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June 28, 2008
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 .
read comments (16)
June 28th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I’m sure it’ll be well worth upgrading.
June 28th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
It is quite possible that there might be quite a few features in work that are still immature to make a big deal by Apple at this time. Most probably all these will be announced at Macworld 2009.
It is always a good policy to under-promise and over-deliver!!!
June 28th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Hm, sounds like you haven’t checked Apple’s website:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/
As the website points out, Snow Leopard is focused on several key areas:
* Building support for Microsoft Exchange into Mail, Address Book and iCal
* Improving multiprocessor performance with a set of technologies Apple has dubbed ‘Grand Central’
* Full 64-bit support, addressing up to 16TB of RAM
* Quicktime X, featuring performance improvements and other unnamed improvements
* A much faster Javascript implementation for WebKit
* And OpenCL, which will allow developers to take advantage of video card processors in addition to CPUs for compute-intensive applications
Other than the Exchange support, the common thread in all this is performance. This is an ambitious set of improvements requiring some fundamental changes in the core OS, and it makes sense for Apple to want to limit the scope of the release to minimize risk. I suspect that accounts for the “No new features” posturing.
(Of course, there will be new features — in fact all the items mentioned above *are* new features — but most of them won’t be all that visible to end users, so Apple wants to keep their expectations down.)
June 28th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Plus the other features listed on http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/
June 28th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Jonathan-
I am not sure how to read your comment, and perhaps you missed the tone of my post. I am not putting Apple down for the release of Snow Leopard, or trying to minimize its importance. Much to the contrary. I am aware of the things you speak of, and most fall under efficiency and stability.
My point was, that while users will not see the staggering list of new features that they have in past upgrades, they should not feel that this is a less important release.
I hope that clarifies my position.
Thanks for commenting.
June 28th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Hi Stephen,
Just to clarify, I agreed with your conclusion but thought your post was largely silent on what seemed to me (and apparently to Apple, from reading their Snow Leopard page) to be key technologies.
When I look at the release as a whole I get the feeling that it’s largely addressing the needs of Enterprise customers, which is really pretty interesting when you think about it in terms of Apple’s larger strategy. Of course that’s just my take on it, but there’s no denying the degree to which Apple is touting across-the-board support for Microsoft Exchange in Snow Leopard, and that’s a real departure from their long-standing, exclusively consumer-oriented focus. I think it’s going to be really interesting to see how this thing plays out.
Just my $.02 of course.
June 28th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Absolutely … I agree 100%. Apple venture into enterprise technologies is even more apparent when you look at the iPhone 3G, which promises to match and surpass the blackberry ..
Snow Leopard is one more step in a road that leads to corporate acceptance of Mac products.
June 29th, 2008 at 3:00 am
That myth about the shrinking app sizes has been debunked a while ago… mostly missing localization and designable.nib files…
June 29th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
The under the hood upgrade is a good idea but I sure would like to see the UI cleaned up also and see some of the sleekness of the iPhone interface and touch screen implemented (see new HP iMac rival coming).
June 29th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I don’t buy that security through obscurity myth.
However, if it is true, wouldn’t those of us using Panther or Tiger be even more protected, if we didn’t upgrade, as the target switches to Leopard and Snow Leopard?
Seems to me the PPC Mac users would be well protected as also.
Trojans require social engineering. Only an IQ upgrade will help you there.
So far there are no self replicating viruses for Mac OS X. Until one turns up in the wild, there is still no need for anti-virus software.
June 29th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I would definitely agree that PowerPC users will remain in a higher degree of security (especially with Apple going away from PowerPC) since evil ones will focus on where there are more targets.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:41 am
I am a Windows user, so I’m a little ignorant of this kind of thing, but I was thinking about getting a Mac. So let me get this straight… you have to *pay* for an update like this? Or no?
September 15th, 2008 at 5:31 am
I’m not sure about the software but object to the assertion that a Snow Leopard is just another type of Leopard. The Snow Leopard (Uncia uncia) is classified in a different genus to the Leopard (Panthera pardus), as they have divurgent appearance, behaviour and physiology, and have no overlap in range. As an illustration of this difference, unlike all big cats (Panthera genus) the Snow Leopard cannot roar.
Logically, this software should have less in common with OS-X Leopard than Leopard does with Panther/Tiger and the rest. It might have been better termed Bengal Tiger. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t consult with me before naming its operating systems. Shame.
November 13th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Anderson, Snow Leopard is basically a new version of Mac OS X. The only reason it is still called OS X is because, unlike Mac OS 1-9, it runs on top of a Unix-based kernel called Darwin. The difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard is roughly the same as the difference between Windows Vista and Windows 7. Apple does have minor version updates (Leopard is up to 10.5.5 now) that are equivalent to Windows Service Packs and those are free.
January 7th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
[...] to 64-bit Saved by Fipps on Sun 28-12-2008 Snow Leopard Saved by agmilmoe on Sun 28-12-2008 Apple’s Snow Leopard. What’s the point? Saved by philgyford on Thu 25-12-2008 BLOB 2.0 Snow Leopard Saved by fernandojclaros on Tue [...]
June 12th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
im also a windows user planning to get a mac. Pay for an update, like, updating from vista to vista sp1, i will have to pay?