Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Tex]

Hubbard's Q1'09 OS announcement was interesting.

Hubbard's discussion of what Apple is doing under the hood is also interesting. He explicitly states Leopard's read-only ZFS is to enable compatibility with future versions of the OS, which implies that future versions of the OS will be creating ZFS volumes.

The OpenCL ratification suggests that the technology is far beyond the "we hope to code it one day" state in which I supposed this tech stood. This is an apparently widely-liked standard that is hoped to create demand for more aggressive hardware, and to invite development from a broad array of software writers ... who need not learn ActiveX v11 to leverage GPUs for general computing, and who need not guess in advance what kind of DSPs, GPUs, CPUs, etc. will be available in a user's machine. This will definitely have performance impacts on real-world software as it is deployed.

An announcement about early '09 Snow Leopard release would definitely provide excitement, and create a bolus of high-margin software sales. Who knows: if Apple fixes its cloud offerings, free-with-new-OS trial versions may create some subscription revenue, too.

I wonder what Snow Leopard will do to iPhone hardware components ....

Take care,
--Tex.