Ironic, isn’t it? At the same moment Microsoft has given up the struggle to improve Windows Vista, letting users downgrade for free (!) to Windows XP, Apple is previewing its next version of Mac OS X, code-named Snow Leopard. Equally ironic is that Snow Leopard will be the first Mac OS X version to support Microsoft Exchange 2007 out-of-the-box. Microsoft Exchange is currently the market leader in enterprise-class communications and an operating system that has native support for it is bound to find its way into large organisations easier and more quickly.

In stark contrast with Microsoft, which is obsessed with making Vista work the way it was intended to, Apple is making Snow Leopard even more 64-bit capable than Leopard already is. The RAM supported by Snow Leopard is a theoretical 16TB, which puts Snow Leopard in the same league of capabilities as those Unixes that HP and IBM deliver for heavy server applications.

QuickTime is going to be upgraded to QuickTime X. The new technology will support modern codecs better, with more efficient media playback, and hopefully faster encoding of video formats such as H.264.

Improving the OS's Multicore Efficiency

What really will set Snow Leopard apart from any other desktop OS, is Grand Central. Apple says it’s a new set of technologies built into the OS to support multicore systems better and more efficiently. Indeed, multicore machines aren’t necessarily faster. The performance that you can get out of multiple cores largely depends on the OS running on the machine. If that OS can efficiently manage task delegation and allocation across the available cores and processors, you will have unrivalled performance. If the OS fails at doing that properly, you’ll just have an expensive but slow piece of silicon and metal on your desk.

Leopard is good at managing multi-processor tasks, and it’s even good at multicore management, but apparently the technology that drives that management is not as efficient as Apple would like to have it. Grand Central is bound to offer multicore management more effectively.

Apple these days does a lot for developers too --or so it seems. We are already seeing an explosion of well-designed applications with excellent functionality often developed by small businesses. This partly is because Mac OS X is a growing platform, and so it is becoming economically interesting to program for Mac OS X, but it must also be that Apple is providing its developers community with the necessary resources to make development easier and more fun.

The developers’ tools we all get on our Mac OS X install discs shows a glimpse of what Mac OS X offers out-of-the-box to developers, even if you’re not a programmer yourself. OpenCL is said to make it even easier for developers to use computing power currently locked up in the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of a machine.

Snow Leopard is still a year off, but the preview shows us we Mac users are a privileged bunch. We are not privileged because Apple never makes a mistake --far from being perfect, Apple comes close to offering what we want, when we want it, and that’s a better “user experience” than any other OS maker can deliver currently. We are privileged because of that and because we are at the forefront of what computing will look like deep into the 21st Century.

Even Apple’s new MobileMe service gives us a glimpse of what the future looks like: a hyper-connected world where we can sit back and watch the Mac do all the work and we can enjoy the good looks of the machine and do what really matters to us. There’s nothing clumsy about the way it’s been set up (elegant is the word that always pops up in my head when I see something new being announced by Apple) and in general we are lucky enough to get systems that work securely and effectively.

The downside of what Apple is offering us, could be that we risk becoming increasingly lazy and hedonistic. In reality --and you don’t have to be an analyst to recognize this trend-- Macs are turning us into better designers, video-editors, sound designers, trainers, and just office workers. Macs have always helped us with creative tasks, more than Windows or Linux PCs could. But something has changed with the introduction of Mac OS X. The Mac no longer helps us with creative jobs.

It makes us creative, and that’s a big difference. I don’t believe there can be a bigger compliment to any system than this.