Hmm, not exactly convincing. Leopard brought stuff like time machine, this smells more like a big service pack. I mean, OpenCL and some of the central applications running 64-bit? Better Quicktime and a new Safari? I don't even use QT and Safari.
And it's $29? Too little to be too much, but still a lot for a service pack.
Apple choosed speed, optimization and refinement over features. And I welcome this choice wholeheartedly, enough bloat already... make my OS faster, slimmer and more robust and I'll be happy.
Sadly the price point of Snow Leopard, and the sort of reaction that you have make me think that the big shops will continue to make ever more massive and bloated softwares...
After all, you get what you are ready to pay for : if you think features are worth more bucks than optimization, that's what you'll get.
Here http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/ are the new features that went into this release. And your comment doesn't even make sense, first you say it's a service pack than you rattle off a short list of new and upgraded items. These things do cost money to develop. And I'm pretty sure $29 barely covers the cost of it. I don't remember anything new being in Windows when a SP rolled out except a new browser. (There was the uPNP browser that popped up in SP2 I believe)
Every other "system update" reboot I've made for the past 20 months seems to have included an update to QuickTime and Safari -- both of which, by the way, are available as free downloads -- and the prominent featuring of those two products as a component of a whole new version of an OS makes it feel like a service pack.
> and the prominent featuring of those two products as a component of a whole new version of an OS makes it feel like a service pack.
point me to a page that only displays those 2 updates as the main features. In my browser Apple is clearly marketing the 64-bit, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL as the main reasons to upgrade.
Also stop referring to an OS upgrade as a service pack. Because it isn't. Microsoft releases service packs, just like Apple releases minor updates to their OS, (eg. 10.5.7)
Thras, I'll ask you this completely sincerely, because I don't and never have understood this. Why do you, and people like you, get off from reading a lengthy debate on a topic online, and ignoring every point except the one that's not a point, then snarking about it? It's not just you: A lot of people do it, and it baffles me. I always really enjoy being told why my opinion on something is wrong, and these snarky responses don't seem to prove anything.
You more or less said that the grandparent was wrong "just because." You were telling someone that he was wrong without any argument. Exactly what you complained about with me, btw.
The only possible response to that sort of thing is snark.
When Apple first announce 10.6, they said it wouldn't have any end-user features, but just a lot of re-engineering under the hood. Well, they couldn't help themselves, and there are a bunch of smaller features, plus things like Exchange support across the board.
And there really has been a lot of re-engineering, most of it focussed on making things a lot faster and smaller.
I think Apple deserve our thanks for actually making performance and improved footprint an explicit goal of a major release, rather than larding on new feature after new feature in some kind of misguided feature war.
It depends on what you plan to do with it, I suppose. I'm personally happy to pay merely for a decent chunk of performance improvements (isn't that what we do when we buy faster computers, after all?), but the new frameworks are also interesting—OpenCL, for example.
And it's $29? Too little to be too much, but still a lot for a service pack.