andihawe's blog

Daniel Lyons
Conventional wisdom is that everything ran great at Apple during the six-month period when CEO Steve Jobs was out having his super-secret liver transplant. Supposedly, the company just kept running without a hiccup. But after unimpressive reports on the performance of Snow Leopard, the new version of the Mac OS X operating system, I'm starting to have my doubts.

According to early reviews, like the one by David Pogue of The New York Times and the one by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal, Snow Leopard doesn't offer a lot of improvements that are visible to the end user. And apparently, it brings with it a bunch of new glitches and bugs. Some drivers don't work. Some third-party apps won't run right until they get rewritten for Snow Leopard.

Sure, Apple and its third-party software developers will sort out the problems, and Apple won't take a shellacking over these flaws the way Microsoft did with Windows Vista. That's just how things work. When it comes to Apple, people are more willing to forgive.

But this is where you start to wonder whether everybody kind of slacked off a little bit when Jobs, a notorious tyrant and perfectionist, wasn't around to put the fear of God into them. What are they doing putting out a product that (a) doesn't blow you away with some life-changing new features and (b) doesn't quite work right? It just seems so, well, unlike Apple.

Sure, Snow Leopard is faster than Leopard. And it's smaller, meaning it takes up less space on your hard drive, which probably doesn't matter to you, but anyway, there it is. Snow Leopard will start shipping as the pre-installed operating system on all Macs as of today. If you're running Leopard, the current version of Mac OS X, you can upgrade to Snow Leopard for $29. If you're running Tiger, the predecessor to Leopard, your upgrade cost is $169. And if, despite the lackluster reviews, you're keen to upgrade, as usual it's probably a good idea to wait a bit, let Apple iron out the wrinkles, and then jump in.

Microsoft, for its part, is about to ship a new version of its Windows operating system, Windows 7. It's officially due out in October, but it's been out in the wild for months now in a wide-ranging (read: anyone could download it at no cost) "beta" program. I've been running it since January, on a bunch of different machines, and it's great. Stable, fast, clean. And by the time it ships, Windows 7 will have spent almost a year being tested and beaten on by millions of people.