Snow Leopard and Apple’s dirty little secret

As one of the last of our WWDC posts, I want to talk a little bit about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.  It may end up being the most important software upgrade Apple has ever done. To understand its significance and why you will want it, you’ll need a little bit of history to set the stage.

For the most part, there’s not a whole lot of new stuff to get excited about.  Yes, there are a few new features – some really good ones, like OpenCL, Grand Central, and QuickTime X.  I’m going to save my thoughts on Exchange support for another time (beyond this article: it begs the question on whether Apple’s own server is now second class to Microsoft’s groupware solution or if Snow Leopard Server will be up to task).

The name and the price tell the tale of Snow Leopard.  And it makes more sense to people, like many of you reading this, who have been using the Mac for a long time… and also to people like me, who have been supporting the Mac for a long time.  Now maybe this is just me being a conspiracy theorist and no, I haven’t done a lot of homework on this – it’s just a combination of remembering things I’ve read and my own gut feeling on some recent experiences.

None but the biggest Mac zealots will claim that the Mac is perfect.  Even in the early days, it was still a computer – subject to hardware breakdowns and software corruption like any other.  The difference in the Mac over other computers was in its design and in the care that had gone into its programming.  It led Mac aficionados like me to tell the uninitiated that the Mac “just works.”

When Mac OS X first came out, stuff didn’t “just work” but we gave Apple slack because they left us with Classic so we could still use OS 9-based solutions and more importantly because it was new.  OS X didn’t have 15+ years of development behind it.  I remember saying at the time that we traded extension conflicts for bugs.  And that was OK because for whatever negatives that OS X brought to the table, its positives provided an overwhelming net gain.  And each major version was progressively less buggy than the previous.

When Leopard sat in development for 2.5 years, which was a change of pace from the almost yearly upgrades that came between every previous major version, we all wondered what was up.  What was so great about Leopard that was taking so long?  Apple even delayed shipment, remember?

Now they blamed it on pulling necessary resources to iPhone development, but I always wondered if that was it or if Leopard just needed a LOT more work.

Towards the release date, we got word from Apple that we should always do “archive installs” of Leopard because it was so fundamentally different than Tiger.  This struck me as an odd thing to say.  And then I read about how Leopard gained true UNIX certification.

Ultimately, this means that Leopard is indeed fundamentally different than Tiger. It’s possible that every single command, even at the lowest levels was changed to obtain this certification.  Even simple file modifications might be different than previous versions.

And one other oddity about the certifcation is that it only applied to Leopard on Intel-based Macs.  The fact that Leopard ran universally on both new Intel and old PowerPC would make it complex enough – but only half-certified?  Surely that was trouble.

At BestMacs we installed a lot of Leopard.  Time Machine was a huge draw. Initially iCal Server looked promising (but ended up being limited to certain scenarios).  For most the upgrade came because new hardware required it.  And while I don’t have any hard data to back this up, and maybe it was just that I was dealing with personal issues (like a premature baby) or training new employees, it seemed like Leopard kept us busier than any other version of OS X.  I can’t use that as evidence to my point, but I’d like to.

Again, it’s not been all bad and now over 18 months and 7 updates later, Leopard is dominant in our client base and it seems to be doing pretty well.  But does it “just work“?

This is where Snow Leopard comes in.  When it was announced at WWDC 2008, about this time last year, they said they were going to worry less about new features and more about the guts.  To quote Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior VP of Software Engineering:

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more”. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

To me, that sounded GRRRREAT.  (Apologies to Tony the 10.4)

And finally, this year at WWDC 09 we get the scoop: it’s out in September, almost a full two years after Leopard, and well after Apple hopefully learned some lessons from a troublesome iPhone and MobileMe release.

They also told us that Snow Leopard would be for Intel-based Macs only.  Frankly, I love this.  Yes, there are still a lot of PowerPC Macs out there, but they’ll all hit the 3+ year mark next year.  This move allows Apple (and third-parties) to shave off the old PowerPC code and make the software that much less complex.  Folks, the inability to do this sort of thing drags Windows stability and performance down considerably – there’s a lot of old code in there.

At the beginning of the article I put the focus on the name and the price.  You probably get the significance of the name at this point – a cool followup to the previous system.

And the price?  A $29 upgrade for all Leopard users (or $49 for family pack). Excellent.  Many were concerned that we’d see the same $129 we saw for all previous versions of OS X.  I take the low price tag as further proof that Apple gets it – that much of this two years was spent fixing their code base and making it more robust.

You might argue that if it’s just bug fixes, it should be free.  To that I say, if Snow Leopard brings us back to the old Mac – if it “just works” – I’ll gladly fork over my $29.

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