Okay, so I’ll admit to a certain amount of goading to begin with here but, hang on a minute, there’s a serious side to this too! OS X Snow Leopard may only be $29 (if you already have a copy of Leopard and not if you don’t) but I’ve been reading through the what’s new feature list with some hilarity.
Apple begin by, sensibly, saying that OS X Snow Leopard is “Refined, not reinvented”…
Mac OS X is renowned for its simplicity, its reliability, and its ease of use. So when it came to designing Snow Leopard, Apple engineers had a single goal: to make a great thing even better. They searched for areas to refine, further simplify, and speed up — from little things like ejecting external drives to big things like installing the OS. In many cases, they elevated great to amazing.
Ok, so let’s look at this new OS by taking each “amazing” example they give and treating it solely on its merits.
1) A more advanced, more nimble Finder – So they redid ‘explorer’. I’ll hold my hands up at this point and say that Microsoft have never redone explorer in a service pack, but let’s just see if the whole package can stand up to scrutiny as a ‘new OS’.
2) New look, new features for Exposé and Stacks – Which is the live thumbnails in Vista and Windows 7, which, frankly, have never needed fixing. It’s a change, but not so much a new feature. Okay so we move on to…
3) Quicker Time Machine backup and 4) Faster to wake up and shut down - I’d hope so… that’s what service packs are for! Moving on to…
5) Faster, more reliable installation – This is just expected from any new OS so can hardly be claimed as a feature.
6) Smaller footprint – Will people really care about this? A 1Tb hard disk now costs less than £100 so, no, you can’t call that a feature either.
7) Another leap forward for QuickTime – which is, sadly, just another new version of QuickTime which, again, is something you’d expect. If Microsoft shipped a new version of Windows without upgrading Media Player everyone would just think they were dumb.
Innovative Chinese character input – Oh dear, oh dear! We’re not even at number 10 yet and already we’re on to something that is only for a very specific and small number of Apple customers.
9) More reliable, higher-resolution iChat – Which Microsoft decided can be updated far more frequently and in a much better way by removing it THREE YEARS AGO.
10) The right service at the right time – MULTITASKING!!! People, Apple’s number ten new feature for OS X is multitasking!
I’m not even going to press on with this at this stage. Suffice to say when you get a bit further down the page and see that “More reliable disk eject” is listed as a new ‘feature’ you might, as I just did, lose all will to live.
I was initially going to write this article about why Snow Leopard has received such little coverage in the press on its launch, and compare this to the press that Windows 7 is expected to get. Having read Apple’s own publicity materials for the ‘new’ OS on their own website however, I can completely understand why.
Snow Leopard is a service pack for which Microsoft have never and will never charge a fee. Windows 7 is a greatly improved operating system over its predecessor (let’s face it it’s hard not to) with a whole big host of new features. And, yes, it too comes in Chinese 
