Snow Leopard: the Obvious Choice

Ivan Moscoso, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 @ 11:00 am

When OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was released back in late 2007, I told a colleague at the time that Leopard was, by far, the worst release Apple ever put out. You can pardon a bit of hyperbole there, but after a healthy string of solid releases of OS X that just "worked", the problems produced by Leopard were numerous (one might counter that this is all relative-- four to five issues might not sound as numerous to users of other operating systems, but for OS X, these were a pretty big deal, and kept me from switching for months).

By comparison, Snow Leopard marks a great return to the kind of releases the Mac community came to expect. Yes we still have a month left to wait for its release, and yes there might always be small glitches, but as one long-time Mac user the answer to the question of "is it really all that?" the answer is pretty clear to me at least: "Yes, yes it totally is."

There are two ways of looking at an operating system: the underpinnings of the platform (in the technical sense), or, in the popular sense, the body of applications surrounding and defining a baseline of functionality all users can expect each other to have. The great thing about Snow Leopard is, without getting into details itself, that there are enough improvements in both areas to make this a must-have upgrade. And as a footnote, the number of issues I have had with the betas so far have been relatively minor in comparison with 10.5. There really is no contest. Whereas the initial release of 10.5 brought some improvements to the operating system at a very large cost for early adopters, 10.6 brings a lot of improvements with much lower risk.

I'm not going to rehash what's new in Snow Leopard, but suffice to say that it proves out the wisdom of Apple's strategy to focus on improving the internals 'under the hood' for this release. Since the release of 10.5, Mac users have been fortunate enough to see improvements with other technologies on the platform (Safari 4 comes to mind), and hardware that continues to improve both in features and price. OS X by itself does not need to draw people to the platform-- the iPhone and Mac hardware will do that. So it seems to me that, thanks to these other factors, the keys to the OS have been given back a bit to the engineers-- and if my instincts are right, it's going to be a great release.

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Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   Also looking forward to the Snow Leopard. Dedicate a whole year to just improving the internals? Great. Given the leaps and bounds that the OS has taken feature-wise, I’m glad the company is taking the time to breathe a bit and clean up the dust.

   Comment by Chris Vincent, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 @ 12:01 pm

2. 

   As a video producer, I’m really looking forward to the OpenCL implementation that promises a speed up in video encoding (if you are lucky enough to have blessed video cards).

   Comment by Kevin Triplett, Friday, August 7, 2009 @ 12:03 am

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