Feel free to skip this article and jump right into ordering your copy of Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 right now.

Software developers were extremely bound by the speed of the hardware that their applications were to be deployed on. In many cases, 100′s of man hours were put into optimizing the smallest of features, in order to fit a program into a space of memory that is a smaller than an inexpensive thumb drive.

Those days are over. There is significantly more CPU speed available to users than most will need. Casual web browsing, checking email, and other basic computing tasks take only a fraction of the CPU speed we have available to us. As an example, an iPhone has more CPU power than that of the first generation of iMac’s that began Apple’s return from the abyss of a negative balance sheet.

Why then, with all this seemingly extra CPU speed do applications get slower as time goes on, and not faster? Why does your computer feel slower now that in used to? Two words: “Software Bloat”. What will generally happen, is that version 1 of an application is released; created lean, well designed, with attention to performance being a key thought process for the applications development.

Over time, version 2, 3, 4, and so on are released. Each version takes the existing code, and adds new features to it. Not everyone needs these new features, most in general do not, but in order for the marketing departments to be able to continue to create compelling reasons that convince buyers to purchase their software, progress must be made.

This piling on of new features is not always bad. Yet, in most cases, each new feature is only an opportunity for the software to get slower. It is an opportunity for the software developer to add a new feature that pushes the envelope of what can be done. It may not be well executed, it may not be optimal, but the developer knows that in short time, the next batch of CPU’s will come out, faster than the last, making this new feature perform “good enough” for the time being.

Software developers literally bank on the prospect of computers becoming fast enough to run new features with acceptable performance.

Apple, to the best of my knowledge, did something completely unique to the commercial software industry. They decided “good enough” was not acceptable. Apple released an update to their operating system, that in large part, offered almost no new features.

You may be wondering; why would you want to update to Mac OS X Snow Leopard if there are no new significant new features? Because Apple added in the most important new feature of all. Apple looked over their System 10.5 code, and spent an entire development cycle, doing mostly optimizations.

This means you will not see fancy shiny features; you will not see a whole new set of applications coming from our friends in Cupertino. But it does mean you will feel the performance increase of those optimizations. As an added bonus, you gain a new operating system, one which performs better, yet has very little that you will need to learn or struggle with.

This is what Snow Leopard is for the end user. Little change on the surface, great and significant change under the hood.

That Time Machine backup that used to take 10 minutes, may now take only 2. The file that used to take 10 seconds to compress, now takes 1. The HD video that used to stutter and clip, has a much better chance of playing smoothly.

To add to the unique situation Apple created, they released this operating system as a full operating system. This is not just an upgrade operating system. You need not previously own Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard at all.

For the absurdly low price of $24.99, you essentially get a brand new computer out of the deal. A computer that will run faster on the same hardware you have now. (Please look at the Snow Leopard technical specs to make sure your computer does qualify for the update, as not all do.)

If you already are on Mac OS X Leopard, and you meet the requirements for updating to Snow Leopard, there is no reason to skip this update. Enough time has passed that nearly all applications have been updated to run on Snow Leopard. Time for you to take the plunge! Buy the update, insert the DVD, and run the installer. If the only thing you notice is your machine now starts up in half the time it did previously, over the course of a few months, you easily have saved yourself the $24.99 in your personal time.

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