Is Apple rushing Snow Leopard out ahead of Windows 7?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, operating systems, Applications, Microsoft, Apple on
Windows 7 is done, but the massive Microsoft machinery is grinding slowly through the process of localising it into multiple languages, burning discs, printing, stuffing and shipping boxes and getting the PC manufacturers on the starting line. Snow Leopard is done and it went on sale on Friday. Does that mean Apple is more nimble - or just in more of a hurry?
Since Snow Leopard went on sale there’s been a flurry of posts and questions - about application compatibility. We knew Snow Leopard itself wouldn’t run on PowerPC Macs because they don’t have the Intel chips that the new features rely on, but unlike Microsoft’s massive app testing and beta program Apple hadn’t been pushing out details about application compatibility. Running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system often causes problems. Apple was prepared for this; the reviewer’s guide says “During installation, Snow Leopard checks your applications for compatibility, and sets aside any incompatible applications that are known to create instability in Snow Leopard” and this page on the Apple support site http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3258 lists a handful of apps that are known to have problems. Most of them are the usual suspects; low-level storage and security software that has to be updated with any operating system release. But a wireless broadband card, or Adobe Director MX 2004? That’s down to a large number of API changes, designed to remove old bugs - but as Microsoft has often found, one developer’s bug is another developer’s feature and fixing it can break an app.
There was quite the snowstorm of discussion at John Nack’s blog about Adobe products and Snow Leopard. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/snow_leopard/ The official policy; CS4 is supported on Mac OS X 10.6, although Version Cue doesn’t work, CS3 isn’t supported. The unofficial line; CS3 “works fine” “to the best of our knowledge”; cue discussion about how long you should support old software on a new platform and whether you should delay creating the Cocoa version of Photoshop to go back and do the testing. But beyond the question of what resources Adobe could or should devote to supporting an OS update when it’s company policy not to put out updates to versions of software it no longer sells, is the question of how much time Apple has spent on testing third-party apps - and how much it could be telling users about potential compatibility issues. Apple certainly works very closely with the Photoshop team and would know about any problems they found (”If we found issues, we worked directly with Apple to get them fixed,” blogged Photoshop quality assurance manager David Howe) but there’s nothing about Version Cue on the support pages.
For Windows 7, Microsoft worked with 45,000 hardware and software developers, from IT departments inside businesses to one-man-bands to the big software and hardware names. There’s a long list of just a proportion of the devices tested at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/10/primer-on-device-support-and-testing-for-windows-7.aspx and when you can actually buy Windows 7, the Windows Upgrade Advisor will be out of beta (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15) - this checks the hardware and software you have installed - the Vista Compatibility Center http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/ will turn into the Windows 7 Compatibility Center where you can look up that Photoshop Album needs a free upgrade to v3.2 and Corel makes you pay to upgrade to Paint Shop Pro X2. We’re still impressed by the range of hardware and software Windows 7 supports; at the end of last week our elderly Elonex Media Center PC picked up a new driver for the Hauppauge TV card that hadn’t worked for years and suddenly offered up 98 Freeview TV and radio channels.
Apple doesn’t give Mac users this level of detail (there’s a list of supported printers and scanners at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669 but nothing official for software), so they’re gathering it informally; check http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ for a long list of apps that do and don’t have problems.
It’s unlikely that any of these application compatibility problems mean that Snow Leopard wasn’t ready to ship. But perhaps Apple isn’t able to test as widely as Microsoft does or perhaps it was so keen to get Snow Leopard on sale to deflate some of the Windows 7 momentum that it didn’t take the time to document the issues. Or is it the back to school market that Apple is chasing, now rather dominated by netbooks (which DisplaySearch now puts at 22% of all personal computers sold)?
-Mary
Rated: 40% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by - September 1, 2009 on 1:07 pm
I’ve given Snow Leopard a good run and it does exactly what it says on the box. Smooth as silk. It is also V.fast with Apple software, switching on and off. I look forward to Adobe upgrading to 64 bit!
I gave up on Microsoft long ago, far too clunky and glitchy!
Roger
Comment by william - September 1, 2009 on 5:15 pm
I have loaded Snow Leopard on 2 computers and have run into the same problem on each: I cannot click on a “group” in the email address book and have it put the full group in the address… it only puts in the first name. I have spoken to Apple Tech Support and have made them aware of this issue.
Comment by Steve Jobs - September 1, 2009 on 6:26 pm
Nice try in trying to bring Snow Leopard down. You can talk about windows being more thorough, but they still don’t have a better OS than Snow leopard.
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