Snow Leopard. I prefer to call it Snow Yawn. Leo Laporte prefers to call it Snow Job, whatever you call it, Snow Leopard is basically not a very big event, you can ignore it and not feel guilty. I'd even go so far as calling it a service pack you have to pay for. The Apple Fanboys will hate this article and so if you are one you can either man/women up and take some criticism of the products you use (like Microsoft people do and accept daily), send me an abusive e-mail about it or ignore the rest of this article.
Ok, so lets get down to Business. Apple have previously stated that Snow Leopard will contain "0 New Features" which is absolute rubbish because if it contained 0 new features then you wouldn't make it because nothing will have changed. Secondly the biggest features they have promoted includes 64 bit computing. Snow Leopard actually doesn't boot into 64 bit by default, it just boots into a 32 bit kernel. Now I know there is technical reasons why they don't want to boot 64 bit by default (mainly compatibility) but if you're going to use 32 bit by default, then don't advertise that Snow Leopard is going 64 bit - because for the majority of consumers - this is not true! As Paul Thurrott says, if Microsoft shipped a 64 bit operating system with a 32 bit kernel, the industry would just laugh at them and pick them up for that straight away, especially Apple users, but when Apple does it, nobody notices.
Secondly, there is actually no noticeable difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard, yet so many compatibility problems already. At least when Microsoft royally stuffed up with Windows Vista, you could actually see things had changed so much and that was probably a good enough reason. Windows 7 very much outstrips Snow Leopard in terms of what it offers. If Microsoft offered this to consumers as the next version of Windows - they'd be most unhappy because it feels like a service pack. Leo Laporte described it as if Apple had saved up all their features that they could have done with Leopard but decided they'll keep them all, release them as a new system and charge $29 to their customers. Mac OS X 10.1 was free, 10.6 should also have been free for what it offers.
Lastly - what is with Apple filling up the new features list with tiny little things just so they can have a new features list. PDF icons refreshing 1.8 times faster - OMG I gotta get it! Gamma changed from 1.8 to 2.2 to match Windows PCs.... Sold! It just shows how pathetic it is. So yes, Snow Leopard is actually Snow Yawn and I hope the Media keeps attacking Apple for this, as well as their extremely closed nature, but that's another story.
