Just installed Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro, and I’ve been wondering for ages what version of OpenGL it would come with (I want to play around with OpenGL 3). Here’s the result….

*sigh*

2.1 NVIDIA-1.6.0

With OpenCL being included, I was hoping a lot of the subsystems would be upgraded. Alas, it hasn’t happened. It’s not like OpenGL 3 is new either, it’s been out for over a year (current release is 3.2).

Ok, so I figured I’d jot down my thoughts on Apple’s announcements at WWDC09. Normally I’d just chuck this on Twitter, but I don’t think 140 characters isn’t enough

iPhone 3G S
I like that it’s got a speed upgrade and a dedicated 3D processor (I’m actually a little jealous of this one), but that’s about it really (for me anyway).

I’m a bit meh about the Magnometer (compass). I’m sure I’ll eat my words here when a killer app requires it.

The camera doesn’t really bother me. 3MP with crappy optics isn’t going to do much. I hardly use mine anyway, I’d much prefer to use a dedicated camera. Video could be nice, but once again, if I wanted video, I’d use a dedicated one.

Voice control, while a very nice technology, it’s not really practical. You can’t really use it in public without annoying people, and I don’t know about you, but when I’m by myself, I feel a bit stupid talking to nothingness.

All of the rest of the features are included in the 3.0 software update (which I’m actually quite excited about) that is coming out worldwide on the 17th of June (Australia included, their press release was actually incorrect).

MacBook Pro
This one is easy. I am so glad that I bought mine last year! At the same price point that I paid (bottom level 15″ MacBook Pro), you now get a downgraded machine
Pros:-

• Faster CPU (does CPU speed really make much difference these days?)
• More memory (Pretty cheap to upgrade RAM too)
• Longer Battery life (5 hours is enough for me, but this is a nice bonus)

Cons:-

• Only a GeForce 9400 integrated graphics card. This one is a dealbreaker for me. The 9600, while not the best card on the market, it’s pretty good for a laptop card (especially with Snow Leopard using OpenCL – more below)
• No Express Card slot. It’s been replaced with an SD slot (which you could have had with an SD Express Card reader).
• Non removable battery. Not a dealbreaker (how many people actually replace their batteries rather than buying a new laptop), but I think this is a bad way to go.

Snow Leopard
Out in September. This is going to be a fantastic upgrade. Full 64bit operating system. The current OS is 32bit with 64bit extensions (basically to allow addressing of over 4Gb of system memory – ie. This doesn’t just include installed RAM). Going to full 64bit should speed things up quite a bit.

Installation time has gone from 1 hour down to 15min which is a nice change, it’s not a big change in the scheme of things (you only do this once every now and again – much less on the Mac than Windows).

It’s smaller. This one surprised me. I’m currently hearing that the installed size is about 6gb smaller. I guess this is due to not having to have the PowerPC binaries in their apps anymore (Snow Leopard is Intel only). This is a very nice change that a newer operating system is faster and smaller than the one it’s upgrading.

OpenCL. Most people really don’t care about this one, but this is going to give some major performance increases for anyone with a GeForce 8600 or better. Basically your Dual Core system just got a whole lot more cores added to it (think hundreds of slower cores). Now while this won’t double performance in most cases, you will see some major speed-ups.

One that I don’t know which way it’s going (if anyone knows, let me know). OpenGL. Is Apple going to have OpenGL 3.1 (and GLSL 1.3) on this, or will it still be stuck back at OpenGL 2? I’d love to start playing around with 3.1 (some quite major changes) and I’m sure more apps/games would use this if available.

Safari 4
Meh.

Finally, an update to the blog.  Actually, you should be getting another update after this shortly (within the next couple of days).

I think I’ll need to chuck a disclaimer here too.  I’m not bashing Apple here.  I actually love my Apple products.

Anyway, with the new release of various Mac’s today, I was checking out the store specing up a new $30,000 Mac Pro (I can dream okay), and started having a look at the Xserve’s that Apple offer and it struck me as strange, what problem does this product solve?

To me, it seems like a solution looking for a problem.  But what is it really?  It’s an Apple server (based on Intel hardware) with their server operating system which (which is based on FreeBSD) with the Apple tax on top of it (I actually hate that term, to me it’s the quality of the build/components/support that make up that tax – most of which are either covered by buying server components, or not needed as you won’t get support for your server software anyway).

Now if you need to run some type of server, why not build it out of regular server components (I’m talking Xeon, ECC RAM, etc. here), or buy a much cheaper one with the same spec from Dell/HP/whatever.  Then chuck FreeBSD or Linux on it and pretty much have the same result (I haven’t done any deep research, but to me it seems like all the Apple specific protocols would already be supported).

A 1U rack server is likely to be headless and the apps shouldn’t need to have a UI (command line is more than enough for server apps), so running Mac OS X Server seems like you’d be wasting CPU time for no benefit.  Objective C is also already supported on Linux/BSD too (and has been for years).

Now, back in the PowerPC days, I can almost understand the use for this (although there’s been PowerPC builds of Linux for ages, but they don’t seem as well developed/supported as x86 ones), but since swapping to Intel, I really can’t seem to find a use for it.

If anyone can enlighten me on this, do so in the comments.