absent.canadian

I’ve been wondering for the past week while Apple seemed to rush Snow Leopard out the door last week.  Apple enthusiasts like me weren’t complaining, but there are always concerns about being the first on the block to install a new version of an OS.

My normally overzealous enthusiasm was muted.  I spent a good bit of last weekend trying to get Time Machine to work.  There were other odd little quirks like mail.app’s disinclination to show you the contents of the inbox when you first opened mail (in case you’re worried, the mail is there … all you have to do is click on another folder and back to the inbox).

Imagine my surprise last night when I logged into Snow Leopard and saw that an OS upgrade was already available; 10.6.1.

My first reaction was, “good – hopefully this will fix things that should never have been broken”.  But it also got me wondering if Apple should have held off for another week.

Apple – long known for quality products – sells in part because of the perception that their products are trouble-free.  Last week’s upgrade was the 3rd Max OS upgrade I’ve done, and it was by far the most troublesome.

This all comes in rather interesting contrast to Microsoft’s release candidates of Windows 7 that have been surprisingly stable.  Almost always on the butt-end of jokes from Apple owners, Microsoft’s bold (and largely successful) prerelease of Windows 7, and Apple’s premature release of Snow Leopard makes me wonder just what’s going on in Cupertino and Redmond

Snow Leopard-ed, that is.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I bought the second copy of Apple’s new OS X Snow Leopard sold at Crabtree Mall this morning.  I take some small pleasure in the fact that I rarely make a point of being “first in line” for anything … but this time I didn’t want to be the last to know!

The install took just under an hour, and seemed entirely eventless.  My usual desktop came up after the first bootup, and I was left wondering … what changed?

As a software engineer, I appreciate upgrades that work this transparently–and while I’ve never been one to panic when something changes, it’s also nice to see some perceivable value.  The Microsoft Exchange support is nice but largely irrelevant to me.  The new Exposé is nice, but I can’t say that it’ll revolutionize how I do window management.  I was already running Safari 4 …

In fact, the most substantial refinement I can see out-of-the-box is the scrollable stack.  A small thing, but one I’ll appreciate.

Of course, I’m aware that there’s some substantial changes below the surface, and I’m looking forward to testing the performance of Grand Central.

Still – I’m not feeling quite as overwhelmed with awe and excitement as I was when 10.4 and 10.5 came out.