Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 09 June 2009 11:41
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
There are a couple of possible explanations that I think we can discount. The first is to make Windows 7 look like an expensive upgrade (it will do that, but I don't really think it was part of Apple's decision), and the other is the state of the economy (it's just too big a reduction for that to make sense).
I suspect part of the reason for the relatively low price is a desire to get as many people onto 10.6 as quickly as possible. There's a lot of good stuff in there, but it's down to developers to take advantage of some of the changes.
In particular, OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch have the potential to provide significant speed improvements by taking advantage of GPUs and multicore CPUs.
While smaller developers are usually fairly quick to implement new and relevant Mac OS X technologies into their products, the bigger players (notably Adobe and Microsoft) tend not to hurry.
By providing a substantial 10.6 market, Apple may be hoping to accelerate the adoption of Snow Leopard technologies by developers.
And when there are plenty of programs around that run better on 10.6 than they do on 10.5 or earlier versions of Mac OS X, there's an incentive for people to buy new Macs that fully support the new operating system.
The basic requirements for Snow Leopard aren't especially high: an Intel CPU (as suspected, PowerPC gets the flick), 1G of RAM, 5G of free disk space (Apple claims a net saving of 6G after the upgrade from Leopard), and a DVD drive for installation.
From memory, that covers every new Mac since the first Intel iMac was released in January 2006, though some may require a RAM upgrade if they haven't already had one, and the MacBook Air will need access to either an external or shared DVD drive.
What about PowerPC owners? How much is Snow Leopard likely to cost in Australia? Please
read on.
