all these “under the hood” improvements to the Mac OS are impressive and important for the long term. but what will a consumer actually notice that is a real improvement to Leopard 10.5? will some things be noticeably faster or “snappier”? will there be convenience refinements to the Finder/Desktop (we all have a few we’d like) in addition to the new Marble look? will laptop batteries last longer? will this be when MobileMe gets more capabilities and a slicker interface?

With Win 7 trying to copy most of the UI features of Leopard, Apple needs to keep ahead of the competition in that regard too.

Well, while I’m sure Snow Leopard’s improvements will sell some standalone copies, Apple obviously isn’t having trouble selling new Macs and that’s not likely to change regardless of what iteration of OS X is installed by default. People want Macs and are buying them in ever greater numbers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft will be trying to sell Windows 7 in the stagnating PC market, either on its own or, how they make most of their money, by tying it to every new PC sold. Vista has seriously damaged Microsoft’s already lackluster Windows brand and Win7, i.e., Vista SP2, may not ship ’til 2010! Then add in the fact it won’t have hardly any new features except a totally different Taskbar, yet it will still run slower than XP on the same hardware.

When Snow Leopard is released, not only will it result in another jump in Mac sales amongst consumers, it’ll be at a time when businesses are still awaiting Windows 7. By Snow Leopard’s launch, new iMacs and Mac minis will be available, the latter of which could be very enticing to IT managers looking for a quick, affordable switch.

Have they…? First I’ve heard about it. Any links…? Any how you’d have to also disable booting from the DVD drive as well. People just put it on a External Harddisk to save time…

ZFS is indeed very cool. I’m quite sure our Macs and Time Capsules and Apple home servers will be using it in some years from now. It’s clearly the future, and the licencing is just right.

But we have heard all this before. Remember the build-up to Leopard’s release? A Sun exec publicly stated that Leopard would use ZFS. Be clearly didn’t know what be wasvtalking about. But many people were prepared to believe him.

Apple will use it when Apple is ready. I’d love to see that in 10.6.0, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

I wouldn’t worry about Silverlight. It’s meant as an answer to Flash, but as Apple have shown on the iPhone: who needs that? Closed plugins are thankfully going against the tide now at last. Google’s power online, and Apple’s power at the client side, are keeping us clear from a return to the ActiveX style horrors of the 1990’s!

Open standards: everybody wins. Well, besides Adobe and Microsoft! But no one’s keeping them out either.

So, I wouldn’t count the behemoth out on this one. All MS has to do is make deals with video content behemoths (something they are good at) and they may be able to start monopolizing in another area.

As someone who recently worked on a 15 GB video project, I sure hope you’re right.

There are two big flaws/deficiencies with Leopard’s Time Machine. One is that backups are created on an hourly schedule, rather than when files actually change. If you create a new file after the backup at 1:00 runs, and then you accidentally delete it before the next backup happens at 2:00, the file is lost.

The other issue is that when a file is backed up, the *entire* file must be backed up. This is acceptable for small files like text documents, but it becomes a problem for larger files, like video. If you edit one second of a 50 MB video file, the entire thing gets backed up again, even if the edit itself only creates a difference of 500 KB in the filesize.

ZFS’ snapshots feature, I think, could solve both problems. You could back up files *when* they change, so you never lose a revision, and you could back up only the *parts* of files that change, making much more efficient use of space. Anyone who uses Time Machine would definitely appreciate those improvements.

FYI – I have no inside information, this is all my own speculation. But it would make sense for Apple to do this anyway, and it would give them something to market to end users too.