« Two from San Francisco | Main | La Table @ Château Restaurant Joël Robuchon »

September 10, 2009

So About that Snow Leopard "No Features" Feature

The Mac cognoscenti are all aflutter, rushing to heap praise on Apple for its daring "no features" Snow Leopard upgrade. There are many articles describing all the cool technical things going on in the background, from OpenCL to Grand Central Dispatch. It's groundbreaking. It's significant. If you only listened to the tech nerds, upgrading is a no-brainer. It's that good.

But I'm curious as to what the adoption rate will be after a few months. Judging from a sample of one, my girlfriend, a typical non-techy user, it won't be too good.

"So, your Macbook has new software (eschewing any technical terms like 'operating system,' or I would lose her right off the bat)."

"What's new about it?" she asked, very reasonably.

"Um... nothing."

A pause as she looked at me like I'm wasting her time.

"Well, not nothing. There are a bunch of little tweaks here and there and it's supposed to be a little faster."

"Nah, I don't need it then," she pronounced. "It's working fine right now, why bother?"

True, by the way.

"Well, it's only US$30."

"Wha?!?? And this costs money? I definitely don't want it then."

"Well, it's good, trust me, let me install it." I insisted. I wanted to see all the hoopla myself (I don't use a Mac). She said fine, whatever, since I'm her one-man I.T. department. So a few days later, I installed it while she was at work.

She looked at it when she came home and said to me, "So? it looks the same."

I started pointing out the small differences here and there and she just shook her head and rolled her eyes at me like I'm a silly, silly boy.

Filed Under: Technology
Tags: mac, osx, snowleopard