Snow Leopard

As usual, John Siracusa has provided a detailed review of the latest upgrade to Mac OS X: version 10.6, a.k.a. 'Snow Leopard.' The section on the reason a new install takes up so much less space is especially interesting, in that it illustrates how changes over time in the relative performance of different system components can cause system architects to make counterintuitive trade-offs in how and where they store and retrieve data.¹

This review dives into the under-the-skin changes more heavily than most, what with Snow Leopard being mostly a tidying up/polishing of 10.5 that puts in place various technologies that will really come into their own over the next couple of years as developers start to use them to take advantage of the more powerful hardware that's available in modern Macs.

It's just a pity that this is all of academic interest to me; 10.6 is the first release of OS X since I Switched back in 2003 that I won't be using, what with Apple having decided not to support PowerPC-based systems in Snow Leopard.² I do understand why Apple have decided to prod users firmly in the direction of 64-bit systems, and why it's not worth their while producing a PowerPC port of most of the new features in 10.6 given that they haven't released a PowerPC-based system in some four years now. I just can't afford to go down that path any time soon.

1. I know that's a tad uninformative as descriptions go: all I can say is, if you have any sort of head for the details of how computers work you should read that section of Siracusa's review in full for yourself. It makes a complicated subject crystal clear. ↩
2. I don't doubt that they'll continue to produce security updates for PPC-based systems for a while yet, but I suspect that within a year – 18 months at the most – I'll have come across the first application or upgrade I can't install because it's Intel Only or Snow Leopard Only. ↩