Sharpe's Opinion

I like the suggestion that Apple should contribute some of their profits to wild cat causes. I’d have thought they would jump at the chance for some ‘green’ publicity.

Stu, is this really a whole new operating system or an incremental upgrade of the existing one?

That really depends on your definition. It’s a new operating system in the same sense as Windows 7 is a new operating system – it’s built on the same foundations as the last one, with a whole load of changes, updates and improvements. It’s not like the shift from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X where they actually built a brand new operating system and replaced the old one entirely. That’s probably not going to happen again.

The Snow Leopard update is an odd one, though – rather than adding lots of new features for users they’ve done a huge upgrade of the internals. So there’s not much new ‘stuff’, but they say everything’s faster, uses less power, uses less hard drive space and memory, and there’s a whole load of improvements for developers.

And because they’re not added many new features for end users, they’re only charging £25 for it. Which can’t be sneered at, really.

No, it makes major changes to the internal system, not just minor updates and improvements. They release the equivalent of Service Packs every 3 or 4 months usually, through the automatic update system. So the most current version is 10.5.8, which in windows terms would roughly equate to OS X, version 5 (‘Leopard’), SP8.

It’s kind of tough to equate, though, since Apple and Microsoft have such massively different approaches to release schedules. Windows tends to have reasonably large SPs very occasionally, and then make massive releases which they charge a fortune for every 4 years or so. Apple tend to incrementally update on a very regular basis, and then have major new releases around every two years.