Snow Leopard gets hip to CoreLocation and multitouch
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted February 5th 2009 1:07PM
posted February 5th 2009 1:07PM
We're in the Q1 2009, folks, and while we'd love to believe that the release of Snow Leopard is imminent, it looks like all we'll have to be sustained by is rumors and innuendo for the time being. According to "insiders" at, well, Apple Insider, the eagerly awaited operating system will be taking some cues from the iPhone, adding both CoreLocation and opening up the multitouch trackpad to third-party developers. Since MacBooks don't currently have GPS, we're guessing CoreLocation will be powered by Skyhook's WiFi-positioning service, but anything can happen down the line. With all the buzz over Google Latitude making its way onto all manner of devices, including the G1, select Blackberrys, and (someday!) the iPhone and iPod touch. With Mac sales being particularly laptop-heavy lately, it looks like location awareness is shaping up to be the must-have functionality of the coming year. Fabulous, darling. Fabulous.
Kelmon.
Find me one laptop on the market today, no matter what the price that matches the performance of my self-built, $2,500 desktop, and I will retire from system building today.
You can go all the way up to a $5,000+ premium top of the line laptop, fully decked out with the highest specs available for them, and yet it would still get utterly destroyed by my $2,500 self-build.
8GB DDR3
GTX 295 in SLI
Core i7 @ 3.6 GHz (OC'd)
256GB SSD and 1.5TB SATA
Once more, find me one laptop, anywhere in the world, that even comes CLOSE to matching that level of performance.
First of all, in multimedia benchmarks, my system would literally run anywhere from 2-20 times faster than any laptop on the market. Mostly around 6-7x faster than the fastest laptop configs due to the SLI GTX 295's.
In terms of general computing, my Core i7 @ 3.6 Ghz would also feature at least 50% more speed than any mobile solution on the market.
Combining those two, adding in the near 2TB of storage and the 8GB of RAM, I would like to see what laptop can afford me with that level of performance, price be damned.
You misunderstand me. What I said was "[g]iven the performance of laptops these days, why would you want a desktop?", not that desktops are not faster than a laptop. Heck, a supercomputer will whup your self-build but the important point is that you don't need the power of a supercomputer. I seriously doubt that you need the power of your current computer either, and neither does anyone else. In the past laptops were slow and you had to make compromises but these days you can buy them and they'll do pretty much everything that a desktop can, and this is coming from someone who was very anti-laptop up until about 6-years ago. These days just about any laptop will deliver enough power for the tasks you can throw at it, plus it comes in a portable and convenient package. The computing power delivered continues to advance at a pace in excess of the demands placed on it by the software.
Heck, I used to build my own PCs but these days, why bother?
@Hamidxa: for your next trick, let's see you cram it into a $350 homemade book bag and take it to the library.
meh i think its useless, its only going to be somewhat accurate when your in a city using skyhook registered wifi, so good luck using it wherever you go.
another way apple just tries to be different, why dont they just drop their purse and add a REAL gps chip, this corelocation stuff is a JOKE.
but Palm is much better than Apple !!
Palm is a big company
with NEW Palmbook, Palmpod and many more.
Apple is down
CoreLocation would be great for Back to my Mac.
Does this already exist?? When testing a core location app in the iPhone simulator from the SDK, Apple seems to determine my location on the iPhone simulator. How do they do that??
It does a reverse IP lookup, which is also why it can sometimes be hilariously wrong (if your ISP sucks and has its entire IP block registered in some other city). This isn't actual CoreLocation technology (just a cheap iPhone Simulator replacement).
Real CL would be using Skyhook to look at the WiFi hotspots near you, as well as relative signal strengths, to get a rough estimate of where you are.
@potato: Thanks for explaining. Does Skyhook work in _foreign_ countries as well? Like Thailand? I kind of doubt it...
Honestly although there are many good implementations of such a technology as CoreLocation, I can't help but feel that 99% of it's usage will be based around targeted advertising depending on the area you're in... *sigh* more things to block....
Who's this we you are talking about? I couldn't give less of a shit about the real leopard release sans the bugs. Realisticly Apple should be giving this OS away to users who have been putting up with their buggly ass 10.x.0 release every 2 years. What? It look like 3 years to get OS X to a somewhat stable state and yet Tiger was buggy as hell. Leopard was buggy as hell (I lost count the number of times WIFI kept dropping on that POS.) Snow Leopard should be the "sorry we bad" free edition just as Win 7 should be the "sorry Vista was a steaming pile" free edition.
I too smolder with generic rage.
OMG Awesome!!! I can't wait for this!!!! The mac tablet would be awesome.. like a giant iphone! :) I'm too busy using the fetch mms app on the iphone to finally friggin send mms. It just came out. thats my little review for it :) its awesome