Ars Technica’s Exhaustive Look at OS X “Snow Leopard”

Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” was released last weekend to a lot of mixed reaction. While the $29 price tag is undoubtedly easy to stomach compared to the $100+ consumers usually pay for a new OS, many still don’t believe that they got their money’s worth. Our friend Cyril Kowaliski at The Tech Report, a Mac user, had only one thing to say… “So that’s why it only costs $29“.

The reason for the mixed reaction is simple… there are few new features in 10.6. When Apple first announced Snow Leopard at last year’s WWDC conference, they actually showed a slide that stated, “0 New Features”, which you could imagine sparked quite a bit of questioning. The lack of features was replaced with brand-new APIs and other developer-specific additions, as well as a near-complete re-write of the underlying OS. The latter non-feature feature is the reason for noteworthy performance-boosts.

If you’d still debating on whether you should purchase the latest version or not, or simply want to read up to find out what’s new and notable, down to the most inane detail, Ars Technica has posted an exhaustive 23-page review that gives new meaning to an “in-depth look”. I’m not kidding. Unless we start publishing articles over 30,000 words in length, I’m not sure we have the right to use the term ourselves!

The article tackles everything from its pricing to its 64-bit nature to its base 10 numerical system for filesizes to developer-specific information to OpenCL support to the revised dock to finder updates to… whew. I’m actually quite tempted to read through just to get a better grasp on how an OS I don’t use works. For now, I’m going to take a few Aspirin, as I somehow have developed a headache…

A major operating system upgrade with “no new features” must play by a different set of rules. Every party involved expects some counterbalance to the lack of new features. In Snow Leopard, developers stand to reap the biggest benefits thanks to an impressive set of new technologies, many of which cover areas previously unaddressed in Mac OS X. Apple clearly feels that the future of the platform depends on much better utilization of computing resources, and is doing everything it can to make it easy for developers to move in this direction.