Why OS X Lion roars

The arrival of OS X 10.7 “Lion” is a significant step forward for many reasons. For some, it will be the point at which Apple starts to integrate the desktop/laptop experience with the tablet/iPad one. For others, it might be their first experience of Apple’s platform – it’s clear that sales are being gained as customers who’ve bought iPads or iPhones start to examine their options to move on from older Windows machines (which puts OS X into the frame in a way that Linux isn’t).

For me, though, what’s significant is that Apple hasn’t given up and shut up shop on the OS X family.

Without a doubt the arrival of first the iPod, then the iPhone and lastly the iPad, have had a truly dramatic effect on the company’s fortunes, an effect that’s amplified by the explosion in the number and the success of its retail operation – at a time when everyone was predicting that e-sales were the only way to go. And of course this has been helped along by Microsoft’s inept dropping of the ball with Windows Vista, from which it has only partly recovered through Windows 7.

Lion is a significant release – it’s Apple’s Windows 8 moment, but a whole year earlier

I’m not denying for a moment that Windows 7 has been a success for Microsoft in terms of units sold, the rebuilding of corporate image and a refocusing of energies for the future, but we know today that the platform we’ve been waiting for – the true successor to the hearts-and-minds success of Windows XP – will be Windows 8, due out next year. At that point, many strands will come together: a revamped UI experience that finally acknowledges the existence of touch interfaces; a shift to supporting very low power consumption ARM CPUs; and an admission that much of the old legacy software is now beyond its sell-by date, locked in a time warp and not really fit for the forthcoming decade.

That the company could keep getting it so wrong for most of a decade and still be in business is a testament to its colossal market share and importance. I cruelly joke to friends inside Microsoft that this is all the ill-gotten rewards of a convicted monopolist, which has managed to cling onto the market share it obtained through means both fair and foul. Their reaction – namely, to choke into their pint-sized paper mugs of milky coffee – suggests that my view isn’t the one currently prevailing in Redmond, even though there’s a sniff of truth hidden away in the acidity of the comment.

Nevertheless, Apple has made steady progress with OS X, with a new release every year or two, each of which tends to bring better features without breaking the recent past. We must try to remember that the 2000s were the decade when Apple managed the near impossible: killing off its old OS line, which culminated with OS 9, and replacing it with something far more solid and with an equally long history.

Never forget that the underpinnings of OS X came straight from NeXTStep, the OS developed for the company Steve Jobs set up during his time away from Apple. Comparisons with the early days of Windows NT are entirely valid, and some people will argue quite cogently that NeXTStep both came before, and was superior to NT. But that’s a topic more suitable for one of our regular ITTU (IT Tweet Up) meetings, which we hold either in a London pub or the pub next door to my house, near Huntingdon.

So Lion is a significant release. It’s Apple’s Windows 8 moment, but a whole year earlier. It isn’t only a pretty face, although the cosmetic improvements it brings are welcome. For example, finally we can resize a window by dragging on any side or corner. Yes, I know that Windows 2.x did this back in the 1980s. As any long-term reader will understand, there are few truly new ideas in the world, only different, and better or worse implementations of common sense.

What else makes Lion worthy of attention? Well, this is the OS release where the kernel goes 64-bit across the board. Apple has managed to create an OS architecture that could have a 32-bit kernel running both 32-bit and 64-bit apps. Nothing new there, you might think – Windows has done this for ages. Indeed, it did, but OS X allowed 32-bit and 64-bit drivers to be intermixed on the same kernel, whether that be 32-bit or 64-bit. That’s why OS X hasn’t suffered from Windows’ 32-bit vs 64-bit differentiation, which has inevitably led to slower uptake of 64-bit driver writing than might have been ideal. With Lion it’s a 64-bit kernel push, and a corresponding push for 64-bit drivers and apps.

Next comes its support for non-Intel code. Before Apple moved over to Intel CPUs some five years ago, the platform ran on PowerPC RISC processors. In order to make the transition seamless, Apple licensed processor emulation code that enabled PPC code to be run on the Intel OS and hardware. The upside of this was that many apps that were useful back then would still run today, but the time has come to snip this umbilical cord and move over to a pure Intel environment. All of this is good stuff, and keeping its OS cleansed and up to date is something that all OS vendors should be able to manage. But it isn’t the stuff of game-changing advance.

This is one of the most significant changes in the computing world for years

Despite a lively PC Pro podcast on this subject, and a Twitter debate with most of the editorial team one Saturday morning about the changes to the scroll direction on the touchpad, this isn’t a biggy, despite the passions that were vented at the time. No, let’s look at a couple of things that should make even the hardened Windows user blink and think twice.

First, system recovery. Most users don’t learn about Windows’ built-in recovery tools until something goes bang and they’re presented with a front-end boot menu offering them single-user login and so forth. This is all good stuff, but it’s of little use when something really nasty happens – then you wind up booting from the OS install DVD and going for a full reinstallation.

Before you do this, however, check out the fixing tools on the Vista and Windows 7 front menus. These comprise a set of intelligent tools that can recover your Windows machine from many common problems.

Similar tools exist in OS X, known also as Single User boot – you hold down the splodge-S key combination to boot into this mode (for non-Apple users, “splodge” is the affectionate term for the Cmd keys to the left and right of the spacebar). But what if things are worse still?

Well, you boot from the DVD in Windows, or from a USB key if you’ve built one using the Microsoft tools, and reinstall the OS. This is all straightforward, but what if your device has no DVD drive, or you have no disc and don’t have a large spare USB key already set up with the necessary installation files (which, naturally, will be the case for all but the most dedicated geeks)?

Apple has a solution for this fatal occasion, and it’s very elegant. First, when you install Lion it creates a hidden partition in which is stored a core bootable installation of the OS. Hold down splodge-R when you boot up the machine and it will take you to this installation, which is created even if you upgraded from Snow Leopard 10.6 rather than a clean install of Lion (unless, that is, you have a software RAID boot partition spread across a number of disks, in which case Lion will decline to set up this feature). From there, you can fix disks, reinstall the OS and so forth.

What if the disk itself is broken, or you’ve installed an entirely new hard disk? Well, the EFI BIOS firmware will notice that there’s no bootable device in the computer, and take you online to Apple’s cloud servers, from where you can download and automatically reinstall the OS onto your computer, using a full GUI. I accept that moving 4GB of OS code over the internet might take some time, but Apple’s view is clearly that the world is ready for this today, and I’d have to agree.

The installation licence is tied to your Apple account, so there’s no scrabbling around for that box with the long and unmemorable licence key printed on it (which was doubtless thrown out in the tidy-up after Christmas). No, with Lion you boot into the cloud, login and your licensed OS is downloaded, then all the apps that you’ve bought through the App Store are downloaded and installed too. And once the iCloud service is up and running in a few months, all your data will reappear too.

This is one of the most significant changes in the computing world for years. Enabling internet-connected users to do a full OS reinstall, app reinstall and reunion with their data has been the Holy Grail for anyone who has to do friends and family support. Tell your relative to splodge-R and let the machine sort everything out, then put the phone down and continue with your life. Of course, there are a few speed bumps here that are beyond Apple’s control. You wouldn’t want to attempt this over a PAYG 3G mobile data connection, or from a bandwidth-constrained hotel room network. But it brings a very powerful new system recovery feature into play, which means Apple can continue to grow the market while still staying in control of its technical support infrastructure.

Keeping the promise

Next up is Thunderbolt. I’ve been keeping an eye on this technology under its beta name of Light Peak from Intel. This is a quad-channel, 10Gbits/sec interconnect that delivers PCI bus and DisplayPort video into a single, small connector. It allows for up to eight devices to be daisy-chained together, and you can run quite large amounts of power down the bus, too. Its promise has been huge, and it’s now a shipping technology, both in Apple computers and in various peripherals.

Let’s look first at Promise’s drive array. For not many pennies over a grand (exc VAT), you get a medium-sized desktop tower case that holds six 2TB hard disks. On the back of this case is a pair of Thunderbolt ports and an IEC mains socket. Power it up, connect it to your Thunderbolt-equipped Mac and run the setup program provided on the supplied CD. The drive comes preconfigured to run in RAID5 mode, whereby one whole drive’s worth of space is used to store checksum information. This means that you can lose any one drive out of the set, and still keep working while you locate a replacement.

Calculating the checksums takes time: when you first power up the drive it creates the RAID5 array, which takes about six hours or so and tells you the length of time the rebuild will take. You can work with the drive while it’s building/rebuilding, but it’s best to let it do its work unhindered. Once it had completed, I had a 10TB single volume running in RAID5 over six 2TB disks.

Measuring the performance of this beast was actually quite difficult. The thing is so damn fast that finding anything that could feed it data quickly enough wasn’t easy. There are a number of benchmark utilities out there – although it was clear that some of them were becoming confused by the delayed-write RAM cache held inside the drive array – but all of the figures were eye-popping, somewhere between 300 and 500MB/sec read and write speed. For comparison, the 512GB SSD drive in my MacBook Pro 17in tops out at about 200MB/sec, so be in no doubt that this Promise drive array is right at the cutting-edge for speed.

Even better, if you need more space, just buy another one and plug it in, and then another. A 17in iMac has two Thunderbolt ports, so it could have at least 12 of these monsters connected to it. That’s 120TB of disk space…

For high-powered workstations Thunderbolt is here, it works, it’s fantastically exciting

But there’s more. Apple has just updated its rather lovely 27in monitor to a full Thunderbolt connection, so now the monitor itself sports a Gigabit Ethernet connection, a FireWire 800 port and some USB 2 connections, all running over the Thunderbolt channels. If you take a new MacBook Air, which has only two USB 2 sockets and a Thunderbolt port, you can add this screen and gain a whole bunch of extra connectivity too.

I’m so excited by this groundbreaking technology – an interconnect that’s protocol-agnostic and which runs at speeds that were unthinkable even a few years ago. Indeed, when wiring up my new office, I’m having to make hard decisions: should I go with 10Gbit Ethernet cabling, or stick with 1Gbit CAT-5E in the expectation that my future requirements won’t be supplied by Ethernet at all, but by Thunderbolt over fibre?

And here’s the joy: today, these cables are limited to 2m in length, but take apart the plugs at each end and you’ll find a whole bunch of small microprocessors in there. These handle the signal-shaping over the 2m wire run to ensure you get the full 10Gbits/sec throughput, but clearly there’s no reason why there couldn’t be fibre transceivers in the same place, and a longer cable carrying fibre at full speed. They’d still need to run DC power down the cable as well to support remote-powered devices, so the cable itself would probably look identical but simply be longer. Run that through the trunking, sir? Don’t mind if I do.

For high-powered workstations Thunderbolt is here, it works, it’s fantastically exciting, and it’s clear that Apple’s desktop/laptop hardware business is big enough to attract a range of vendors to get involved with the technology. The results are eye-watering, and without any significant cost premium.