Leopard Takes a Giant Leap Ahead of Windows Vista

Apple has justified the delay of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard until October 2007, due to the lack of manpower behind the iPhone project. The Cupertino-based company attempted to justify pushing back Leopard much with the same argument that Microsoft used for Windows Vista with Windows XP SP2, not sufficient engineers to complete both projects in time. Subsequently, the iPhone will take center stage at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 between June 11 and 15 in San Francisco. But Leopard cannot be ruled out, as Apple promised thatthe next version of its operating system will be feature complete by WWDC. Moreover, the Cupertino company even plans to be generous with beta copies of Leopard.

Following the postponing of Leopard, the operating system has somewhat slipped into the shadow of the iPhone. But just a few days before WWDC it managed to leap out. Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Schwartz spilled the beans on the new Apple file system. "This week, you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developers Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS X," Schwartz said, revealing that the upcoming version of Mac OS X will scrap the HFS+ file system for Sun's open-source ZFS. In this context, leopard has made a giant leap ahead of Windows Vista.

Microsoft's latest operating system comes with the NTFS file system, a relic from Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. The fact of the matter is that while Windows Vista does come with a decent array of improvements the file system is not one of them. By comparison, Leopard will deliver not just a 128-bit file storage system but also a volume manager and a RAID controller. Sun's Zettabyte File System makes volume management redundant, prevents data corruption and delivers built-in backup capabilities. The only downside for Apple is the fact that the company building the "most advanced" operating system in the world is borrowing technology from Sun's Solaris OS. But hey, in the beginning Mac were running on Microsoft software...