Leopard Quad Universal, Vista One Trick Pony

The media's reaction to the Leopard preview at WWDC has been limited. Time Machine has been receiving a lot of comments as have Spaces and the improvement to Mail and iChat. However, a lot of the really important features have been entirely ignored. From a technological point of view, the 64-bit capabilities of Leopard are astounding, but this of course won't register with most journalists that don't even know what that means.

Unlike Vista, which does have 64-bit support, but in the form of a separate installable build, the next version of OS X has full native support for both 64-bit and 32-bit applications. This is a very big difference as in Vista, support for 32-bit applications is done through an emulation layer called Window on Windows. The biggest issue with this emulation layer is that 32-bit hardware drivers will not work, and as such, many will forgo the latest technology and go for the build that run all their ancient software.

Apple has done things right and ever since Xcode 2.4, the OS X Universal Binary format has been capable of supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit for both PPC and Intel processors inside the same file, which is being referred to as Quad Universal. This is a huge step forward as users do not have to worry about processor architectures or 32 vs 64-bit processors, everything being handled behind the scenes, both in terms of the OS and the software.

The lack of hardware driver support is the main reason why Windows XP x64 has not been widely adopted, and with Vista, this will not change one bit. The hardware incompatibilities will remain and people will continue to use the 32-bit version of Vista, despite the fact that they have 64-bit processors. What is the point in advancing the hardware if the software is incapable of taking advantage of it?