Snow Leopard continues Apple’s drive towards the future and break with the past. Millions of PowerPC-based Macs have just been abandoned, and the remarkable library of classic Mac applications has been long forgotten at corporate headquarters. But we understand and accept that as the price of progress.
It seems very obvious that Apple’s goal is to wean its customers off PowerPC hardware. At $29 per copy, Apple’s not trying to get rich from software sales, and a more likely explanation is the desire to cut costs by eliminating support and engineering costs for continuing PowerPC support. Cutting those expenses undoubtably makes business sense, and, no matter how many million they are in number, Apple’s not making much money off those customers still running PowerPC systems and older Mac operating systems for economic reasons, or because they have legacy hardware and software that are not supported by the latest Mac products.
At this point, we’re also struck by the contrast between Mac OS X and the iPhone/Touch platform. Mac OS X has diverged so far from the original Mac OS that the iPhone better echoes the style and scope of original Macintosh in some ways. Snow Leopard, which is orders of magnitude more complex than both Mac OS and the iPhone OS, seems to be aimed with all its bells and whistles, “eye candy” and performance tweaks, directly at Windows, which eventually stole the original Mac’s thunder through Microsoft’s monopolistic business practices. We use both Apple’s platforms — iPhone/Touch and Mac OS X — on a daily basis, wondering how they’ll evolve over the years ahead. It doesn’t seem like they’ll converge, really, and much of the third-party energy we see is in the mobile platform. We’ll be watching very closely, as Apple makes its latest announcements next week, to see if the rumored tablet computer debuts and what it may portend for the future if it does arrive this month.
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For people used to older Mac systems, though, Snow Leopard is a stunning improvement over Tiger in many ways. If you can give up PowerPC hardware and classic Mac applications — and if you don’t have any critical compatibility problems with other software and hardware — then Snow Leopard delivers everything from raw performance to Time Machine to a Finder that actually works. Snow Leopard’s Finder (like Leopard’s) can even view thousands of files in a folder without lurching to a screeching halt, and (unlike Leopard’s) it can eject an iPod or disk volume without posting inane error messages when you happen to disconnect the device after it has disappeared from the desktop.
