Lions, MacBooks, Predictions! Oh My!

As I noted earlier, Apple’s Mac event is just a week away, and the invite is highly suggestive of two things:

1. New Aluminum MacBook Pro’s and/or MacBook Air, and
2. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

The majority of the invite itself looks like the lid of a an aluminum Mac notebook, with the Apple logo freshly cut out (I’d love to get my hands on one of those scrap Apple logos). And then there is the lion peeking out. And let’s face it, I don’t think Apple will stick with the cat theme for Mac OS 11, so my bet is definitely on Mac OS X 10.7.

Needless to say, I have my hopes and dreams…

New Mac Portables

MacBook Pro

I suspect there will be slight refreshes to the MacBook Pro. Faster processors, bigger batteries, USB 3, and maybe even higher resolution screens (maybe even 16:9). Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if the Pro line took a page from the MacBook Air and moved the optical drive to an external accessory. I rarely use my optical drive, and would love to use that space for something else.

MacBook Air

The MacBook Air has always been an enigma to me — super light & portable but severely underpowered and overpriced. Also, with the 13-inch screen, a 13-inch MacBook Pro seems like a better investment.

For weeks there have been rumors that the Air may go to an 11.6-inch screen. I think this seems right. Shrink the screen, shed even more weight, give it the all-glass trackpad like the MacBook and MacBook Pros, and for crying out loud, figure out how to squeeze more than one USB port in the thing.

And hey, if the price can be chopped further, I think you may have something neat on your hands.

Lion

Whenever there is news of an upcoming major update to Mac OS X, I always find myself at a loss for what Apple could possibly add to make it better. And, of course, I am always blown away. Last time, for Snow Leopard, I was blown away by the cost — $29. Once installed, Snow Leopard blew my mind with the overall “super polished” responsiveness. Even though there wasn’t a great deal of new features, it was obvious there was a lot of refactoring under the hood.

For Lion, I can only fathom a couple things that seem like shoe-ins.

FaceTime

Apple’s giant drum to parade around this year is FaceTime. It’s in the iPhone 4 and the latest iPod touch. I also think it is going to be in the next iPad.

For years, we’ve had video calls in iChat on Mac OS X. However, right now, FaceTime isn’t getting a lot of my attention since I can’t do a video call with my relatives who don’t have an iPhone 4 or new iPod touch. Lion will likely change this. I bet iChat will gain FaceTime support for video calls to Apple’s mobile devices.

Hey, maybe Apple will give iChat a much needed facelift while they are at it.

Multi-Touch

Apple has been slowly adding Multi-Touch to the Mac over the years. Mostly, this has remained exclusive to Mac portables, but recently came to the desktop with the advent of the Magic Trackpad (which I love, by the way).

I think Apple will eventually bundle the Magic Trackpad with the iMac as the default pointing device, likely around Lion’s release, as I am sure it will utilize a fair amount of Multi-Touch interaction.

I am unsure how extensive Multi-Touch will permeate within Lion, but I’d wager it will be a foundational release to eventually move away from the traditional mouse for good.

iOS Integration

One thing I appreciate about my Mac apps that have iOS counterparts is the ability to sync their data via WiFi. The problem is that this is cumbersome. You have to launch the Mac app and the iOS app and have both devices on the same network in order for them to sync.

Some apps, such as 1Password have taken to using services like Dropbox to sync data cross device and cross platform, without requiring the user to do anything beyond the initial setup.

That is a much more fluid and transparent way of doing things. I hope Apple provides a method for developers to easily hook into a drop dead easy way to sync information from a Mac to an iOS device. Label this as hopeful.

MobileMe Included

Apple has been building a gigantic data center on the east coast for some time. I have long wondered if that was either for a streaming iTunes service, or for a free MobileMe. Overall, MobileMe is much better than .Mac, which it replaced, with one glaring exception – iDisk. It is slow and just plain doesn’t work all that well.

I’d really like to see iDisk get overhauled to be a lot like the aforementioned Dropbox. That would actually facilitate that iOS syncing integration pretty well.

My hope would be that MobileMe would move to being free with Lion, but I do actually feel like I get my $100 per year out of it. The advantage of making it free is that more users would adopt the technology, making for a leaner, cleaner experience. Also, iOS device owners on Windows may feel more inclined to have that seamless integration between Mac OS X and iOS.

UI Refresh

Undoubtedly, a major Mac OS X revision brings some fresh UI paint. Maybe I’m crazy, but iTunes always seems to be the forerunner for design choices that later find their way to Mac OS X. Particularly, I am think of the “traffic lights” going vertical, and the title bar possibly going by the wayside. It seems to work well in iTunes, though I am unsure how well the removal of the title bar would fare in other places, such as Safari (that is, unless, Tabs on Top finally made their reappearance).

I can definitely see the traffic lights going vertical. I’d bet a nickel on it.

iLife and iWork

Who knows, maybe we’ll see fully 64-bit updates and overhauls to Apple’s two famous software suites. I know I wouldn’t mind seeing both of these appear.

That’s my wish list and educated guesses.

Back to the Mac!

Apple just sent out invites to the press for an event on 20 October, pictured above. It simply says Back to the Mac, and shows a lion behind a slightly rotated Apple logo.

I’ll bet my money on a preview of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Also, I’d wager speed bumps to the MacBook Pro line (it’s due) and that 11.6” MacBook Air redesign that has been in the rumor mills the past couple months.

I hope this event is live-streamed like the September iPod event was.

Rethinking iChat

Bjango makes fantastic apps for iOS and Mac OS X. I use their hugely popular iStat utility every day. They pose the question on their blog of “What if iChat was one window?”

Their mockup and explanation is top notch and a great read. My favorite line from the whole thing is:

I’m finding more and more that the best way to design desktop apps is to imagine you’re building them for iOS.

I couldn’t agree more. I hope someone at Apple is listening.

Pages Gets Friendly with iBooks

Apple’s iWork ‘09 suite received a software update today addressing some bugs in all three apps. Pages, however, has a new feature hidden amongst those bug fixes — Export to ePub. 

ePub is the eBook format that Apple is using for its iBooks app on iOS. Now, anyone with iWork ‘09 can turn a document into an ePub file for use as a DRM-free book that they can distribute themselves, or presumably upload to iTunes for inclusion in the iBookstore. 

Pages certainly isn’t the only tool out there capable of doing this, but it’s a nice feature for iWork users. 

Apple has also provided a support document for advising when an ePub or PDF is better suited for your document, and how to go about creating that ePub.

Yahoo! Search for iPhone has Inquisitor DNA

Back in the day before Snow Leopard, there was a lovely little search replacement for Safari called Inquisitor. Back in may of 2008, Yahoo! acquired the rights to Inquisitor, and ported the browser extension to Firefox and IE. Unfortunately, due to changes in the Snow Leopard version of Safari, Inquisitor no longer works in Apple’s browser.

About a year later, this handy little app was also made into an iPhone app, which was a quick and easy way to perform a search on the iPhone. Seriously, it was fast and didn’t seem to require as many taps to get things done. However, just as Inquisitor faded into obscurity on Snow Leopard equipped Macs, a change in iPhone OS 3.0 caused Inquisitor to type everything in the search bar in all caps. This didn’t appear to affect search results, but as Yahoo! never addressed the issue, it looked as if this app would be neglected. 

(I’ll admit that I am a stickler for perfection, and an annoying all caps bug was the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for me. I quit using the app solely for this reason. Yes, I’m a snob)

It appears that Yahoo! has breathed new life into everything but the Inquisitor brand. On March 23, 2010, Yahoo! released Yahoo! Search, and you can definitely tell this app’s daddy is Inquisitor. The similarities are unmistakable. See for yourself.

Even the icon is similar, with only color changes being the obvious difference.

But differences are abundant between the two apps. The new Yahoo! Search can display maps as you search. Entering Starbucks as a search term yielded (ironically) a Google map (I assume using the built in iPhone Maps API) showing Starbucks stores nearly my current location. Enter a stock symbol such as AAPL and you’ll see the current stock price and whether it has gone up or down. Enter a movie title and see showtimes at theaters near you. 

Overall, it is refreshing to see the Inquisitor app live on in this new name. I do, however, find it odd that the original Inquisitor iPhone app is still available on the App Store. As for Inquisitor for web browsers, I haven’t kept up on the news of its support for Firefox and IE (as I don’t use those browsers) but I think it is safe to say that the Safari version has reached the end of its life. And that is truly a shame. 

 I honestly think it is too bad that Apple didn’t acquire the technology long ago. Hopefully Yahoo! can keep it alive.

9 Years of Mac OS X

Today marks the ninth anniversary of the release of Mac OS X. I’ll admit that my knack for early adoption of technology hadn’t bitten me quite yet 9 years ago, so I was still on OS 9 at the time. I actually didn’t jump to OS X until 10.2 Jaguar in 2003, when I bought my first Mac that I could truly call my own when I went to college. 

I remember how much it changed my outlook on how to use a computer. Everything seemed much more simplified and colorful. It was a rich experience that made computing fun. I also remember starting my college experience by ditching Internet Explorer for Mac in favor of the brand new Safari browser from Apple. A browser I still use as my primary window to the Internet every day, whether that is on my Mac or my iPhone.

Two months into my college career, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther was released, bringing with it a lovely feature called Exposé. This little bit of software allowed Mac users to see all open windows at once by tapping the F9 key. F10 would show you all windows within the current application, and F11 would push all windows aside to reveal the desktop. On current Mac keyboards, the F3 key has been assigned the duty of handling Exposé, with control-F3 performing windows within the current app and command-F3 whisking windows aside for desktop viewing.

In April 2005, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came upon the scene, bringing Dashboard widgets and Spotlight search. Dashboard is a nice way to see little mini-apps that provide a quick burst of specific information such as current weather, stock prices, or what is on your calendar for the day. Spotlight proved to be the shining gem for me, as I much prefer searching for a file rather than digging through Finder. I also quickly learned to use Spotlight as a quick application launcher.

Apple isn’t often credited as having a major OS X release in this fashion, but in January 2006 Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.4, which included support for the latest iMac and the new MacBook Pro, which utilized Intel processors. Even though 10.4.4 is numbered as an incremental release instead of a major release, I think it is fair to say that supporting the same OS on two entirely different architectures is a milestone accomplishment.

October 2007 brought forth Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard after a 6 month delay due to Apple needing to borrow engineers to get the iPhone ready for prime time. 10.5 changed mainly the appearance of OS X. Many of the default apps on the Mac took on the user interface theme, the menubar was given the option of subtle transparency, icons jumped from a size of 128x128 pixels to 512x512 pixels, and the Dock took on a 3D look. Overall, Leopard took steps to bring polish to Mac OS X, but Apple was just getting started with tidiness.

In August 2009 Apple took Leopard and refined it. Mac OS X 10.6 was released, featuring very little in the aspect of marketable features. The big features were tidiness. PowerPC processor support was dropped, and many components of OS X were optimized. This process shaved off 7 GB of the standard install size of OS X. The Finder was rewritten from the ground up from Carbon to Cocoa, and OS X became fully 64-bit. Also, Snow Leopard allows developers to easily optimize their apps for multi-core processors, and to even hand off processing tasks from the central processing unit to the graphical processing unit. The result is a much leaner, faster OS X. I believe Apple took these steps to also put things in place to build upon newer features for future versions.

Out of the 9 years of OS X, I have enjoyed 7 of them as an avid user, usually moving to the latest and greatest version of the OS on the day of release. I can’t wait to see what is next.

Quicken Essentials for Mac

Quicken has long been the standard of personal finance for the better part of the last 15 years. If you wanted to digitally keep track of your finances, Quicken was the first name you heard of. Quicken for Windows remains, from what I’ve heard, the gold standard. However, the Mac version had long been put out to pasture with the last version, Quicken 2007, having been released in the Summer of 2006.

 I’ve been using Quicken 2004 for Mac since, well, 2004, because the “upgrades” (read $70 bug fixes) just weren’t justifiable in the 2005, 2006, and 2007 versions. Then, in January 2008, there was the promise of Quicken Financial Life for Mac, with a ship date of Fall 2008. This was to be a rewrite of Quicken for Mac that sport a fresh user interface and finally bring Intel native code.

Sadly, that ship date kept being pushed back again and again. I even started to contemplate alternatives to Quicken, but ended up deciding to just stick with my decrepit 2004 version. Then in October 2009, Quicken bought Mint.com, and put Mint’s head honcho, Aaron Patzer, in charge of the Quicken team. He promptly ousted the much-delayed Quicken Financial Life and put his Mac-savvy Mint team on the job to compile the essentials of finance tracking in a built-from-the-ground up Cocoa version of Quicken for the Mac. And they did it in four months.

Today we realize the culmination of that fresh outlook on financing in Quicken Essentials for Mac. Now, it truly is just the essentials, but it’s the essentials done right. It lacks stock-lot accounting, bill pay, and TurboTax export, among a few other things, I’m sure. However, if all you need is to get a hold of your spending and create a budget then QEM should fit right in for you. 

I’ll admit, I was extremely skeptical about QEM for the past couple months when looking at the multitude of failures and delays of Quicken Financial Life. What really sold me was Aaron Patzer, formerly of Mint, now VP and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group, getting out and talking to just about any major Mac site that would listen. Keep in mind that he came in to the fray in October 2009. Here’s an excerpt from Macworld:

“When I came in, I looked at the Mac product and said, ‘Holy crap, we haven’t put one of these out in three years,’” Patzer said. “It’s called ‘Mac Essentials’ because it’s got the essential features used by 80 percent of the users we’ve surveyed and talked to. So we had to decide, do we want to put a product out that serves 80 percent of the market and is a vast improvement in so many ways, or do we delay it again? And what I thought was, given the growing popularity of the Mac platform… it was better to get a product out that’s good for 80 percent of the market.”

 Also:

Patzer says that you’ll see more similarities to Mint.com in the desktop Quicken products. Patzer says he “personally specced out” Quicken for Windows 2011. “Over time, you’ll start to see features and functionality for all the platforms come together. It shouldn’t matter if you’re using Mac, PC, iPhone, Android, or online” when it comes to features and data availability. Apps should have a native appearance, he said, but the underlying data structures will be the same and it should be easy to go from using a desktop app to the online service and back again.

It’s obvious to me that Intuit, the maker of Quicken, saw that they were stagnant. When they bought Mint.com, I thought for sure they did so just to kill it off, as it competed with Quicken Online. Instead, the company tossed Quicken Online in the bin, and embraced Mint.com as its replacement. It sounds like they gave the Mint people carte blanche over all of Quicken. It also sounds like the fresh blood has a vision for the future, and it is that vision that persuaded me to embrace Quicken Essentials for Mac.

Whether or not you decide to adopt Quicken Essentials is primarily based on whether you are an 80 or a 20. Thankfully, I fall in the 80 percent of the user base. I leave my investments to my brokerage site, and I like the web interface that provides. So I didn’t feel the need to continue on with Quicken 2004 and wait for another year or two.

Thankfully, my grandpa has Quicken 2006 and I was able to use iChat’s Screen Sharing and my iDisk to convert my 2004 file. From there, QEM worked like a charm.

A Few Predictions on the "Tablet" Event

I’ve wrestled with the idea of posting any predictions on the forthcoming Apple Event that takes place in less than 48 hours, but I am caving to tradition. This is just something most any writer who writes about Apple has to do. I don’t have anything to back anything up besides my gut feelings. I’m really just spitballing with a best guess.

The order of events to an Apple keynote, especially a Jobsnote (love having you back, Steve), is a pretty timeless and standard affair. Everything will start by recapping a lot of market data for the Mac, iPod, and iPhone. Apple will tout the financial numbers which are being released later today.

Mac announcements will come first, if there are any. I’m expecting a cursory announcement of iLife and iWork 2010 (or whatever they decide to call it) with some brief demonstrations of the latest enhancements. I’m thinking only iPhoto and iMovie will see demos. I have absolutely no idea what could be added. Expect both suites to go fully 64-bit.

iTunes will be after that. There will be a new feature or two added. I’m hoping that the rumors of all-you-can-eat streaming TV shows come to fruition. If that happens, and the Apple TV gets a hardware refresh to support 1080p, I’m there. I’ve been looking for an excuse to drop cable TV and TiVo (combined, they are just too expensive). $30 or $40 a month would be perfect. I must say, though, I don’t really see this happening. I do see iTunes getting one or two new features, and they’ll likely tie into the iPod and iPhone.

iPod announcements will follow iTunes, and the iPod touch is going to get most of the spotlight (all 3-5 minutes of it). The gist of it will be the announcement of iPhone OS 3.2, which will support whatever new features iTunes brings.

Following that, the iPhone will get a nod, with iPhone OS 3.2 coming for it as well, natch. Here’s where I play my wild card. AT&T will lose it’s US exclusivity on iPhone. Now, I expect this to be more announcement oriented, rather than immediate availability. I expect the iPhone will simply be available this summer on T-Mobile, the other GSM carrier in the States. But I know most are hoping Apple releases a CDMA iPhone for use on Verizon (and maybe Sprint). And this could be the stage to announce that for summer availability. Either way, or even both ways, AT&T will lose exclusivity. I’m calling that one, and I’ll eat crow if it doesn’t happen.

Lastly, and this will be the most lengthy part (I’m counting 30-minutes for everything else, an hour for this), the mythical “tablet” will finally be unveiled. There’s so many delusions surrounding this thing’s hype that it’s laughable. I’m keeping my predictions light. The hardware will look similar to an overgrown iPhone or iPod touch. I mean, realistically, imagining much beyond a giant piece of glass with a metal and/or plastic back, with as few buttons as possible isn’t much of a stretch. But the secret will lie in the software. That’s what is beautiful about multi-touch input — there isn’t a lot of limit on the user interface. I think the software will be more closely related to iPhone OS than Mac OS X, but it will be its own branch off the OS X root, much like iPhone OS was.

I think it will be revolutionary. I don’t think any of us have come close to what it will do or how it will fit in with our computing lifestyles. I do think that we’ll all say, “That makes sense” after Steve explains it to us.

I just hope it has a cool name like Canvas. I’ll slap my forehead if its name is iSlate or iPad.

Multitouch Trick with QuickLook

I recently discovered a neat little trick about QuickLook. It occurred by accident, but I have since been using it quite a bit.

There is one requirement, you must have a trackpad that has all the multitouch capabilities, specifically the pinch/zoom gesture. Also, I have only tested this on Snow Leopard, so I have no idea if this works on Leopard.

Basically, highlight a file, tap the spacebar to enable QuickLook, then use the pinch/zoom gesture by drawing your two fingers away from each other. QuickLook will expand the document out into fullscreen.

To reverse the process, use pinch/zoom in the opposite direction, drawing your fingers together, and you’ll return to the normal QuickLook HUD window.

I have found this extremely useful for viewing images, and especially documents where I just quickly need some information, but the font renders too small in the HUD window to read.

I hope this little hint has helped you out. If any of you are still running Leopard, let us all know if this works for you.

Too bad the Magic Mouse doesn’t do pinch/zoom. By the way, mine is set to arrive Friday, watch out for a review around then.

The Name is Leopard...Snow Leopard

On Friday, August 28th Apple released Snow Leopard into the wild to feast upon Macs everywhere. Mine arrived via FedEx about 2:00 pm. I’m guessing that with the $29 price point, many users are upgrading, as the FedEx driver who delivered my new kitty said he had over 1,000 boxes from Apple on his truck, and there were easily over 10,000 Apple boxes in the Lincoln, NE facility when he arrived earlier that day. And that’s just in Lincoln, NE, folks.

I set about installing Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro immediately, as I had already backed up in anticipation. I also upgraded any software I could to latest versions (many of which already were sporting Snow Leopard compatibility). I chose to do the standard issue upgrade from the installer, knowing that if it was super glitchy I had a backup I could do a clean install from. The upgrade process of dusting some Snow on Leopard took about 35 minutes.

And I am happy to report that the upgrade process was flawlessly smooth. The benefits of going to Snow Leopard are simply staggering. The chief attribute that stands out above all the rest is speed. This is one fast cat. Booting up is faster, going to sleep is faster, many apps run much faster (CandyBar is a great example. I’m used to opening it then checking Twitter while it loads all the system icons. It takes only a couple seconds on Snow Leopard), and even shutting down is faster (5 seconds by my clock).

Visual Changes



Visually, there are very few things different than Leopard. All the menus within the Dock are now black with white text and a stunning blue highlight (like the Spotlight search bar, not Aqua). Personally, I think these new black menus look very wonderful. I wish they were persistent throughout the system such as contextual menus or menus from the menu bar, which are still translucent gray.

Exposé

Exposé has been one of my favorite features of Mac OS X since it debuted with 10.3 Panther. I can’t think of a day using my Mac since that I haven’t invoked Exposé at least once. However, it is also a feature that hasn’t seen any (user-visible) improvement since its origin. That has changed in 10.6 Snow Leopard. Exposé has received a bit of an overhaul in how it displays windows. It used to be that windows scaled to fit the screen in an inconsistent way. Some windows were quite large, some were quite small, and they ended up in various areas of the screen without any rhyme or reason. Now windows scale to a near uniform zoom level and arrange themselves in a grid. Hovering your cursor over a window while using Exposé then pressing spacebar activates QuickLook to enlarge the window briefly, so you can make sure that is the window you wish to select.

Exposé is a great feature that is now married to another great feature of OS X – The Dock. By clicking and holding on the icon of an open app in the Dock, Exposé is triggered to show windows from only that app. Similarly, if you click and drag a file from the Finder (or wherever) and hold it over an active icon in the Dock, Dock Exposé kicks in, showing windows for that app, which you can then drop the file into the desired window. Making Dock Exposé spring-loaded was a great idea. Props to whoever at Apple coded that.

One last thing about Exposé – if you have minimized windows, those show up as well. They appear as smaller windows beneath a thin line separating minimized from non-minimized windows. It’s a nice trick.

(Note concerning minimized windows: you can now choose to have minimize windows behind the app’s Dock icon instead of piling up in the right side of your Dock. Problem is, there isn’t a visual cue that windows have been minimized to the app icon aside from Exposé.)

Stacks

The list view of Stacks gains the same black theme as other menu items in the Dock. Fan view looks exactly the same. However Grid view received some new-feature-love in Snow Leopard. Grid view now supports the ability to drill down into folders. Clicking on a folder in a Grid view Stack now shows the contents of that folder, and places a back arrow (very similar to the back arrows in the iPhone’s user interface) at the top left of the open Stack. If the number of contents of a Stack in Grid view exceed the visibility of the Stack interface, a scroll bar now appears. These enhancements actually make the Grid view useful, though I still prefer List view for Stacks with many items.

There are a few other nuances of the user interface that have been refined, but I should leave some stuff for you to discover on your own.

QuickTime X

Apple drastically revamped QuickTime. The user interface is now black with inline controls that fade in and out as needed (along with the title bar). The result is a playing video that just floats in the middle of your screen. Hardcore QuickTime 7 Pro users will outcry at the lack of some very high end features, but QuickTime 7 is an optional install that will reside in the Utilities folder. For me, QuickTime X does it for me. The ability to do minor trim edits (anything else I can use iMovie for) is fine. The big seller for me is the ability to do a screencast recording. If I am unable to do a screen share via iChat to help out friends and family, I can record a quick tutorial video and send it to them. Perfect.

Under the Hood

It’s no secret that the majority of Snow Leopard’s enhancements are under the hood. Consumers won’t notice these enhancements outright. The only way mere mortals notice these things is through perception – such as “speed” and “stability.”

As for the perception of increased speed, many refinements and optimizations to Mac OS X as a whole contribute a lot towards that. However, within a few months, I believe users will notice vast speed improvements as third-party developers update their applications to take advantage of new “under-the-hood” technologies in Snow Leopard. Chiefly I am talking about Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

Grand Central Dispatch will allow developers to easily split up tasks in their apps between the different processing cores in our modern-day Macs. This was achievable in Leopard, but it was extremely difficult. Now this can be achieved much easier now that Apple has laid down a uniform path for all developers.

OpenCL allows developers to access the extreme processing power that is often idle in our graphic processors. Applications that require a lot of computational processing power will now be able to call upon the GPU to churn through data faster. I imagine in the near future, apps such as Photoshop will take advantage of this and be able to complete tasks like PhotoMerge much faster.

As for the reliability of Mac OS X overall, things are very promising. Instead of adding “300+ new features” to OS X like in Leopard, Apple introduced very few features. Instead they went through OS X with a fine tooth comb and did a massive spring cleaning. This is reflected in that many users will regain around 6 or 7 GB of hard drive space (I’ve heard reports of up to 20 GB). Apple threw out a lot of cruft, and good for them. One of those pieces of cruft was support for PowerPC legacy machines. My grandfather is actually affected by this, as he bought an iBook G4 about a month before the Intel MacBook was released to replace it. He is stuck at Leopard unless he buys a new machine. But the last PowerPC Mac was released nearly four years ago. It’s time for OS X to move on.

Conclusions

So far, my Snow Leopard experience has been delightful. Everything is snappier, all of my apps work correctly (as far as I can tell), and I’ve only encountered one slight bug (with the 4-finger Exposé gesture on my MacBook Pro’s trackpad). One flagrant bug. That’s about 39 fewer flagrant bugs than when I went from Tiger to Leopard. The refinements are wonderful. The price tag was perfect. $29. You can’t beat that. If you have Leopard, you’d be silly not to upgrade to Snow Leopard (unless a critical app you use isn’t compatible yet).

Overall, I’m very glad Apple sat this round out for adding loads of new features. I believe Snow Leopard has laid the groundwork for Apple to build an amazing next generation of OS X.