Apple released Snow Leopard on Friday. I've been using it for a few weeks now since it was announced to have gone gold. Does it live up to the hype? Wait a minute. What hype? This was the least hyped release of OS X I've ever experienced (I've been a user since 10.2, Jaguar). There is a good reason for that.

Mac OS X 10.6 is an incremental upgrade in many ways. It lacks the boat-load of new features that most Mac users have become accustomed to over the years. We knew for about two years now that this release would be a little anti-climatic. On the other hand, Apple has polished areas of the OS that were already good and turned them into shining beacons of what an OS should be. In short, $29 is a small price to pay for speed, stability and compatibility and that's what you get with Snow Leopard.

The problem is that many Mac users will left out of the Snow with this release being Intel-only. PowerPCs will soon be relegated to the domain of having an obsoleted OS if  you want to stick with OS X. This will enable still somewhat powerful PowerPC-based Macs to be had for pretty cheap giving you some cool hardware to run Linux on. Keep an eye on eBay!

Where does Mac OS X go from here? Will there be a 10.7 or are we finally drawing a line at release 10 point 6 and dreaming up major changes for the next MAJOR release? ZFS as a default filesystem, please. Transparent Windows binary compatibility, please. Some other crazy features that Apple is good at convincing us we always needed but never had, please! I suspect we may hear something about it at next WWDC next June or at least know what direction we're heading.

The time immediately succeeding Mac OS X releases is always interesting because we don't know where we're headed from here. You're usually kept busy by all the new features that are provided in the fresh release, but to be honest, we're not going to be kept busy with Snow Leopard. We're going to smile every now and then by the little quirks and niceties in it, but there isn't really anything that will keep the Apple faithful intrigued over the next few years until the next major release, which I'm hoping to actually be major and not yet another 'minor' version number increment.