This is the final part in a series of two.
Yesterday, I focused on the un-selling points of the new MacBook Pro line as announced during the WWDC keynote. Today, my focus is going to be on Snow Leopard, Apple’s rather depressing tendency to bash Microsoft, and the rather nasty turn-off this all happens to be. Granted, most of Apple’s recent ad campaigns have comprised of “let’s make things up about Windows!” in order to try and gain market share. Microsoft is only avoiding suing Apple because of the potential for the world’s worst Streisand effect, which is depressing given the libelous nature of the ads themselves.
Having said this, it’s no surprise to see this mentality persist throughout this year’s WWDC keynote, so I’ll pick up from yesterday and explain just why Snow Leopard in and of itself is nothing more than hypocrisy.
I won’t even bother to discuss the Mac v. PC non-Ad that opened the WWDC keynote. Instead, I’ll start with
“Even more complexity is present in Windows 7 – the same old tech as Vista. Just another version of Vista.” -Bertrand Serlet, 10:19 AM
So he slams 7 as another version of Vista and follows it (within the same minute) with:
“We come from such a different place. We love Leopard, we’re so proud of it; so we decided to build upon Leopard. We want to build a better Leopard, hence Snow Leopard” -Bertrand Serlet, 10:19 AM
Holy crap, that’s a new time record for admitting to being completely hypocritical! But wait, there’s more!
“Adding Exchange support to Snow Leopard. We’ve got chills. Chills we tell you!” –Bertrant Serlet, 10:20 AM
If the audience in that room had any idea as to who makes Exchange, I’m sure we would have seen many bricks in their chairs.
Bertrand later admits to the three major changes coming to Snow Leopard: refinements to the operating system, a few new technologies here and there, and Exchange support. What are these refinements of which he spoke? Nothing much; just a few under-the-hood changes to Finder and an installation process which is 45% faster and takes up 6GB less space! It sounds remarkable on face value until you realize that they dropped support for PowerPC.
PowerPC is a platform which Apple stopped using only three years ago, and Snow Leopard has already slapped it down to the pits of hell. If Microsoft had discontinued support for an older hardware just like that, there would’ve been a massive uproar, but apparently Apple users will follow along. Add the fact that Windows 7, which can run on hardware Vista couldn’t run, also installs faster than Snow Leopard and Windows Vista as well as the fact that Leopard is less stable than Windows Vista (let’s see how many times you run into that Rainbow Swirly of I-Want-To-Pull-My-Hair-Out compared to a Blue Screen of Death), and we’ll see which platform is the better platform to build off of. Bertrant talks about how bad a platform Windows Vista is, and yet, Leopard is sadly worse.
Let’s get to these so-called “new technologies.” Which new technologies did they add? How about Aero Peek?
“Next up, the Dock: We’ve had a feature that we use to deal with clutter, called Expose, and now we’ve built it into the dock.”
Like the way Aero Peek is built into the amazingly more usable Windows 7 taskbar? It’s funny because their particular implementation is the most minor thing, and yet it somehow warrants inclusion within a keynote. Aero Peek is more functional than Expose and a bigger boost to productivity than Expose all because it allows for full window previews, thus boosting productivity in the office, and yet the best Apple can come up with is just adding Expose to the dock. They have three buttons dedicated to it on the keyboard, which lends one to the idea that the only reason they even attached Expose to the dock was because Microsoft successfully created a more usable taskbar than their dock.
Of course, that’s not all. Apple finally started trying to truly join the x64 club, and this is what we have:
“So first, 64-bit. The obvious reason is to take advantage of a lot of memory. When you run in 64-bit, the memory limit is… 16 billion GB. It’s unlimited.”
First of all, it’s actually over 17 billion, but I won’t pick nits. The point is that Windows has been doing this since the days of XP, and that Vista and 7 have basically mastered the art of 64 bit. Apple has been so late to the game that Adobe actually stuck with Microsoft for a 64 bit implementation of Creative Suite 4. The Windows world has almost completely finished adapting to the 64bit world, and Apple is only just now beginning to arrive.
“All the major system apps run in 64-bit mode in Snow Leopard.”
Wow, it’s not even a complete transition! They only ported the major apps over to 64bit; the minor processes and non-system-essential applications are still stuck in the last decade.
Sure, Snow Leopard isn’t a complete disaster. There is one technology which Apple did well to include, and that’s Grand Central Dispatch. The thing about GCD is that it will allow for programmers to easily create their own multithreaded applications without actually having to worry about the threads, which is a wonderful addition to the OS and is a tool I hope developers use to their advantage to create better applications.
Then there’s OpenCL, which stands for Open Computing Language. It’s essentially a framework that can run code along any processing-capable path, such as CPUs and GPUs. Kudos to Apple for making it open, but it’s not even Apple’s technology anymore. While Apple still holds trademark rights (which they’ll no doubt abuse), the Khronos Group is now the managing force behind OpenCL, so anyone can include it if they fit the bill.
However, that’s basically it in terms of any new technology. In the end, Snow Leopard is a partially-64bit OS comprised of Safari 4 (standalone included), Quicktime 10 (standalone included), Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, Exchange 2007 support, tweaks to Expose and Stacks, performance fixes to the Finder, and an update to the Common Unix Printing System, all while dropping support for Macintoshes more than three years old.
Apple is charging 29 dollars for this? Keeping in mind that the only new technologies are Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, 64bit readiness, and Exchange 2007, it’s time to start picking this price apart for what it is: a rip-off.
Vista Service Pack 1 brought the finalized Server 2008 kernel to Windows Vista. That’s an enterprise-quality near-bulletproof kernel added to consumer versions of Windows for free! In addition to boosting performance just about everywhere (not just in Explorer), Vista SP1 also introduced support for an entirely new filesystem, exFAT. Following this was Service Pack 2, which brought a new version of Windows Search, support for Bluetooth 2.1, native support for burning Blu-ray discs (something Apple still doesn’t support even reading), a new framework for wifi connection management, support for VIA’s new 64bit CPUs, as well as a new power management framework which actually puts an emphasis on saving power both for desktops and laptops as opposed to just being efficient with how it’s all used.
Together, these service packs introduced more performance boosts and features to an already fast and powerful operating system for free. Apple is not only introducing less new features, what they’re introducing is either behind the curve or won’t directly impact productivity, and Apple is still charging 29 dollars for previous Leopard users. Worse yet, if you happen to be one of the holdouts still using Tiger because you figured out that Leopard is an unstable sack of crap for an operating system, you’re out of luck; Apple’s going to flip the bird and charge you “full price,” whatever exorbitant amount that is for a gimped service pack to an operating system which you already didn’t like.
Let’s not forget that Apple dropped support for the ZFS filesystem, which was one of the features many Apple users were looking forward to the most.
As usual, share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
Update: Sam chimed in via WLM with the following:
Sam says:
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I just wrote this long comment to explain why Snow Leopard is worth $29.
Just as I was thinking Safari is naturally going to crash now, it disappeared.
Nice.
Update 2: I thought about it a bit longer and decided that not only is Apple issuing a gimped service pack, they’re also doing nothing to embrace the future. Tablets are one of the handiest business and graphics design tools in existence, and yet while Apple could easily have dominated the game, they didn’t bother. Now, Windows 7 is more touch-ready than ever, allowing for a far more favorable user experience on capable computers (such as on the HP TouchSmart and the Dell Latitude XT).
Not only has Snow Leopard seemed to not have any purpose, Apple itself seems to have gotten a bit distracted and lost any desire to improve usability, whereas Microsoft made usability one of their major goals with 7.