With the release of Snow Leopard rapidly approaching how will Apple price this performance based upgrade? TidBITS has published an article by Adam C. Engst which suggests that Snow Leopard should be sold as close to free as possible.
Specific improvements promised for Snow Leopard include support for up to 16 TB of RAM; improved multi-core support for applications; a next-generation version of QuickTime; out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange in Mail, iCal, and Address Book; and support for OpenCL, which is designed to expose the computing power of modern graphics processing units. Other Snow Leopard promises have included a smaller memory and disk footprint, a faster installation time, and a tweak to Stacks to allow subfolders.
Sound exciting? From a developer standpoint, absolutely. From a user standpoint, not so much. Based on everything Apple has said so far, Snow Leopard won't, on its own, bring any of the marquee features that could change the way you use your Mac, much as past releases of Mac OS X brought us Time Machine, Screen Sharing, Spotlight, Dashboard, Expose, Automator, Front Row, Spaces, Stacks, and more. So how much are you willing to pay for an operating system upgrade that does exactly what your current one does, but uses a little less RAM in the process?
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Specific improvements promised for Snow Leopard include support for up to 16 TB of RAM; improved multi-core support for applications; a next-generation version of QuickTime; out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange in Mail, iCal, and Address Book; and support for OpenCL, which is designed to expose the computing power of modern graphics processing units. Other Snow Leopard promises have included a smaller memory and disk footprint, a faster installation time, and a tweak to Stacks to allow subfolders.
Sound exciting? From a developer standpoint, absolutely. From a user standpoint, not so much. Based on everything Apple has said so far, Snow Leopard won't, on its own, bring any of the marquee features that could change the way you use your Mac, much as past releases of Mac OS X brought us Time Machine, Screen Sharing, Spotlight, Dashboard, Expose, Automator, Front Row, Spaces, Stacks, and more. So how much are you willing to pay for an operating system upgrade that does exactly what your current one does, but uses a little less RAM in the process?
Read More