Any time Apple has a new operating system under development, you can bet there will be plenty of speculation, not to mention a wide range of hopes and dreams about the shape of the finished product. But Snow Leopard is a different breed of cat, if you’ll excuse the lame pun. You see, it’s supposed to be largely a performance enhancement project, with few compelling new features.

In fact, the only new feature of note appears to be enhanced Microsoft Exchange support, which will only appeal to the subset of Mac users who require that capability to hook into their office email networks. For the rest of us, it will mean absolutely nothing. Of course, it will help Microsoft sell more of those uber-expensive Exchange licenses, and they could always use the extra cash, in case they want to make another bid for Yahoo.

When it comes to those ubiquitous reports about Safari 4, even if they are correct, there’s nothing to indicate that the next version of Apple’s browser will be restricted to Snow Leopard, and won’t be available for Leopard and even Windows users for that matter. Since Apple has expanded Safari’s support to two platforms, it doesn’t make any sense that they’d build a version that would only run on 10.6.

So let’s set that aside for now and get on with issues that only relate to 10.6 and its promise and potential.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

This article was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 6:30 PM and is filed under News and tagged with: 64-bit, Apple, Bill Gates, broadband, Commentator, desktop, download, enhancement utilities, Havoc, Leopard, Live Radio, Mac, Mac Pro, Mac Security, Microsoft, multicore, New Mac, Night Owl, OpenCL, Optical Disc, Pentium, Phoenix, processor, Quicktime, Qwest, RAM, Safari, snow leopard, Software Companies, Thursday Morning, waiting in the wings.