The OS alone will be 33% faster (or more) based off of early results using LLVM with GCC.

I can’t wait for my poor Vista-suffering colleagues to start salivating over my speedy new MBP (only it won’t be very new at all)!

I am intrigued by the concept of “code refactoring”. Daniel’s explanation of customer preferences seems quite accurate. It does not only explain why Windows is the way it is but also why tech gadgets in general have so much unusable features.

And then there seems to be a short term versus long term conflict of interests. On the short term people are impressed with geeky new gadgets with lots of features. And they are afraid of missing the essential feature that their friend boast about (”What, no second video camera on your smartphone?”) On the longer term people discover lots of features don’t really work and features tend to be replaced by usability as a sales argument (in a stage, of course, where the product isn’t geeky anymore). Look at videorecorders in the late 1980’s compared to the late 1990’s.

So on the short term the Bill Gates strategy (not to fix bugs) has been extremely profitable but on the longer term, while consumer preference shifts to usability and real performance, it leaves him with a difficult to maintain and inefficient legacy.
The fact Apple comes with Snow Leopard indicates they are investing in the future. They know its not a popular story for consumers, but then: why would they wake up competitors now when they can take the world by surprise with features that can be released in a few years time built upon the base that is now under construction?

I think it is a story that also holds for other kind of tech consumer articles. Ten years ago everybody thought Toyota had gone completely mental by developing hybrid cars and spending their money on improving internal efficiency of a car while consumers were asking for SUV’s and ATV’s that could impress their neighbors. No need to explain what the situation looks like now…

There’s nothing worse, nor more embarrassing, than having to remove previously hyped upcoming features. Think of Leopard’s promised resolution independent display technology. Where’d it go?

Or worse, Vista hyped a huge array of features that were shorn from it the longer it’s release was delayed. As Daniel quoted in the article, what’s a Microsoft product without an X-mas list of new features? Clearly, not much.

Quite right. Daniel is easily the leading writer on Snow Leopard at the moment, followed in second by “Prince McLean” at AppleInsider!

It’s understandable (though not good) that news sites bluster about what’s new today, as it’s the essence of their self appointed remit. Snow Leopard for them is a vague statement from Apple about “OpenCL” (huh?), “Grand Central” (juh?) and “in about a year”. No surprises what their headlines *were* before they moved along, as orderly as ever, to write about the next thing.

The wider problem seems to be that the places we go for analysis have caught the news bug. Usually the Mac Web is rich with in depth opinion pieces, lengthy illustrated UI critiques and treatises on whatever idea has stolen the author’s mind. Snow Leopard has easily won the prize for least specific interest that I’ve seen in my five years on the platform and in the sites and blogs. Compare the monumental furore this time three years ago over the Intel transition, or last year’s hysterics over the iPhone … Snow Leopard isn’t even getting the same Mac Web buzz as Panther.

Apple are very likely the main reason for this. The way that Steve shuffled the next big cat right out of his keynote and into the private developer sessions pretty much pushed it out of mind for the professional journalists. The fact that the bullet points so far released are technical (OpenCL and Grand Central) and unexciting (no big new features besides Exchange, no new UI by the sound of it) has kept the blogs quiet as well. Apple have chosen to focus eyes on the iPhone 3G rollout, as they should. So it’s no real mystery, just frustrating!

As a newbie developer and a keen technical Mac user, I am of course very interested in the deep promise that seems to lie at the heart of Snow Leopard. LLVM, GPGPU and a new assault on the problems posed by parallel processing hardware are all very worthy of in depth coverage and analysis.

So yes, good job we have Daniel writing for us. The other leading Apple analysts (Gruber, Siracusa, where are you on this?) have some catching up to do.

Maybe this is the “new feature” of Snow Leopard: People will pay happyly the $129- for a “good quality software”!
(…as people was paying $500 for a “good quality” cellphone!)