The “Service Pack” white elephant
One criticism levelled at Apple over Snow Leopard is that it’s merely a service pack for Leopard.
While Apple is guilty of touting minor improvements as “features” when it advertises the total number of them on release day, it’s by no means alone in this, and Apple has been quite clear that a large proportion of Snow Leopard’s changes are very definitely just refinements. As such, Snow Leopard will have a massively reduced price tag as compared to previous Mac OS X releases.
That said, Snow Leopard does contain a lot of brand new stuff: some of it’s aimed very squarely at developers, who arguably make the platform what it is, though there are some things (such as the in-built integration with Microsoft Exchange—something Windows 7 lacks) which are good, old-fashioned, user-level features.
The “service pack” criticism isn’t new, though. Part of this is because Apple doesn’t reinvent Mac OS X’s user interface between major releases in the same way that Microsoft does with Windows (compare the default UIs in Windows NT 3.51, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7). This is a good thing. A major OS upgrade is a big deal at the best of times, without having to re-learn everything along the way. Sit any seasoned Mac user down on a machine running an older release of Mac OS X than they’re used to, though, and the curse words won’t be far behind.
A brief look at the GUIdebook entries for Mac OS X shows how the user interface has evolved, however: we’ve gone from pinstripes to brushed metal to Leopard’s current “plastic” theme (though I think it looks far more like the gently brushed aluminium currently used by Apple in the construction of its hardware). As the theme of the interface has changed, so have conventions—generally for the better.
Meanwhile, we’ve seen the evolution of the various applications, from iCal, iChat, Address Book and Mail, right down to the Terminal (which saw a major overhaul with the release of Leopard). Finder has changed significantly with pretty much every major release. Safari didn’t even ship until the advent of Mac OS X 10.3 (“Panther”)—prior to that, the default browser was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Mac.
In short, the “service pack” claim is no more true for Mac OS X than it is for Windows. It’s a criticism that’s been levelled at Windows in the past, too: I recall it being a major complaint about Windows XP when it was released, and many believe Windows 7 is little more than a point-update to Windows Vista. Indeed, the only possible exceptions to this are Mac OS X 10.1 (“Puma”), which was a free upgrade to 10.0 users, and Snow Leopard, which will cost a paltry $29.
Having used Snow Leopard, $29 seems to be an entirely fair price: there’s an awful lot of new and improved functionality, but in terms of what people see, there’s far more “improved” than “new”. There’s enough there to justify charging something for it, but customers would very likely have balked at the full $129.
My instinct is that people would have been willing to pay $49 for the Snow Leopard upgrade. $29 is a snap.
