I upgraded to Snow Leopard yesterday and upon initial restart of my computer I sat there dumbfounded at how Apple is going to market this product as a must have for their user base. Beyond the desktop picture you will be hard pressed to notice anything new.
That being said what we have here is a product that is going to be the roadmap for Apple over the next two to three years and beyond. If I had to compare this release to a tangible product out there I would say it is more like buying house in a down market….there is a ton of upside. Think of this $29.99 investment as something you won’t see dividends on until iTunes 9 or iLife 10.
All the architectural improvements bundled in Snow Leopard are going to allow programs to access more memory, do things more efficiently (like video chat) and probably the biggest thing leverage your graphics card to do heavy computation….
For years a big goal of Apple’s has to been to allow users to unblur a photo. Steve Job’s said a few years ago
“It’s mathematically possible to unblur that photo, It’s computationally ferocious–64-bit computing will one day possibly help that.”
With Snow Leopard this feature could become a reality. Inside most Intel and all current shipping Macs is a Graphics Card or a GPU which not only allows you to play games, but powers your entire video system inside your computer. With Snow Leopard Apple has devised a way with all major manufactures of these cards to pair the horse power of the GPU with the Intel chip running inside every Mac to work together. The combination of these two chips is going to lead to a whole new way for users to enhance multimedia content such as Photos and Video.
