Apple unveiled its Snow Leopard OS — a modified version of OS X — at the recent World Wide Developer’s Conference. It failed to impress the crowd with any new major features, and it actually looks and handles almost exactly like Leopard. In fact, it’s practically useless for most of us right now, so why is it so important? We think it has a lot of potential to significantly influence the future of the PC world in a really, really, really, crazy way.

The New York Times published a piece yesterday detailing how Apple’s new OS will change the way programmers assemble programs for OS X, essentially allowing them to take advantage of more processing cores much more easily. Apple CEO Steve Jobs made this clear on Monday at the conference.

“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”

The company plans to “hit the pause button” on new features for OS X in order to focus on making the engine behind the computing experience much more efficient and streamlined, and in order to do that, they need to also make it easier for programmers to work with the OS and the hardware that it runs on.

Snow Leopard hopes to be just that, and it’s most important feature is known as Grand Central. This is what allows (those) programmers (we all love but seriously under appreciate) to write code that takes advantage of several processor much more easily. Snow Leopard can also use graphics processors in addition to a computer’s normal processor to process data.

Crazy, indeed, and we think this is what’s going to take the computer world to the next level in the same way Intel’s Core Duo processors upped the ante in the processor world. Watch out Microsoft…

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 7:24 am under Apple, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Danny Mendez.
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