macs) is a good incentive to move people to an operating system that will help Apple as much as the customers themselves.

Infrastructure that will help tap into multicore processor power is important. I'm still not expecting any free lunch for developers--it'll still be hard to write software split into parallel chunks that run independently in separate threads--but providing an operating system foundation that handles some multithreading chores stands to help the Mac ecosystem broadly. The fact that the only Macs available today with more than two processor cores are Mac Pro models costing at least $2,499 indicates that Apple recognizes the today's limits of multicore chips for most users.

But Apple likes to focus on the future more than on the past, and it's clear that multicore chips are the future. Wringing performance out of them is crucial to the success of any software.

Breaking with the past
Maintaining backward compatibility is a tough act in the computing market, where hardware changes faster than customers upgrade. Microsoft, with larger market share, has extended support for elderly software such as Windows NT 4.0 and Windows XP, but Apple has been willing to draw the line on many other occasions besides the Snow Leopard change.

Here are some examples:

• The move from PowerPC to Intel chips was not Apple's first change. The company switched from Motorola's 680x0 family of processors to the PowerPC line in the mid-1990s. To ease the transition, Apple provided translation software that could run older programs for 680x0 chips on the newer machines.

• After leading the charge for years with 3.5-inch floppy disk drives that were significantly smaller than the 5.25-inch models in PCs, Apple ditched the built-in floppy drive altogether with the 1998 introduction of the iMac. Need a floppy? Get an external drive.

• Also going by the wayside with the iMac was the Apple Desktop Bus, which had been used to connect keyboards and mice. Apple embraced the USB technology that began its life on the PC side of the industry.

• FireWire, standardized as IEEE 1394, is perhaps something of an exception. The Apple creation had superior data transfer speed compared to USB, but Apple no longer embraces FireWire universally. Today, MacBook Pro laptops have FireWire ports while the MacBook Air doesn't and consumer-oriented aluminum MacBook models introduced in 2008 didn't.

• ExpressCard, which inherited the the expansion-slot throne from the PCMCIA standard, is another victim of Apple's calculus. The company's newly announced MacBook Pro line ditches it in favor of an SD Card slot for flash memory cards. Only a "single-digit percentage of customers" was using the ExpressCard slot, said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in his speech at WWDC.

• When it comes to connecting external monitors, Apple anointed DisplayPort when seeking a successor to the mini-DVI port in earlier MacBooks, passing over an entrenched alternative to DisplayPort, HDMI (High-definition Multimedia Interface). Adapters can help bridge the gap, though, for those who need to support incompatible displays.

Innovation's consequences
Not everything is an either-or proposition. Apple's gradual transition to a 64-bit operating system--a transition it says Snow Leopard completes--was eased by compatibility for older 32-bit drivers so older hardware didn't suddenly break. In comparison, Microsoft has strained hard for years to try to get hardware companies to release 64-bit drivers to let Windows communicate with their products.

But often, change does come at the expense of last year's technology, and it can be rough on customers when companies decide it's time to move on. I recently sold off an old Vista-incompatible Wacom graphics tablet I'd used for a decade, long after the PC industry had abandoned the serial port it required, and I was sad to see it go.

But change comes, and when it does, Apple's relatively small market share and low penetration into businesses actually is something of an asset.

Microsoft has to update Internet Explorer 6, a browser introduced eight years ago, in part because so many businesses don't want to rework processes that rely on it. Apple can move ahead to Safari 4 in a much more liberated way.

Apple wraps itself in the flag of innovation, and if you're a Mac user, you should expect both the ups and downs of that philosophy.

Corrected at 7:26 a.m. PDT to reflect that Apple's sole remaining MacBook model does have FireWire support and 1:57 p.m. PDT to reflect that the household upgrade price is good for up to five Macs.

Apple and Microsoft are fighting for the mindshare of consumers as both companies prepare to roll out upgrades to their operating systems later this year.

Apple on Monday showed Worldwide Developers Conference attendees Snow Leopard, the next major version of Mac OS X. Apple has been very open about the fact that Snow Leopard is meant to be an under-the-hood maintenance release, focusing on performance enhancements to the operating system.

Windows 7 is essentially Microsoft's maintenance release for Vista, that according to many accounts was a failure for the company. Putting aside all of the back and forth between the two companies, one industry analyst feels it comes down to the consumer.

"It's really immaterial the degree of the rewrite in the operating system," Ross Rubin, director of analysis for market research firm NPD, told CNET. "The key is the consumer benefit."

Apple introduces Mac OS X Snow Leopard at the WWDC.

(Credit: Jim Dalrymple)

While early testing of Windows 7 seems to bear out improvements in the operating system, Microsoft is coming off a very bad consumer experience with Windows Vista. That is not a trivial obstacle for it to overcome.

Microsoft will have to fight the industry perception that Windows 7 is just Vista with a few fixes. That could certainly lead to slower adoption of the new operating system out of the gate.

Apple on the other hand is coming off one of the most successful operating system launches in the company's history. Mac OS X Leopard was a solid release, packed with features. Overall, Leopard had relatively few problems throughout its life cycle.

Apple doesn't have to fight off that negative perception from its users or the industry. Macs have been selling better than ever and there is no sense that will slow down anytime soon.

Typically, Apple sells its new operating systems for $129. That's a flat fee. Everyone gets the same version that includes all features and enhancements. However, Leopard users will be offered an upgrade to Snow Leopard for $29. Microsoft has yet to release its upgrade pricing, but it is expected to be much higher.

"The OS war is on in a big way," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president of Strategy and Analysis at Interpret. "Charging $29 won't win Apple any converts, but Microsoft is going to look really bad with its upgrade pricing."

It's clear that Microsoft has a much bigger channel to push Windows 7 to customers, but we've seen with the Vista release that doesn't always mean success for an operating system.

Apple is coming from a strong position with Mac OS X Leopard, so upgrades to its newest Snow Leopard release should be very strong.

Apple said Snow Leopard is expected to ship in September. Microsoft will release Windows 7 in October.

The WWDC banner hanging inside Moscone Center in San Francisco.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Apple has started decorating San Francisco's Moscone Center in anticipation of the Worldwide Developers Conference, which opens Monday morning.

And as has become tradition, when the banners go up, the seemingly round-the-clock guessing game of what Apple will announce intensifies. This year, the banners say "WWDC: One year later. Light-years ahead." Now the objective for many is parsing that phrase and poring over every image on the banner to extract some sort of meaning.

The phrase itself, plus all the application icons on the banners, indicate the centerpiece of the conference will be the App Store and the new features of the iPhone OS 3.0. Apple said as much in its announcement of the conference keynote address, which is on Monday at 10 a.m. PDT. We know there will be discussion of the updated mobile operating system as well as more details on OS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard. And of course, there have been previous indications that a new iPhone is on the way.

The iPhone Blog points out that the App Store did launch in July, not in early June at WWDC last year, so it hasn't technically been "one year later." Gizmodo thinks "light-years ahead" is a snarky reference to the jumble of competing smartphones debuting soon--particularly the Palm Pre, which launches two days before WWDC opens.

TUAW took out its copy editor's pen, noting that "a year is a measure of time while a light year is a measure of distance." Of course, anyone who remembers "Think Different" knows Apple slogans haven't always been bound by the traditional rules of grammar.

In any case, all the mysteries will be solved by the end of Monday's keynote speech, which we'll be live-blogging. Until then, check out the gallery of photos below that we snapped Wednesday morning.

Photos: Prep for Apple's WWDC 2009 begins