OS X ‘Snow Leopard’ will be a feature-poor release in 2009
The next incarnation of OS X is to offer little in terms of features beyond ‘Leopard’ and this fact is perhaps betrayed by its derivative name ‘Snow Leopard’.
Steve Jobs’ brief announcement of Snow Leopard yesterday made no mention of ground-breaking features like Time-Machine or Spotlight but will focus on ‘enhancing performance’. While half of my mind is thinking ‘It’s about time’ the other retorts ‘well, they’d better not charge us for it then!’.
A senior Apple vice-president has said:
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.
So there’s little to look forward to other than perhaps a speed bump thanks to Grand Central which is expected to make more efficient use of multi-core processors.
This leaves two big questions which may be answered by the hype, leaks and rumours that usually circulate around an OS X release:
- What models will be killed off in the update?
- Will Apple forgo the usual charge for feature-packed updates?
What do you think?
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