Apple's next OS Snow Leopard is coming
How will Apple sell the next iteration of its operating system to ordinary consumers? Alex Kidman pulls at Snow Leopard's tail...
Snow Leopard, or OS X 10.6, to give it its rather dull "real" title, will hit Macs sometime next year. If you believe the rumour mills, it could be as early as the end of Steve Jobs' Macworld 2009 Keynote speech. I suspect that's a tad optimistic, but Apple's a funny company in some ways, and it'll arguably need some kind of rabbit to pull out of its hat for Macworld 2009. My completely uninformed gut feeling guess, however, is that shinier iMacs will be what Steve will be making a fuss about in just over a month's time.
In any case, back to Snow Leopard. The big focus of Snow Leopard, from the dribbles that Apple's allowed to leak out so far, will be on improved efficiency, performance and having an improved memory footprint. There's also the persistent suggestion (not from Apple, I hasten to add) that it will dump PowerPC entirely, making Snow Leopard an Intel-only version of the Mac operating system. To be brutally honest, it's probably a fair step on Apple's part, but I can feel the mass of long-term Apple fans bemoaning the fact that their near ten year old G4 Power Macs might not be supported. I'd suggest they take a look at how many pre-Y2K Windows boxes can run Vista. Then again, can anything really "run" Vista, as opposed to "tolerate" it, at best?
Previous OS X updates have focused on some specific consumer-friendly features -- Leopard most recently gave us things like Time Machine, Spaces and Stacks. Snow Leopard, so it's claimed, won't have any shiny consumer baubles of that style. Sure, it's always possible that Steve Jobs will give his patented reality-distorting smile on stage and announce, say, that Snow Leopard will come with an inbuilt Playstation 3 emulator or something, but I think Apple's playing a different game, and it's a game they seem to be playing alone.
The tactic of going it alone is something Apple's done in the past, with varying degrees of success. For every "let's ditch floppies and go USB only" (wise, in hindsight) there's been a Newton or G4 Cube rattling around Apple's closet. And by pitching an operating system that doesn't talk up its supposedly "great" new features, Apple's definitely going it alone here.
By specifically talking up Snow Leopard as an OS that's about efficiency, rather than new features, Apple's making its statement about what it feels is important in a new operating system. It's a bold gambit -- will consumers bite onto paying for an upgrade that's only (arguably) about speed and stability rather than new gizmos? For the Mac fans in the PC Authority audience, would the prospect of paying the usual one hundred and sixty odd dollars for an upgrade with no "new" inbuilt applications entice you?
Do current operating systems (as Apple seems to be at least partially arguing with Snow Leopard) do enough already? Or do they handle too many functions that should be handled by standalone applications? Apple seems to be going one way, and based on what Microsoft's showed off with Windows 7, it appears that they're going the other way. The way that consumers go? Well, that's the game that both Apple and Microsoft are playing, and it'll be interesting to see which way the endgame plays out.
Other Blog Entries written by Alex Kidman:
Thoughts on this article? Add a comment below.
Comments: 2
|
bbjai
Dec 3, 2008 10:22 AM
|
This makes sense in a way, stability and speed have always been the core competency of the OSX business. Having a minor iteration as i think Snow Leopard is will do well for the next one that will build on these increases. Its a smart business plan I think. |
|
zudensternen
Dec 3, 2008 11:58 AM
|
It speaks volumes about where Mac OS X is with respect to Microsoft's offerings. Apple perceives that they are far enough ahead to spend *an entire release cycle* just cleaning up loose ends. And they are correct. Vista is a black hole that is busily sucking the entire Redmond enterprise down with it -- see for example https://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/01/0317244 . |