The 10.6 Review We’ve Been Waiting For

John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written incredible reviews of each OS X release for years — 10.5 Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, 10.3 Panther, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.1 Puma, the original release of OS X, and even the public beta.

His take on Snow Leopard is no different. All 23 pages of it are great. He covers the installation process, the 32- vs. 64-bit debate, QuickTime X, new development tools, various tweaks throughout the OS, performance increases and more.

Here’s the crux:

Though it’s obvious that Snow Leopard includes fewer external features than its predecessor, I’d wager that it has just as many, if not more internal changes than Leopard. This, I fear, means that the initial release of Snow Leopard will likely suffer the typical 10.x.0 bugs. There have already been reports of new bugs introduced to existing APIs in Snow Leopard. This is the exact opposite of Snow Leopard’s implied promise to users and developers that it would concentrate on making existing features faster and more robust without introducing new functionality and the accompanying new bugs.

On the other side of the coin, I imagine all the teams at Apple that worked on Snow Leopard absolutely reveled in the opportunity to polish their particular subsystems without being burdened by supporting the marketing-driven feature-of-the-month. In any long-lived software product, there needs to be this kind of release valve every few years, lest the entire code base go off into the weeds.

There’s been one other “no new features” release of Mac OS X. Mac OS X 10.1, released a mere six months after version 10.0, was handed out for free by Apple at the 2001 Seybold publishing conference and, later, at Apple retail stores. It was also available from Apple’s online store for $19.95 (along with a copy of Mac OS 9.2.1 for use in the Classic environment). This was a different time for Mac OS X. Versions 10.0 and 10.1 were slow, incomplete, and extremely immature; the transition from classic Mac OS was far from over.

Judged as a modern incarnation of the 10.1 release, Snow Leopard looks pretty darned good. The pricing is similar, and the benefits—to developers and to users—are greater. So is the risk. But again, that has more to do with how horrible Mac OS X 10.0 was. Choosing not to upgrade to 10.1 was unthinkable. Waiting a while to upgrade to Snow Leopard is reasonable if you want to be sure that all the software you care about is compatible. But don’t wait too long, because at $29 for the upgrade, I expect Snow Leopard adoption to be quite rapid. Software that will run only on Snow Leopard may be here before you know it.

Should you buy Mac OS X Snow Leopard? If you’re already running Leopard, then the answer is a resounding “yes.” If you’re still running Tiger, well, then it’s probably time for a new Mac anyway. When you buy one, it’ll come with Snow Leopard.