PowerBook and OS Futures Outlined at Apple Developer Shindig

Computergram International, May 11, 1999

By Rachel Chalmers

Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference kicked off on Monday morning in San Jose's Convention Center with a characteristically solid, upbeat keynote from head honcho Steve Jobs. The friendly crowd was treated to new business portable hardware, plenty of alpha and pre-alpha graphics software demos (most of which went without a hitch) and a lengthy explanation of exactly what Apple intends to do on the operating systems front. It all went over a treat.

As expected (CI No 3,657), the perpetual interim CEO announced two new PowerBooks, one with a 333 MHz processor and a 4GB hard disk drive, the other with a 400 MHz processor and a mighty 6GB of HDD. They're thinner than their notoriously burdensome siblings ("They're just beautiful," said their proud Papa), but they're still no lightweights and certainly no threat to Sony's Vaio or the other sub-notebook contenders.

The industry standard for big-screened, DVD- or CD-enabled notebooks is 7 to 8 pounds, with the current hefty PowerBooks right at the top of that range. At 5.9 pounds, Jobs claims the new PowerBooks are the lightest notebooks in their class. What really won the new portables an ovation, though, was Jobs' promise of extended battery life: five hours for one battery, thanks to a little kernel tweaking in Mac OS 8.6, of which more later.

The extended battery life means road warriors can watch Austin Powers on DVD twice on one battery, Jobs pointed out. Best of all, the new PowerBooks should be in US stores ten days from now. That news was enough to quell disappointment at the oft-delayed announcement of Apple's consumer portable, said to be called the iBook. Since Jobs let slip this opportunity to launch the iBook, it seems likely that he will announce it at MacWorld Expo in New York in July.

Apple's increasingly solid graphics utilities took up their share of demo time. In January, the company committed itself to OpenGL as its 3D API. Jobs announced that that API is shipping now and will be included in future versions of Mac OS. Also shipping now is MRJ 2.1.1, which Jobs says is the fastest Mac Java runtime environment ever. Pity it's still 30% slower than Java on Windows, but kudos to Jobs for admitting that that's the case and promising to do better in future releases. "It's great that all Java runs faster," he admitted.

Not surprisingly after that slightly embarrassing confession, Jobs revisited Apple's Star Wars trailer coup. Late in 1998, LucasFilms Inc released the 30-second teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode One in a variety of formats, including RealVideo and Microsoft's Media Player. Not so the second, full-length trailer, which was available in Quicktime only - by public demand, according to LucasFilms! Senior software engineer Avie Tevanian took the opportunity to play the by-now-familiar trailer once and a half (it still won a round of applause) and added one of the new TV trailers released last week, just to show off new channel and streaming features in Quicktime 4.

What this particular demonstration made abundantly clear is that Apple intends to eat Real Networks' lunch, by releasing for free its streaming server software alternative to Real Networks' cash cow. "They'll charge you big bucks for what we'll give you for nothing," Jobs pointed out. "We believe there's a major market around open servers for streaming video, and we intend to lead that. Quicktime owns the space for non-streaming multimedia. We have a very solid base there. Now we're moving this 800-pound gorilla into the streaming space, and the horse we're going to ride is open protocols and open source." At least one cash- strapped content provider has bought the story: National Public Radio, which is now broadcasting via Quicktime on the web.

There were few surprises but many more details in Jobs' operating systems roadmap. Mac OS 8.6 is now available worldwide, and there will be one more major release - Sonata - before the release of Mac OS X client early next year. 8.6 adds bug fixes and "a few little features" to 8.5, including the kernel tweaks that add battery life to the new PowerBooks. Sonata should have over 50 new features. Of these, Tevanian showed off two: multi-user capabilities and major additions to the Sherlock meta-search engine which make it an LDAP client and a shopping agent. Type a product name into Sherlock II and it will poll many search engines and tabulate the results by price and availability. It's a pretty impressive step forward for Apple as an e-commerce content player.

The big one on the horizon remains, however, Mac OS X Client. This will have the same kernel as Mac OS X Server; that is, Darwin, the open source Unix-like operating system Apple is shipping now. So Mac OS will finally get protected memory, pre- emptive multi-tasking and multi-threading, just like a grown-up operating system. On top of Darwin, Mac OS X Client will run Quartz, an imaging model and windowing system based on Adobe's portable document format (PDF). This recalls experiments with Display PostScript by Sun Microsystems Inc and NeXT Inc in the eighties, but with more processing power on the desktop, it's faster.