Snow Leopard: Mac's answer to Windows 7

[rpm]

Snow Leopard: Mac's answer to Windows 7

Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system is to be launched later this year. We look at what users can expect.

 

[kingmonty]

Ignoring all the fanboism on this forum, Windows 7 is up there, and in my opinion will compete for a while to come. It certainly is polished and it works very well - even on this laptop which is 4 years old and has a Celeron M processor.

The one aspect of Apple that people just blatantly ignore is the price factor. Apples are not cheap - and you still need Apple hardware to *legally* run Mac X/whatever operating systems. And mac hardware is anything but price competitive.

Snow Leopard does look cool. As the different operating systems mature, I think we'll soon see that the paid for OS's are once again in a league of their own. Linux and the rest are about to restart the desktop catch-up game. Considering the massive jump start they were offered with the Vista balls-up, one would think it's an opportunity missed. Snow Leopard will no doubt prove very popular with Mac users and will undoubtedly spawn many more "which is better" articles. But given the stability and capabilities not to mention the features in Windows 7 (albeit only an RC at this point in time), the real competitive indicator between the two will boil down to cost.

 

[PeterCH]

Ignoring all the fanboism on this forum, Windows 7 is up there, and in my opinion will compete for a while to come. It certainly is polished and it works very well - even on this laptop which is 4 years old and has a Celeron M processor.

The one aspect of Apple that people just blatantly ignore is the price factor. Apples are not cheap - and you still need Apple hardware to *legally* run Mac X/whatever operating systems. And mac hardware is anything but price competitive.

Snow Leopard does look cool. As the different operating systems mature, I think we'll soon see that the paid for OS's are once again in a league of their own. Linux and the rest are about to restart the desktop catch-up game. Considering the massive jump start they were offered with the Vista balls-up, one would think it's an opportunity missed. Snow Leopard will no doubt prove very popular with Mac users and will undoubtedly spawn many more "which is better" articles. But given the stability and capabilities not to mention the features in Windows 7 (albeit only an RC at this point in time), the real competitive indicator between the two will boil down to cost.

I know he has me on ignore but to clarify - a Vista Ultimate Upg will set you back R3000 (same for 7) while Mac OSX Snow Leopard has an MSRP of $29. Also you'll be able to upgrade from Tiger/Leopard to Snow Leopard without having to zap your Mac OSX partition, unlike er Windows 7 where XP to Win 7 is difficult or even impossible.

Snow Leopard will run on G4 Macs. How many years back is that??? Unofficially it may even run on G3 Macs.

Macs are not really more expensive than PCs. They are more expensive than weaker PCs (compare a high resolution 17 inch screen to a low resolution 17 inch PC one). If you take a high end Panasonic, NEC or Sony Vaio - and you compare to a Mac laptop you'll find that the Macs are cheaper for what they give you. That's what you must compare and not to the cheapest Acers or Mecers.

To give an example NEC is selling netbooks for $1,800 for an ATOM 1.86GHz CPU, a 64GB SSD and 1GB RAM with a 720p res 10.1 inch screen.

The cost of OSX upgrades is LESS - last time I spent less than R800 upgrading to Leopard. For a couple hundred Rand more you can get a 3 system license - you can upgrade 3 Macs to the latest OS for -- bwana will tell you what or look it up on www.zastore.co.za (and that price is artificially inflated by Core). Can you do that with Vista or 7?

What about AV software? You don't need that for the Mac. If you don't run dodgy warez apps you don't need any AV for Macs. You don't have to pay R300-R600 or more per year extra - how much is Norton 360 or NOD32 or even Kaspersky?

Snow Leopard is not Apple's answer to Win 7. Win 7 is MS answer to Tiger.
Remember XP is ancient, Vista is a lame duck and 7 is CORRECTING the mistakes of Vista. 7 is the real successor to XP. XP was a competitor to Mac OSX Panther.

Anyway, I'm saying this as someone who uses both Macs and WinTel machines.

 

[km2]

Snow Leopard will run on G4 Macs. How many years back is that??? Unofficially it may even run on G3 Macs.

Snow Leopard is Intel only, that's been confirmed and is part of the reason the install has gotten so much smaller.

Otherwise I agree it's not really an "answer" to Windows 7. It's about putting in the foundation for developers to build better apps. Kinda like Vista was supposed to be, but with Vista no one bothers to really develop serious apps using WPF/.NET and the other nifty new technologies added.

 

[inferno]

So now Snow Leopard will be able to do what Win XP has been able to do for years? Cool!

 

[headsore]

I know he has me on ignore but to clarify - a Vista Ultimate Upg will set you back R3000 (same for 7) while Mac OSX Snow Leopard has an MSRP of $29. Also you'll be able to upgrade from Tiger/Leopard to Snow Leopard without having to zap your Mac OSX partition, unlike er Windows 7 where XP to Win 7 is difficult or even impossible.

Snow Leopard will run on G4 Macs. How many years back is that??? Unofficially it may even run on G3 Macs.

Macs are not really more expensive than PCs. They are more expensive than weaker PCs (compare a high resolution 17 inch screen to a low resolution 17 inch PC one). If you take a high end Panasonic, NEC or Sony Vaio - and you compare to a Mac laptop you'll find that the Macs are cheaper for what they give you. That's what you must compare and not to the cheapest Acers or Mecers.

To give an example NEC is selling netbooks for $1,800 for an ATOM 1.86GHz CPU, a 64GB SSD and 1GB RAM with a 720p res 10.1 inch screen.

The cost of OSX upgrades is LESS - last time I spent less than R800 upgrading to Leopard. For a couple hundred Rand more you can get a 3 system license - you can upgrade 3 Macs to the latest OS for -- bwana will tell you what or look it up on www.zastore.co.za (and that price is artificially inflated by Core). Can you do that with Vista or 7?

What about AV software? You don't need that for the Mac. If you don't run dodgy warez apps you don't need any AV for Macs. You don't have to pay R300-R600 or more per year extra - how much is Norton 360 or NOD32 or even Kaspersky?

Snow Leopard is not Apple's answer to Win 7. Win 7 is MS answer to Tiger.
Remember XP is ancient, Vista is a lame duck and 7 is CORRECTING the mistakes of Vista. 7 is the real successor to XP. XP was a competitor to Mac OSX Panther.

Anyway, I'm saying this as someone who uses both Macs and WinTel machines.

+1

Win7 is going to have to be something really amazing to compete with the advances of Snow Leopard, but with that said, there might well be an eagerness of windows users who boycotted Vista to finally get something new and better, whereas tbh, Leopard is brilliant already.

 

[kingmonty]

Snow Leopard is Intel only, that's been confirmed and is part of the reason the install has gotten so much smaller.

Otherwise I agree it's not really an "answer" to Windows 7. It's about putting in the foundation for developers to build better apps. Kinda like Vista was supposed to be, but with Vista no one bothers to really develop serious apps using WPF/.NET and the other nifty new technologies added.

Thanks for quoting that Perhaps I should remove him from my ignore list purely from the entertainment value perspective he adds while trying to shove both feet in his mouth.

I absolutely adore Mac OS X. I always have and I'm sure I always will, but I do think as long as they keep it on closed hardware they will keep it niche, and thereby keep it brilliant. I'm not attacking Apple - I do wish they would drop their HW prices in SA though.

Given the development lifecycle of Apple products and especially OS's, I also don't believe Apple were trying to outdo Windows in particular. They really have a knack of just doing things their way - which is pretty awesome.

 

[PeterCH]

Snow Leopard is Intel only, that's been confirmed and is part of the reason the install has gotten so much smaller.

Otherwise I agree it's not really an "answer" to Windows 7. It's about putting in the foundation for developers to build better apps. Kinda like Vista was supposed to be, but with Vista no one bothers to really develop serious apps using WPF/.NET and the other nifty new technologies added.

Yes, you're right. Leopard was capable of running on even G3 hardware (unofficially).

Here's RoughlyDrafted on the 7 vs 10.6:

Explaining that the company wanted as many Mac OS X Leopard users as possible to upgrade to the new Snow Leopard, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller announced a $29 upgrade price for Snow Leopard and a $49 family pack upgrade. Users who buy a new Mac between the June 8 announcement and the release of Snow Leopard can get a copy of the new software for even cheaper, just $9.95 to cover shipping and handling.

Apple hasn’t explicitly stated it yet, but it appears that the retail box of Snow Leopard could still be priced at $129, although it’s hard to imagine who would need to buy the new operating system at retail rather than as an upgrade, particularly since it requires a relatively modern Mac to run, mostly machines that either shipped with Leopard or have already upgraded to use it.

While Apple is slashing the cost of Snow Leopard dramatically even as demand and interest in the Mac platform is on an upswing, Microsoft did just the opposite with the release of Windows Vista, bumping up the cost of upgrades and retail copies and introducing new pricing tiers to artificially restrict features to pricier editions even as expansion of the PC market began to plateau and as the emergence of cheap new netbooks began to question the need for an expensive operating system.

Microsoft has since backtracked on Vista’s pricing, and for the first time ever, the company has essentially given away a year’s worth of Windows licensing by pumping out free copies of its Windows 7 “release candidate” software on the market to stem the tide of Windows defectors and entice disgruntled Vista users back with a real life, wide scale Mojave Experiment. Of course, it’s only free until next summer, at which point users’ Windows 7 PCs will stop working until payments are made. In any other industry, this strategy might be characterized as product dumping and bait and switch fraud, but in the PC industry that Microsoft has ruled as a de-facto corporate government for the last twenty years, its just business as usual.

...

The name Windows 7 suggests a major new release, when in reality the company’s new operating system is internally numbered as Windows 6.1. Microsoft’s executives have never denied that Windows 7 was actually a tuneup of Vista. In the words of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, “it’s Windows Vista, a lot better.”

Microsoft is notorious for picking its software version numbers out of marketing meetings rather than scheduling releases around engineering efforts as Apple has. Mac OS X has been progressively and predictably notching up a single increment with every reference release over the past decade, and the internal numbering system for its Darwin core OS numbers back to NeXTSTEP releases of the late 80s (Snow Leopard’s Darwin OS release will be 10.0). Mac OS X itself gets its “ten” from the releases of the classic Mac OS. No number games there.

In contrast, the Windows NT code base that both Vista and Windows 7 are based on started its numbering with version 3.1. Exchange Server similarly started out without a 1.0 or 2.0 release for marketing reasons. And really, who would have gotten excited about Windows 2000 and Windows XP if they’d been pushed to market as simply Windows 5.0 and 5.1? Vista and “Windows 7” similarly have far more flamboyant panache than Windows 6.0 and 6.1.

 

[assagai]

So now Snow Leopard will be able to do what Win XP has been able to do for years? Cool!

eh? what are you going on about, man?

 

[bwana]

So now Snow Leopard will be able to do what Win XP has been able to do for years? Cool!

No. Afaik it will continue to be a stable OS.

 

[d0b33]

Windows 7 does not compare, the upgrade to snow alone should only cost a few hundred, Vista users can only wish Microsoft's heart of lumpy custard was that forgiving.

 

[PeterCH]

Thanks for quoting that Perhaps I should remove him from my ignore list purely from the entertainment value perspective he adds while trying to shove both feet in his mouth.

Simple minds, simple pleasures I guess .

Coming from a proponent of the Windows DLL/registry/Installer/Uninstaller hell that doesn't surprise me, in essence my mistake was one of mere confusion between Leopard/Snow Leopard (in articles I've read as I haven't been following the two and the 10.x nomenclature has me confused at times) but at least I'm not lying to myself over Windows installer issues.

By all means keep me on Ignore .

 

[PeterCH]

Windows 7 does not compare, the upgrade to snow alone should only cost a few hundred, Vista users can only wish Microsoft's heart of lumpy custard was that forgiving.

It will cost $29 which is what - R250, of course Core will sell it at R1299 or something, you'll see. The Family pack will cost $49 though - that's 3 licenses.

Still it's safer not to upgrade till all the pro-apps have been updated to Snow Leopard.

The benefits for me lie only in improved multi-core/multi-cpu processing. That is one of the big upgrades of Snow Leopard. Leopard itself did much in this regard already.

 

[kolakidd]

OS X does not require a serial, so licenses are irrelevant.

I actually don't know how you can seriously compare a Microsoft OS with a Mac OS post Vista. Microsoft screwed it's customers so badly with Vista that you should be standing outside their offices with torches and pitchforks.

 

[kingmonty]

OS X does not require a serial, so licenses are irrelevant.

I actually don't know how you can seriously compare a Microsoft OS with a Mac OS post Vista. Microsoft screwed it's customers so badly with Vista that you should be standing outside their offices with torches and pitchforks.

They're operating systems - of course they will be compared. Vista is and was a publicity nightmare - BUT, many of it's problems were grossly exaggerated in the media and on online forums such as this one. As for comparing "Post Vista" - simple really: Windows 7 competes. And it competes well.

 

[PeterCH]

OS X does not require a serial, so licenses are irrelevant.

I actually don't know how you can seriously compare a Microsoft OS with a Mac OS post Vista. Microsoft screwed it's customers so badly with Vista that you should be standing outside their offices with torches and pitchforks.

There's an element of fanboyism there. Mac users tend to be accused of being fanboys but Windows users are just as bad in this regard or perhaps worse.

OSX does not require a serial but if you want to be officially 'legit' you can be so for $49 for 3 machines, while it will cost you R3000 x 3 to do that for Vista Ultimate and possibly Win 7.

Win 7 still doesn't compete with Mac OSX because Mac OSX is included with the hardware. Windows fans still ignore the fact that Apple is a hardware company and sells units which are all-inclusive - they have the OS, many end user applications (iDVD, DVD Player, iPhoto etc) and the hardware all in one bundle. In addition, Apple Pro Apps are a league above Windows versions (and are usually cheaper) and are frequently chosen over Windows versions - so even if Win 7 is as sugarly sweet as OS X Leopard (or even Tiger) - that won't make people switch their entire ecosystem and way of doing things.

 

[ponder]

Linux and the rest are about to restart the desktop catch-up game. Considering the massive jump start they were offered with the Vista balls-up, one would think it's an opportunity missed.

Feature & look wise I think KDE4 offers more.

 

[kingmonty]

Feature & looks wise I think KDE4 offers more.

It just doesn't.

 

[d0b33]

It just doesn't.

In your biased opinion.

 

[kingmonty]

In your biased opinion.

And his:

I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else.

I realise the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it badly. They did so may changes it was a half-baked release. It may turn out to be the right decision in the end and I will re-try KDE, but I suspect I'm not the only person they lost.