Merlin Mann’s tweet about Snow Leopard hits the nail on the head. Even though David Pogue says this is an “uninformed wisecrack,” I’m still calling Snow Leopard a service pack. “Snow Leopard Fixes Leopard’s Bugs” is not the headline you’re going to see in the NYT or WSJ. Instead the tech press told just the story Apple served them on a silver platter: that they did something noble and interesting and efficient by making their operating system smaller, faster, leaner, and even improved in a couple of “subtle” ways (a word I used ). And for only $30! It’s not a very original story. In the wake of a bloated Windows Vista, with netbooks and smartphones offering smaller but less powerful hardware, the “smaller/faster/leaner” sell is the marketing tact of the year, and everyone’s trotting it out. Look at Google Chrome (which is taking a piece of Firefox’s bloated pie) and Google Chrome OS and Windows 7. Don’t get me wrong, “smaller/faster/leaner” is exactly what Snow Leopard is, but it doesn’t deserve a +.1 version number increment. To end users, it’s just a faster Leopard. While we all swooned over Apple’s cheap-cheap pricing, on further thought, this is an upgrade I’d expect to see come down for free via Software Update.
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