Thoughts on the Mac OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview
by Andrew Cunningham & Anand Lal Shimpi on February 19, 2012 7:40 PM EST- Posted in
- Mountain Lion
- Mac
- macOS
Annual OS X Release Cadence
In the late 1990s through the mid 2000s Intel found itself in a situation where it was heavily invested in a microprocessor architecture that ultimately had no future. Intel's platform strategy at the time was also guilty of making the wrong bets. Additionally the company was experimenting with broadening its focus and shifting from a microprocessor manufacturer to a silicon manufacturer. The combination of all of these factors left Intel in an extremely vulnerable state, one that its competitors were able to take advantage of.
VIA Technologies, a fairly low-cost player in the chipset business back then, was able to see real success selling chipsets to customers who were displeased with Intel's offerings. The bigger and more painful surprise was that AMD, Intel's chief competitor in the x86 CPU space, was able to gain significant marketshare for the first time in its history.
For Intel, the painful learning experience resulted in an internal mandate: no more surprises. Intel invested heavily in competitive analysis groups that would model the expected performance of the competition's roadmap and feed that data back into the development cycle for its own technologies. The other major change was a shift to a two-year architecture cadence, now known as the tick-tock model.
Significant architecture changes every two years, separated by minor updates and process node shrinks during the interim years guaranteed that Intel's product lineup would always remain fresh. The other thing tick-tock guaranteed was that Intel would only be on the hook for two years with any given architecture. Should the competitive analysis teams have missed something, a two year cadence would make any major course correction feasible before significant marketshare was lost.
While the tick-tock model was somewhat unbelievable in '05 - '06, it makes a lot of sense today after more than a couple successful iterations of it. More recently, Microsoft announced a planned shift to a 3-year OS release cadence. Just last week, Apple announced a move to annual releases of OS X. The benefits of an aggressive release schedule are clear, the question is whether or not it's a model that will work in software like it has for Intel in hardware.
Mountain Lion is supposed to be the first instance of this yearly OS X release cadence. In speaking with Apple it's clear that annual OS X releases is the goal, however we may see some fluctuation. I wouldn't be surprised if over the next few releases Apple doesn't stick to a 12-month cycle, but instead allows for some wiggle room. While Intel's tick-tock model is generally viewed as a success, historically we haven't seen a new microprocessor from Intel every 12 months on the dot. Both in the hardware and in the software space we're talking about major projects requiring, at times, hundreds of engineers. Maintaining a strict schedule is near impossible, but it's important that the goal is there.
Prior to Mountain Lion, major OS X versions were released about every two years. Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion were released in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011, respectively. Mountain Lion is scheduled for release this summer, likely around 12 - 13 months after Lion's July 2011 release.
Apple's motivations for moving to an annual release cycle for OS X are obvious. Through small but consistent evolution Apple has been able to build iOS from a platform at a feature deficit to the incumbents to an industry leader. It's not uncommon for companies to look at financially successful models internally and apply them to other business units with hopes of achieving similar results.
The Mac business unit isn't in trouble by any means, but as Microsoft becomes more aggressive in wanting to defend Windows' territory Apple is more motivated to respond in kind. Windows 8 is a highly anticipated release from Microsoft and I don't believe it's a blind coincidence that the first preview build of Mountain Lion was made available to developers thirteen days before the Community Preview release of Windows 8. As different as the typical Mac and Windows PC consumers may be, Apple and Microsoft view the audience as a whole as tasty potentials.
There are also the engineering benefits of an aggressive release schedule. We've seen the impacts of tick-tock from Intel and ATI's old philosophy of showing up to the fight. An annual release cadence, at least on the hardware side, tends to trip up the competition more and work out pretty well. Again, it remains to be seen how well this philosophy maps to major OS releases but in theory, it's good.
Finally we have the fluffier benefits. Version numbers get bigger, quicker. There are more PR opportunities and customers generally like getting new things. In the iOS world these updates come for free, so long as you aren't running unsupported hardware. Although Apple has done a good job of lowering the price of OS X over the years, it's unclear whether or not it's going to take the final step and give away the OS for free. OS X as a whole is a bigger, more complex project than iOS (part of why the annual cadence is going to be more difficult to pull off) so I can understand the justification of charging for each update. But from a general consumer perspective it remains to be seen if the expectation for free updates will become commonplace or not.
All in all, a more aggressive release schedule can be a good thing. We've seen it with individual applications (Chrome) but not as much on the OS side. There's the danger of changing too much, too quickly, but Apple has historically done a good job of staying on the right side of change when it comes to OS X. What will this do to point releases? Will we see just as many of them or fewer as a result of the shift in strategy? I suspect the latter will ring true unless Apple decides to significantly grow the OS X team. The bigger question to me is whether or not we'll see a similar move from Microsoft. Each OS X release was always punctuated with slight UI differences that made newer releases feel, well, newer. It's not about implementing dramatic shifts in the UI paradigm every year, it's about the slight changes that make something feel newer or different. It's a mid-cycle refresh in a car maker's lineup. Logically it's not enough to warrant trading your two year old car in on the updated model, but emotionally it makes us do stupid things. Years ago I remember hearing that PC manufacturers were hoping to imitate the automotive concept of buying computers by model year vs. specs. Apple got the closest out of anyone to achieving that goal and its OS X strategy is clearly designed to be in line with that.
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solipsism - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
AT has plenty of articles about Win8.• http://www.anandtech.com/tag/windows-8
Keep in mind that Win8 was leaked, in pieces over a long time so AT had to mostly write blog-length statements about many of the new features as they dropped, while Apple dropped an entire OS update at once with a detailed webpage and reviews by famous journalists and bloggers who got a one-one-one.
ananduser - Monday, February 20, 2012 - link
Anand is a mac user nowadays. Of course he tends to give more attention to mac wares and mac software. That doesn't mean he ignores other platforms or is less fair.solinear - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Honestly, I couldn't disagree more. There is a huge amount of attention paid to every Apple product here now, almost like it's a "zealot lite" website. I love how they focused on the amazing improvements in the browser, talking about how the tabs worked and scaled now... I'm sorry, but I haven't seen a browser where the tabs didn't scale automatically as you opened more in ages, but Apple is the 'standard' that they compare everything else to?As a result, I tend to find myself going to the hardware (SSD mostly) reviews and ignoring a lot of the others. I might be largely alone, but I see a very heavy amount of coverage to the Apple products, particularly for their market share. If he's going to review Apple stuff all the time, maybe he should be reviewing various Linux distro GUI changes and so forth, if he wants to be fair. I can only remember one of those and it was a LONG time ago.
repoman27 - Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - link
If you're not interested in reading articles about Apple products, simply ignore them. If you want AnandTech to focus more on topics of interest to you, just ask, they seem pretty receptive to input.If Apple articles get a significant number of page views and generate decent revenue for the site, why should AnandTech stop posting them? Just because you're not interested in this type of content doesn't mean that other readers aren't. (Apple now has greater than 10% of US marketshare, and their customer base tends to be of a demographic group that is quite desirable to advertisers.)
KPOM - Monday, February 20, 2012 - link
I doubt it. If anything, iOS 6 would be more of the response to Windows 8 than Mountain Lion. The Mac is an important part of Apple, but it represents only 25% of its revenue. iOS represents about 50% of its revenue and about 70% of its profits.Apple always has had a faster release cycle for OS X than Microsoft had for Windows. Plus, they have for quite a while dropped support for older Macs and/or software with each new release. Leopard dropped the Classic mode. Snow Leopard dropped PowerPC. Lion dropped Rosetta and 32-bit Macs. Apple, unlike Microsoft, makes its money on hardware rather than software, and thus does not have an incentive to keep its new operating systems running on ancient hardware the way Microsoft does.
MonkeyPaw - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
"The last thing I wanted to talk about is something we've already touched on, but it bears repeating - Mountain Lion is dropping support for any Mac that is not capable of booting OS X's 32-bit kernel."Am I understanding that right, or should that read "64-bit kernel"?
jedivulcan - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
From what I've been reading and seeing elsewhere on the internet, AirPlay Mirroring does using the latest iOS 5 beta for Apple TV and a Sandy Bridge based Mac.solipsism - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
I'm not a fan of LaunchPad but it's perfect for those that aren't heavy or proficient computer users. It makes finding and executing an app simple while bringing a familiarity seen on iOS-based iDevices which far outnumber Macs.PS: Dashboard also gets the Launchpad-like displaying of widgets and it's much better than their previous model of having a single row at the bottom that scrolls off screen.
ltcommanderdata - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
Any word on new OpenCL (1.2) or OpenGL (4.x) support?With no QuickSync instead relying on CPUs, hopefully they at least are implementing extensive SSE4.x and AVX acceleration.
ananduser - Monday, February 20, 2012 - link
Apple is not really famous for up to date graphical driver support. And in a way I tend to side with them. The most recent OpenGL implementations are only needed for games and not for CAD.