QotD: 10.4
Posted May 20th, 2004 @ 10:12pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: When will Mac OS X 10.4 be available?
My Answer: I'm going to guess March, 2005. And you know what? That's fine and dandy by me. I wasn't annoyed at all by the rapid upgrades, because we needed to get to 10.3 quickly, but now that we're here, let's enjoy the scenery, get settled in, and not have to support 172 new features as developers every 12 months. Ahhh, what's that noise? Yes, the collective sigh of small developers everywhere. 🙂 I love new features as a user, and I love using them as a developer… but sometimes too fast is just that: too fast. We'll have a good pace now that all of the pieces are in place.
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Posted 20 May 2004 at 10:47pm #
i vote that they will try to put it out in the fall, with developer copies released again at wwdc. i vote big server release and refinements of new interface. xsan, xgrid and spoken interface i think will find there home in 10.4 and not to far from the big show. i think they will be more on time than last round with being on schedule as well.
that could just be my hope.
Posted 20 May 2004 at 11:00pm #
I agree with erik. But I think that march 2005 is a bit far. Panther is pretty nice, but there are some serious issues that need to be addressed with MAJOR code changes. Not with point releases. My hope is that anytime November/December would be a good time. This also keeps in time with Apple's gradual slowing of the release pace. 10.0-10.1 (six months), 10.1-10.2 (10 months) 10.2-10.3 (12 months)
I think those numbers are right 🙂
Posted 20 May 2004 at 11:11pm #
Let's see. I finally upgraded to 10.3 last week, which means that the amnesty period ("buy 10.3 after this date, and the upgrade to 10.4 is free") starts... now.
Posted 20 May 2004 at 11:18pm #
My guess is that it will be sometime between November and January. There are some things I'd like to see in an update between now and then, but most of the things I want are big enough that they probably won't show up until 10.4. (Apple seems not to want to add anything to Cocoa in maintenance updates, except the occasional minor bug fix. It seems like Carbon occasionally gets updates in the minor releases, though.)
Posted 21 May 2004 at 3:33am #
Given that Panther still has a huge amount of localization-related bugs, and Apple rarely fixes those in point releases, I'd say that the sooner the better...
Posted 21 May 2004 at 8:05am #
vinay: what serious issues?
Posted 21 May 2004 at 4:57pm #
I think the recent news that the development was going to slow down is a good indicator not to expect too much time wise for Tiger. It will be previewed as announced at WWDC, but no one is going to leave with CDs in hand like with Panther. (Which I wish was otherwise since this is my first WWDC) I'm thinking that it will get released around the January expo. The slowdown is a good thing now that it is stable and has some polish. Otherwise you will have the classic/OS X fracturing problems, I know there is some programs that require 10.3 to run, but there are those that still haven't upgraded to Panther yet.