Now that Apple has revealed CEO Steve Jobs won’t be giving his traditional keynote at next month’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco and after this year the company will be pulling out of the event altogether, it’s tempting to assume that Apple won’t be coming out with any major news at the event.But Thursday, The Guardian (U.K.), citing sources close to Apple that claim development of OS X 10.5.6 Snow Leopard is progressing ahead of schedule, suggested Apple could use the Macworld pulpit to show off the upcoming version of OS X.
Two new technologies in Snow Leopard have garnered the lion’s share of attention since Apple first started talking about OS X 10.5.6 in June: Grand Central, which adds support for multicore processors and parallel computing; and OpenCL, which lets applications tap into unused GPU computing power.
Some Apple resellers have speculated that these technologies could help Apple capture a larger share of the enterprise computing market. According to Forrester Research, Mac business adoption stood at 4.2 percent at the end of 2007.
Parallel processing will be difficult for Apple to sell, but it’ll give users snappier performance across the board in terms of moving around files, launching applications and using system utilities, according to solution providers.
Larry Stram, CEO of Mac Resource, a Huntsville, Ala.-based Apple reseller, doesn’t see parallel computing having a huge impact in the consumer market, but says it’s fast gaining favor in government and research sectors.
“Computers are so fast now that most consumers don’t really need the speed behind parallel processing,” said Stram. “But for Apple, parallel processing in OS X could represent a real marketing advantage over other consumer-based off-the-shelf operating systems, like Windows,” Stram said.
Tags: Apple, Macworld, Snow Leopard