Edible Apple

Today’s daily dose of idiocy comes courtesy of Rory Reid writing for CNET UK.  Reid takes the position that Apple’s recent Snow Leopard release has been hobbled to the extent that it may very well be Apple’s version of Vista.

Child, please!

For starters, sales of Snow Leopard have been through the roof.  More specifically, sales of Apple’s latest OS are more than two times as high as Leopard sales were in the weeks after its release, and impressively, four times as high as OS X Tiger when it was first released.

Strong sales aside, Reid postulates a number of reasons why Snow Leopard might be Apple’s Vista, before he presents facts which actually serve to contradict his overarching claim.

For example, Reid argues that much like Vista, Snow Leopard’s requirements are forcing Mac users to upgrade to new machines, and costing them hundreds of dollars in the process.  But before he can even catch his breath, Reid writes:

Believe it or not, it’s possible that an even bigger hardware transition may be required for anyone moving from 10.5 Leopard to 10.6 Snow Leopard, though the backlash has been minimal.

… Snow Leopard is far greedier. It actually refuses to run on any Apple hardware that doesn’t use one of the ‘new’ Intel CPUs introduced circa 2006. Its memory requirements are relatively low at just 1GB, and it actually requires 4GB less disk space than Leopard, but there’s no getting away from the fact: to enjoy Snow Leopard, many Mac users will need to buy an entirely new PC costing hundreds, or even — as is more likely — thousands of pounds.

Ha, okay.  So Snow Leopard presents upgrade problems even though Reid points out that there’s barely been a peep from users over “forced upgrades”.  Not to mention the fact that Snow Leopard’s memory requirements are “relatively low”.  So basically, Reid’s only gripe is that Snow Leopard will only run on Intel CPUs even though there are more users running Mac OS with Intel chips than with PowerPC processors.

If you’re so inclined, you can check out Reid’s article in its entirety over here.