Should Apple Charge for OS X Snow Leopard?

Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard, is due to appear on the prowl next year, is an interesting release for OS X. Instead of opening the feature floodgates from R&D’s lake of shinyness, a mere puddle of new features will trickle through. In the meantime, OS X has hired a personal trainer, and is now being honed by its developers to become faster, leaner and more modern.

The list of underlying new features that have been confirmed include:

• OpenCL, allowing the computer to harness the control of the graphics card
• SquirrelFish in Safari, to speed up JavaScript (this will also be backported to OS X 10.4, 10.5 and the changes will also appear in iPhone OS X)
• Grand Central, a new parallel programming technology to assist in harnessing OpenCL and multi-core CPUs
• Upgrades to Darwin meaning it can fully harness 64-bit CPUs, adding support for a theoretical 16tB of RAM.

Updates obvious to the end user will include QuickTime X, a new version of QuickTime, and Exchange 2007 support for Address Book and iCal. The Server version will also include full support for ZFS.

However, as yet, we don’t know how much Apple is planning on charging for this update. This represents a problem: OS X is speedy anyway, and many end-users may not see the benefit of something that has very few new end-user features. (It’s also worth remembering that Snow Leopard doesn’t support PowerPC Macs, and there’s still a large proportion of these around.)

I still think that Apple should throw in at least a couple of new features to entice users into buying the upgrade. There are still a few problems with Leopard’s feature base that Snow Leopard could provide an opportunity to polish and fix. These are simple things, like the eye candy: there could be a little more (functional) eye candy around the Trashcan and the Finder, for example. Leopard also has the problem of the 3D Dock having an incorrect perspective in comparison to the icons specified by Apple’s own Aqua design guidelines. They might also contemplate improving the virtual desktops (Spaces) feature, to remove it from the Dock and stick it up in the menu bar (IMO, they should do the same with the Dashboard and Time Machine by default, as it simply clutters up the Dock).

Alternatively, they could simply offer Snow Leopard as a free (or cheap) upgrade to all Intel Mac owners. This would be quite a popular move (Apple giving something away for free: OMG!) so I think it would certainly make good economic sense for Apple.

To avoid upsetting people on the other side of the Severn, Apple should also translate OS X into Welsh.