Was Apple investigating the idea of Mac OS X iPads, or MacBook Airs running on ARM chipsets?

In 2010, Apple’s Platform Technologies Group (a subdivision of the CoreOS department) spent some time working on a project to port the Mac OS X Darwin kernel to the ARMv5 chipset architecture — the same family of chipsets that currently powers iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Here’s a snippet from the project, titled Porting Darwin to the MV88F6281, subtitled ARMing the Snow Leopard:

The goal of this project is to get Darwin into a workable state on the MV88F6281 processor so that other teams can continue their work on this platform. The project has three major milestones:

1. Getting the buildsystem into shape, so that it can build the kernel and kexts.
2. Building and booting the kernel into single user mode.
3. Booting the system into multi-user mode.

The project was only made public several months ago. While iOS also uses the Darwin kernel, this project involved Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and was left for the CoreOS teams to continue. Since Mac OX X 10.7 Lion has since shipped, as have newer generations of iPad and MacBook Air, without any sign of MAC OS X on ARM, it’s unknown if this project is still ongoing or has since been put on the shelf. However, the author of the paper is now a full-time employee at Apple, working as a CoreOS Engineer.

While some might find the idea of a Mac OS X iPad intriguing, Tablet PC, which put full Microsoft Windows on a tablet, never gained any traction in the market. It, like Mac OS X, was simply not designed for a multitouch user interface.

Microsoft, to their credit, is currently working on Windows 8, which will have both a Windows Phone-like Metro user interface optimized for tablets, and a more traditional Windows 7-like interface for desktops and laptops.

Instead of making MacBook Airs with ARM processors, Apple decided to take iOS software “Back to the Mac” instead with OS X 10.7 Lion.

Given Apple’s preference for simplicity, and the huge sales they’ve achieved with iPad, it seems unlikely they’d deviate from their current strategy. Indeed, there has been more speculation of late that Apple would continue to move iOS towards the Mac, as opposed to moving the Mac to ARM.

However, Mac OS X once ran on Power PC chips, yet Apple had it secretly running on Intel chips at the same time. It only makes sense for a company as forward thinking as Apple to have ARM-compatible builds of OS X in the development labs.

SO while neither an OS X tablet nor an ARM MacBook Air seem likely, it’s interesting to see further evidence of Apple keeping the Mac platform nimble.

UPDATE: For those curious about the group, kernel, and chipset referenced above, here are the descriptions from the project introduction:

About the Platform Technologies Group

As it was described by a manager: “We do the plumbing, if we do our jobs right, you never see it.”. The Platform Technologies Group, a subdivision of the Core OS department, works on the embedded platforms that Apple maintains. Here, platforms are brought up and the embedded kernel and lower level support for the platforms is maintained.

What is Darwin?

Darwin is the lower half of the Mac OSX operating system. It includes the XNU kernel which is based on the Mach microkernel, and the userland.

What is the MV88F6281?

The MV88F6281 is an ARMv5te compatible processor from Marvell. It is based on their custom Sheeva core, which is designed to be like the ARM926EJ-S core from ARM. It has all the features youʼd expect from a modern CPU, including several high speed SERDES lanes, a Harvard L1 cache, and 128kb of unified L2 cache.

Source: Delfte University of Technology

To coincide with iOS 5, Apple today has released Mac OS X Lion 7.2 which plugs Apple’s desktop OS into the same iCloud that just started powering mobile. If you’re an iOS user with Mac, grab this now.

If you’re an iOS user with Windows, hang tight. Your update should be out soon as well!

The 10.7.2 update is recommended for all OS X Lion users and includes general operating system fixes that improve the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. It also includes support for iCloud, a breakthrough set of free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content on iCloud and push it to all of your devices. iCloud on OS X Lion includes the following features:

• iCloud stores your email, calendars, contacts, Safari bookmarks, and Safari Reading List and automatically pushes them to all your devices.
• Back to My Mac provides remote access to your Mac from another Mac anywhere on the Internet.
• Find My Mac helps find a missing Mac by locating it on a map and allows you to remotely lock the Mac or wipe all its data.

Getting started with iCloud is easy. After installing the update, OS X will automatically present an iCloud setup panel. Simply enter an existing Apple ID or create a new one and then follow the on screen instructions. To learn more about iCloud visit http://www.apple.com/icloud.

The 10.7.2 update also includes Safari 5.1.1 as well as fixes that:

• Allow reordering of desktop spaces and full screen apps in Mission Control.
• Enable dragging files between desktop spaces and full screen apps.
• Address an issue that causes the menu bar to not appear in full screen apps.
• Improve the compatibility of Google contact syncing in Address Book.
• Address an issue that causes Keynote to become temporarily unresponsive.
• Improve VoiceOver compatibility with Launchpad.
• Address an issue that causes a delay in accessing the network after waking from sleep.
• Enable booting in to Lion Recovery from a locally attached Time Machine backup drive.
• Resolve an issue that causes screen zoom to stop working.
• Improve Active Directory integration.

For detailed information about Safari 5.1.1, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4922.

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4767.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

If you’re downloading now, let us know how it goes for you, and when you get iCloud up and running, tell us how it works.

Trying to figure out where to find the UDID or serial number of your iPad, iPod touch, or iPhone? There are many reasons you may need to look up your UDID, IMEI, or serial number of your iOS device. While earlier generations had the serial printed on the back casing of the device, many newer models don’t. There are still several ways you can obtain this information both natively on your device or via iTunes.

Follow along to find out how.

As a side note, a lot of information is taken out for privacy reasons. Obviously your fields will not be empty.

Serial Numbers

There are a few ways to obtain serial numbers. The most common in under Settings.

1. Tap Settings and go into General.
2. Now click About.
3. When you scroll down you’ll see quite a bit of device information including your serial number. (As a side note, users on 4.x will not see the UDID/ICCID number on your device like in the picture above. I believe this is a new feature in iOS 5.

If your iOS device will not boot and it has a SIM tray, you can also pull out the SIM tray and view the serial printed on it. As long as your SIM tray has not been mixed up with anyone else’s, it should be the correct serial number.

UDID numbers

To view your UDID number in iTunes, use the following steps –

1. Open iTunes with your device plugged in and you will see your device name and information. Tap where your phone number is a couple times and it will eventually show your UDID number (also known as ICCID). This is the number you have to have on file to test developer builds of iOS.

2. If you need to paste this number somewhere, simply go to the top of iTunes and click Edit and then Copy. This will paste your UDID number to the clipboard. From there you can easily copy it into an e-mail or text document.

To view your UDID number from on your device, use the following steps –

1. Download a UDID app from the App Store. There are several available and most are free. I use UDID by Sean White (Free – iTunes Link)
2. Simply open the program and it will give you all of your device information.

3. You can then copy it into an e-mail or just view it.

Viewing device information from programs like UDID are especially convenient if you aren’t home to plug into iTunes and need to access the information quickly.

But what if your device is stuck in restore mode and you can’t load this information in iTunes or on the device?

You can still pull the information if you have a previous backup file as the backups are saved as “UDID – Date”.

Simply navigate to the following location and view your UDID as the name of your backup –

Backup locations in Windows

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Backup locations in Mac OS X

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Have you used any of these methods or a different one? How’d they work for you?

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to news@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

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Marc, Seth, and Rene iterate through Apple’s OS X Lion, Microsoft’s Windows 8 preview, HP’s webOS 3.0 TouchPad UI, discuss text in graphics and color management, and talk with Prototypes’ Duncan Wilcox and Keith Lang. This is Iterate!

• Show notes

Apple implements an interesting layered user experience in both iOS and OS X. They’ve always done this to some degree; early on with Mac OS X, UNIX gurus could live comfortably in Terminal while those raised on the GUI of classic Mac and Windows would feel right at home in Aqua.

With iOS 4, Apple’s mobile platform added similar layers of user experience. While an expert user could double click home to open up the Fast App Switcher, or hide multiple apps into a single Folder, casual users could keep using the iPhone or iPad perfectly well without ever exposing either of those UI elements. iOS 5 adds Notification Center to the mix. Experts can click and pull and expose greater pro-level features while someone coming from a feature phone can use iPhone as little more than a phone that plays music and takes pictures. And both can be perfectly happy.

OS X Lion even adds an iOS-like upper layer with LaunchPad, so now the UNIX geek in Terminal and the GUI user in Aqua can finally give their parents, kids, and non-computer savvy family and friends an iPad-like app launcher to use, compete with auto-save, restore, and a host of other, far more humane features.

Making computers more and more mainstream is something Apple’s done from Apple II, through Mac, to iPad, and it’s something they’re continuing to invest in for Lion, and iOS 5. And their market share seems to indicate it’s paying off.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is here. OS X, the desktop counterpart to Apple’s mobile iOS, has taken iPad innovation “Back to the Mac” with this release, including the iPad home screen-like LaunchPad for app management, automatic save and resume, etc.

“Lion is the best version of OS X yet, and we’re thrilled that users around the world can download it starting today,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Lion makes upgrading a Mac easier than ever before; just launch the Mac App Store, buy Lion with your iTunes account, and the download and install process will begin automatically.”

It’s also the first time a major Mac OS X version will be distributed online, through the Mac App Store. Gigabytes of download will be an interesting challenge for those with multiple machines, but especially for those with slower internet connections or restricted bandwidth. (Never mind what the launch day rush might do to the internet in general — Apple servers have gone down during iOS releases in the early days.)

UPDATE: Apple has announced that Lion will be available “later this August” on a USB thumb drive for $69.

All that aside, we welcome our Mac OS X cousins to the goodness we’ve been enjoying for a while now in iOS. Who’s getting it?

[Apple PR, $29 - Mac App Store]

Apple has just seeded the Gold Master (GM) candidate for OS X 10.7 Lion to developers. That’s the desktop jab, scheduled to land this month, that Apple is using to set up the overhand right of iOS 5, which will finish the combo this fall.

What’s interesting here is that Apple seems to be distributing Lion by Mac App Store redeem codes for the major milestones, and via Software Update for the smaller releases. By contrast, Apple has stuck with the tried, true, traditional direct download method for iOS 5 beta 1 and beta 2, though with the new over the air (OTA) features built into iOS, it’s possible they could try and test that system sometime in the next couple of months.

Lion, like iOS 5, will tie into the also-in-beta iCloud system so developers testing iCloud APIs for iOS will probably want to see how they work in Lion as well.

So, unless there are any showstoppers, we’re probably only a couple weeks away from Lion. We likely won’t see iOS 5 GM until September, however, but once and while, new iOS-centric features sneak into the OS X updates as well, so keep your eyes open.

[developer.apple.com]

Looks like Apple will be holding an event in October again, this time called “Back to the Mac” and no doubt focusing on — OS X 10.7 Lion?! — new MacBooks, a new MacBook Air, and maybe iLife ’11 and iWork ’11?

Since iOS is such an integral part of Apple these days, it’s hard to believe they’ll skip iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad entirely, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for anything from new slideshow exports (yawn!) to a whole new app for making HTML 5 goodness for our mobile devices, or Back to my Mac for iOS? (I still want an iOS layer to replace Dashboard and FrontRow.)

What do you expect?

[Engadget]

Via CrackBerry.com:

RIM has officially announced that BlackBerry Desktop Manager software for MAC will be available this September. THANK YOU RIM. You can visit blackberry.com/mac to sign up for updates and learn more or visit the Inside BlackBerry blog to see a few screen captures of it in action.

Yeah. Good luck with that. Any guesses how long that lasts before Apple releases a patch to disable BlackBerry sync?

(Kidding! Joking! Don’t panic, Kev! We’re happy for you — now you’re at least half-way towards restoring your childlike sense of wonder…)

Good news for Mac OS X-based Jailbreakers! After having to resort to using powered USB hubs or patching in older versions of files to work around a bug in 10.5.6 that prevented DFU mode from being recognized, the iPhone Dev-Team dropped a note a Twitter to give 10.5.7 the all-clear:

The new 10.5.7 Leopard update is safe. In fact it’s more jailbreak-friendly than 10.5.6, since the DFU-mode bug is gone.

So no nasty cat-and-mouse-game shenanigans this time around, and even a slight improvement over the previous — unintentional — round.

Only one thing left — figure out what to do with all those now-redundant USB hubs…

(Via Jamesus)

We already knew that Apple’s next computer operating system, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (estimated for delivery mid-2009) was leveraging some of the amazing work done by the iPhone team, including the highly optimized QuickTime X. Now Apple Insider brings word that things like CoreLocation and more Multi-Touch might be making their way back to the big desktop brother as well:

CoreLocation will utilize a Mac’s existing networking hardware to triangulate the system’s location in a manner similar to the way the original iPhone was able to use the technology to emulate a true global positioning signal. [...] Snow Leopard will also gain access to a new set of Cocoa-based programing interfaces for leveraging the multi-touch features of the latest MacBooks and MacBook Pros within their applications.

The synergy between Apple’s desktop and mobile OS X development really seems to not only be benefitting both platforms, and optimizing R&D’s bottom-line, but bouncing off each other in iterative splendor. Hopefully iPhone OS 3.0 can take a little back as well — I’m looking at you universal spotlight search!

The iPhone runs mobile OS X, a stripped down and highly optimized subset of Mac OS X. Adobe has just released Flash 10, including a version for Apple’s platform. Does this new version finally address all the bugginess and bloat, that has long plagued the non-Windows version of Flash? What about the general privacy and security concerns around Flash cookies and exploits? Ars Technica put the new builds through their paces, and Daring Fireball sums it up thusly:

Performance still sucks on Mac OS X compared to Windows Vista. Using the exact same computer (four-core 2.66 GHz Mac Pro with 6 GB of RAM), Hulu video playback consumes 56 percent CPU on Mac OS X 10.5 vs. just 7 percent on Vista.

John Gruber updates his post to say it’s not as bad as he first thought, but 2 times slower is still 2 (or more!) times too many. The iPhone is not as forgiving as a desktop or even laptop computer. If Adobe really wants Flash on the iPhone — as they keep harping to the media — why not make a highly optimized, super-fast build that would befit the OS X platform? You know, like Apple has done with Quicktime X?

Apple.com has put up a teaser page for their next-generation OS X, 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard. And the features, to put it mildly, are mind blowing:

Exchange support built in, so that iPhone and OS X share common business email, calendar, and contact sync.

64-bit monster, supporting a theoretical 16TB (terabytes!!) of RAM.

Multi-core optimized, using “Grand Central” to chip away at one of the biggest problems in programming: how to really take advantage of multi-core processors.

Media from iPhone! building on the iPhone OS X, Quicktime X takes advantage of streamlined, next gen tech for modern codec support, and ultra-fast javascript for the web.

Open CL, to co-opt the GPU into doing some heavy crunching on the compute side.

How does this relate to the iPhone? Aside from using what they learned making iPhone OS X, from optimization to shrinking the OS footprint, rumor has it Snow Leopard will go a long way towards unifying the OS X branches, leveraging development efforts, and in the end, giving the best of both worlds to desktop, laptop, and handheld users.

Great, I just got through WWDC 2008 and now I’m already jonesing for 2009. Way to go Apple!

Last year Apple infamously delayed the release of their long anticipated OS X 10.5 Leopard in order to devote more resources to their soon-to-launch iPhone. When Leopard finally roared, it brought with it a host of new features, including CoreAnimation, Time Machine, Coverflow and Quicklook, and some 296 more according to Apple.

So would the next OS X release be similarly feature-packed… and delayed?

Turns out maybe just the opposite. Rumor is Apple may release OS X 10.6, claimed to be code-named “Snow Leopard” as early as Macworld in January 2008, and maybe even debut a beta this WWDC (?!).

Sounds crazy? Here’s what’s crazier: just as “Snow Leopard” comes off as a minor addition to “Leopard”, so too is OS X 10.6 supposedly a functionally similar product to 10.5! Focus this time may just be on stability, making what’s good better, and increasing the unification between the various “flavors” of the OS Apple now deploys across the Mac, iPhone, and Apple TV platforms.

Personally, this sounds great to me. OS X is mature enough at this point that more eye-candy or changes for changes sake can easily take a back seat for the final polish analogous to the 10.1 release of the early days. Nailing down the platform will let Apple take both the Mac and their mobile initiatives, headlined by the iPhone, fully and functionally into the future.

Gimme.

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