I wouldn’t count on Snow Leopard including Rosetta… the whole point is to leave legacy stuff behind!

There are too many apps that aren’t Universal-aware. Lots of people, for example, still use Office 2004, because the 2008 edition lost support for Visual Basic for Applications. I can see dropping Classic support, but I think Rosetta will carry on for another release or two.

Peace,
Gene

I wouldn’t count on Snow Leopard including Rosetta… the whole point is to leave legacy stuff behind!

The name, Snow Leopard, being very close to the previous version Leopard seems to send a message that it’s not a big deal. That makes me think Gene is right, that this will be a cheaper upgrade than Leopard.

Or they may not push upgrades at all, since it’s meant for new machines – buy a new system and have Snow Leopard included but don’t bother upgrading. But at the same time, no new applications would require it.

That doesn’t sound right, though, because this emphasis on concurrency means freshly written software would only run under the new version.

It really seems like a puzzling decision since I would think few would buy what appears on the surface to be a bug fix upgrade. So why isn’t it 10.5.something?

D

The ‘Power PC computers will only be three years old when the Snow Leopard arrives’ argument is beside the point. Snow Leopard will, with some very minor exceptions as noted, be exactly the same as Leopard; that’s the point of it. Users of both systems will have the same experience: they will both be running Leopard. OK we geeks will want to have the Snow prefix but normal users simply won’t care.
When the next version with new features (Lion, king of the beasts?) rolls around, say 18 months later, then the Power PC machines will be coming on for five years old, and even the most powerful G5s will be looking very long in the tooth.
In short, Snow Leopard is a stroke of genius. A chance to take stock, regroup and reform whilst the enemy is winded. The code that comes from the rewriting process should be lean, clean and mean. I can’t wait, it’s a win-win for us all. Once again Apple is using an economic recession period to innovate. Now, can anyone persuade Adobe that CS5 (it’s already too late for CS4) should be treated to the same process?

Is Leopard flawed relative to what? Flawed relative to Tiger or Panther or Jaguar or Cheetah? No. Flawed relative to Snow Leopard or 10.7 or 10.8? Yes.

Software evolves. It’s not surprising that the next version is improved over the current one, and the current one is improved over the previous one.

OTOH, if you’re asking did Leopard ship too early and with too many bugs? Yes!! Apple should have waited another 4-5 months. By comparison, Tiger was a much smoother upgrade. But Leopard has more features and after it stabilized Leopard was an improvement to (and therefore less flawed than) Tiger.

Clickbait!

ZFS
Don’t forget about the ZF. The Snow Leopard Server certainly has it. I would expect it would be in the Snow Leopard Client as well.

I thing of Snow Leopard as a streamlined Leopard on steroids running on a range of products.

Looks like good time to upgrade from my old trustworthy G4 Cube running Tiger : )

I just don’t get this bitching about the as-yet-unannounced price of $129 for Snow Leopard.
A family pack is typically $180 at Amazon. I own 5 Macs. So, Snow Leopard would be $36 per machine.
Sounds reasonable to me.

Yes Leopard is flawed, as is every other single piece of software anyone has used.

Apple is being brave and smart by taking a breather and getting things better under the hood. This will allow them to lay the groundwork for much more fantastic Apple software to come.

Well of course Leopard is flawed. With Apple’s policy of “perpetual beta” no OS they issue is entirely problem-free. Problem is, we tend to compare the performance of a new OS in the early stages of its life-cycle, when bugs are most visible, with its predecessor at the end of its cycle, after a whole lot of bugfix releases have ironed out most of its problems.