Snow Leopard: Prepared for Shipment

Earlier this afternoon, I noticed that the order status in the Apple Online Store for my Snow Leopard had been updated to “Prepared for shipment”. Delivery will be by tomorrow, so the order tracking page says. I guess people in Singapore, along with those in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc, will be amongst the first in the world to get their copy of Snow Leopard. It is going to be goodbye to the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on this MacBook really soon now.

The new “in” thing with operating systems is not about doing more. Apple is done with adding more (major) features. It seems to be the case with Windows 7 coming up in about 2 months. For some people, it seems like a disappointment that the upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6 looks almost like a “service pack”. Even the version name, Snow Leopard, suggests only a marginal improvement over Leopard.

On the other hand, for only US$29 (S$48), it seems like a relatively cheap upgrade. I tend to agree that many of the new improvements in Snow Leopard really ought to be enhancements that should have been available as a Leopard update, not requiring users to upgrade to a new version of Mac OS X. But I think there are enough under-the-hood changes that are significant enough to deserve a version number of its own.

Snow Leopard is not about major feature upgrades. It is about plenty of little refinements and usability improvements that add up  to be, hopefully, worthy of US$29.

What am I looking forward to?

1. Improved performance: Plenty of things are said to be faster. With more parts of the operating system turned 64-bits, one would expect a speedier and snappier operating system.
2. Quicktime X: It now records video, audio, and the computer screen. Making video tutorials are now going to be a snap. I think I can find plenty of uses for this.
3. Integration with Exchange: Now, I can finally be in-sync with the corporate mandated platform for email, calendaring and directory, without me having to put up with a Windows OS on my computer. Actually I don’t know how better Mail and Address Book would be (after all there is already IMAP4 and LDAP), but at least there would be iCal calendar integration.
4. Usability enhancements all around: Better Expose, better Docks.

Update: Oh. Even before I really finished posting this… there’s an update. I think Apple’s working through the night tonight. My order has been shipped. DHL Express picked up the box at 21:17!