Snow Leopard does the right thing

If you had to decide between 5 new features in Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) or let's say a 20% speed increase in all of your application compared to Leopard (OS X 10.5), which one would you choose?

Depends of course what those 5 new features would be, but reasonably I can't imagine any feature that would improve my productivity as much as a 20% overall speed increase. I would take the speed boost any time. And, I think Apple is counting on people like me with Snow Leopard.

Nowadays every company is trying to release new products with more and more new features. Designers try to turn every gadget into a Swiss knife. Software is bloated to the extent that it starts to kill off the basic functionality. Analysts say companies forced to do this because we, the consumers demand features and new products won't sell if they don't offer something new.

Apple was among the first companies who demonstrated with the original iPod that a simple and good hardware can do much better on the market than a jack of all trades gadget. Since then, companies are catching up, but still don't have the guts to keep their products clean. Still too many buttons and features.

Apple is doing something revolutionary with Snow Leopard on the software arena as well. Instead of adding 300 more new features in 10.6, they instead hacked the code of the operating system to make it leaner and faster. Here are a few numbers to demonstrate the dramatic change:

• Clean installation is reduced to 13-14 minutes compared to over an hour.
• Mail.app's size reduced to 91MB from 287MB.
• Quicktime 8MB instead of 29MB.
• TextEdit 2MB instead of 22MB.
• Mac OS X Utility folder is reduced to 112MB from 468MB.

Besides making apps smaller Snow Leopard also introduced a number of performance enhancing techniques, such as:

• Grand Central - a collection of technologies that help developers take advantage of multicore processors, so now apps can take advantage of more CPUs easily.
• OpenCL - a tool that enables applications to take advantage of the untapped processing power of the graphics card, which now sits idle most of the time.
• 64-bit kernel - this will allow for amazing speed increases in the near future as 64 bit systems can address much more memory, up to 500 times more than they can do today.
• Finder rewritten in Cocoa - this results in a much needed speed increase for one of the most important apps in the operating system.

While the main objective of 10.6 is to make things run faster and safer, it will still include certain interesting features to some key applications:

• Mail.app, iCal and Address book will integrate fully with the Exchange server opening the mac up for full business use.
• Safari 4 will let you convert a website to a standalone app. Windows version will create an .exe file. (Why is that good?)
• The ability to boot from a disk image. Good for testing.

Again, kudos to Apple for making a rational decision and taking the right direction in the OS development. I hear MS is taking a similar approach with Windows 7 as well, fixing Vista to make it as it was intended to be in the first place.