Don’t Expect Anything but Incremental Improvements from Snow Leopard

Those of you hoping for some last minute big feature in Snow Leopard that Apple has somehow kept hidden from the world until now can stop hoping. It isn’t there.

In an ironic twist in Apple’s continuing PR battle with Microsoft perhaps the biggest new feature is Mail’s ability to natively work with Microsoft Exchange.

The rest of the visible improvements are incremental at best or superfluous, depending on your point of view.

So what are you really paying for with $29? You are paying for speed increases that are not entirely insubstantial and an operating system that is designed for the future. Those speed increases come thanks to the very hard work of Apple software engineers who have rewritten the core of the operating system to take advantage of everything OS X has to offer. And the future will be all the better once third party software developers take advantage of technologies like OpenCL, that allow programs to off-load processor tasks on the more-and-more powerful graphic card chips that in our computers.

Another way to look at it is that Snow Leopard is the operating system Apple had in mind when they decided to make the switch from OS 9. While we all meandered (and occasionally suffered) through the public beta, OS 10.1, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard, Snow Leopard is the prize at the end of all of this. Tiger was the first usable version of OS X, Leopard was the first useful version of OS X and Snow Leopard brings it all together, fast, refined, and it just works.

This is not to say you should go out there an immediately install Snow Leopard on your prized everyday Mac. Software is still software after all and early reports, including from the very trustworthy Walt Mossberg show that like with any update Snow Leopard has its issues. Snow Leopard’s release is like any other big OS update, its first users are ostensibly an extension of beta testing until the next patch release comes along.

But for those of you foolhardy, or, like me, blissfully lustful of the Next Big Thing you can expect a faster Mac, substantially faster native applications, and a UI that has had some significant spit-and-polish applied.

Just don’t expect anything revolutionary. That will hopefully come in the form of the tablet in the months to come.