With the very recent announcement of Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, developers the world over are expressing their opinions regarding Apple’s decision to focus more on stability and performance rather than adding new features. Some are bitter, since Apple has been plowing forward in terms of innovation over the last few releases. Others, like myself, are more appreciative for this move. I’ve compiled a list of my top three reasons to support Snow Leopard’s focus compared to the desires of feature-hungry users out there.

1.) Designing the Framework

With Snow Leopard, Apple is basically going to engineer the operating system to handle lots of memory. And then some. Up to 16 terabytes (TB) as the website indicates. And then using OpenCL technology, graphical processing units (GPUs) will be able to facilitate the other computational efforts of the computer. Coupled with the incredible memory capacity increase, future generations of computers and programs will be able to utilize many more resources which would otherwise remain “hidden” in a computer which is relatively expensive to begin with. This move is truly an indication how Apple thinks “ahead.” Laying down the framework to seamlessly support the resource-hungry applications of the future is a pivotal step in ensuring that they can indeed label their OS as the “most advanced operating system in the world.”

2.) New Distribution Method?

This is a minor thought, but considering that Snow Leopard won’t have many new features, and it will basically be an optimization of the current Leopard OS, perhaps Apple will offer some sort of an “upgrade discount” to 10.5 users. Maybe it’ll just be a series of patches over time. They’ve said that the OS’s footprint will be downsized, implying more efficient coding. But this modification should be easily implemented into an “upgrade” package. Afterall, we’re not dealing with Windows.

3.) Two Steps Forward - One Step Back

The rule of thumb in any successful technology is to plow ahead, test the limits of current understanding, and then backtrack to optimize and debug. This is precisely what Apple is (and should be) doing at this point in their software development. With Leopard (10.5), hundreds of new features (many of which the conventional user is completely unaware) were introduced into the framework of the operating system; however, for the sake of showing innovation, many of the background concerns were ignored - namely, code optimization. With Snow Leopard, Apple intends to take “one step back” to streamline an already amazing operating system with better performance and enhanced stability. For example, I’ve been testing the developer release of Safari 4, and have been amazed by the JavaScript handling. This is definitely a big step in web browsing, since Java is becoming a cornerstone of the modern day Internet. Firefox 3 will have some competition up it’s sleeve. But as we can all expect, Internet Explorer 8 will fall miserably behind. =). Even with the focus being on performance, I’m sure we can all expect Apple to put a handful of useful features in the final release of Snow Leopard (*cough-Exchange-cough*).

So is it worth purchasing an operating system which has very few innovations compared to its predecessor, but is supposedly more streamlined? Well, in my opinion, yes. In fact, flashy features without a strong, performance-based foundation is meaningless to me. Apple is expected to release Snow Leopard within the year, so I’ll be sure to write another article with my opinions after testing it for myself.

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