Let me start by saying that I don’t yet have 10.6 Snow Leopard running on my home system. I’m still on a PPC Mac, so I don’t get 10.6 at home until I get a new Mac. That being said, I’m lucky enough to have access to a whole range of the latest Macs all of which are now running Snow Leopard. 
Through my own use and observations, as well as the in-depth reviews I’ve been reading online I have come to the conclusion that 10.6 will be looked back upon as the OS that changed OSes.
Yeah, Snow Leopard on the front end is a more polished version of 10.5 Leopard; but it’s the back end plumbing that really makes Snow Leopard special. Three things in particular make this the OS that will change everything:
- A new Xcode that makes developing multithreaded apps as painless as possible
- Grand Central Dispatch which makes multithreading a real world possibility
- OpenCL which leverages numbers 1 and 2 to provide developers an easy way to harness all the silicon in modern computers
For the first time we have an OS that was designed to truly take advantage of all the capabilities of today’s multi-core, multi-GPU computers. This really is going to change everything. The really exciting thing is that as nice as Snow Leopard is right now, it’s only going to get better.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The technologies in 10.6 are so new it will take a while for apps to be developed that can really take advantage of the plumbing Snow Leopard has implemented. But, when they start coming out… Man! It’s going to be awesome.
Man, I agree with you 100% if you ever decide to quit your day job, I feel like silicon blogging may be your next calling.
Thanks Eldra. I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing more. I have plenty of thoughts about technology and the tech industry, but I don’t spend enough time writing about it.
I’ve been deeply involved with technology in one way or another since 1994. I’ve been fortunate enough to learn a lot about where we came from, and so far have been pretty accurate about where we are going.
The redesigned blog here will hopefully allow me to express those thoughts more clearly and publicly.