On June 9th, you likely remember the amazing day at WWDC 2008 where the iPhone 3G was announced. Buried in the cheering of the announcement was the less acclaimed announcement of Apple’s latest OS Snow Leopard. Just the name can tell you that this will not be a ground breaking OS, like all of its kitty predecessors.

Snow Leopards are just a different kind of Leopard, so it is safe to assume that the OS will be pretty similar to what we have with Leopard.

That brings me to a lot of the statements that I have been hearing on pod casts, and in blogs.

“Why should I upgrade to Snow Leopard, if there isn’t a bunch of new features? ”

So here is why, beyond the obvious that Steve Jobs needs more money, and you have an obligation to give it to him.

• First, Snow Leopard is officially being billed as a Security and Stability upgrade. For years, Mac users have felt safe from the virus, and hacker attacks that plague windows users. Many, myself included, don’t even bother to run virus applications, and will click any website without fear. However, we have all only really been safe because of the small market share that Apple has been able to garner. Those days are ending. As the market share increases and more and more people begin to favor the mac, virus writers, and hackers will begin to explore a fairly new and uncharted land and will begin to attack macs as well. I believe that Apple is preparing for this with the next version of Snow Leopard. This alone, is reason enough to upgrade. The less up-to-date you are the less secure you are.

• Second, Snow Leopard is ditching its support for PowerPC. For all the PowerPC users out there, myself included, that kind of sucks, and we will be left on Leopard for the time being. However, for the Intel users, myself included, this means a sleeker more streamlined OS. One that focuses solely on a single architecture. This means a dramatically smaller OS.

- On that same line of thinking, the apps are getting smaller as well. Take a look at this chart from [ AppleInsider ]. This comes from a great article that describes in detail why the apps are shrinking. Read it.

• Lastly, we have to ask if the ceiling on features has been hit. For now, probably. We have seen that with Windows for years, but yet the throngs flock to each new version of Windows. So, will a feature lacking upgrade from Apple spurn the same response? It should, since the main feature being released is usability and efficiency.

I will upgrade, and will recommend to my clients that they upgrade as well. So I guess I am also recommending to my readers to upgrade, and to answer the initial question on what’s the point?

Three words : Efficiency, Security, Stability .