Mac OS X Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7

At this year's WWDC, Apple announced that the next version of its operating system would take a break from introducing new features and focus on performance. They delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more. In an effort to deliver the best users experience, they hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world's most advanced operating system.

 

The OS X update, expected to ship in June 2009, will be optimized for multicore processors and enable up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM. Apple also promised a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X. The update will also offer out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007.

On the other side of the fence, Microsoft has had highly publicized troubles with its Vista operating system. So the first question to Microsoft was whether Windows 7 was a smokescreen for fixing some of the problems with Vista. "No," came the answer, "Service Packs 1 and 2 are fixing things," said Microsoft's Ian Moulster. "This is less about fixing things and more about building on the good stuff. This is about where we go from here."

Touchscreen technology

One major new feature confirmed for Windows 7 is a vastly improved touchscreen support. Taking its cue from the iPhone and the technology from Microsoft Surface, Windows 7 will see the same kind of multitouch gestures applied to the desktop or laptop computer.

In this sense, the ball for touchscreen technology is now very much back in Apple's court. Of course, Apple has the iPhone and has rolled out multitouch technology to the trackpads of its laptops, so in that sense Apple is the leading authority on touch-based input.

Features in Snow Leopard/Windows 7

Even though Apple said that the Snow Leopard was about performance, not new features, some have been announced on Apple's Web site. The first is support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal. OS X Snow Leopard will use the Exchange Web Services protocol to provide access to Exchange 2007 on your Mac.

Microsoft took the time to explain some new features of Windows 7 to us. There have been a couple of user interface enhancements. You can now resize Windows by dragging them to edges of the screen. Top to maximize, bottom to minimize, and dragging to the left or right automatically resizes to half the display.

Another new feature set is something called Home Group that makes it easier for multiple users on a network to search each other's hard drive. As we haven't seen this feature in action we had difficulty visualizing it, it in effect sounds very similar to current functionality found in both OS X and Vista.

System Requirements and Release Dates

Snow Leopard is largely designed to take advantage of multicore Intel processors, and to that end we expect it to require a Mac with an Intel processor (so that leaves all G5 and earlier computers on the regular version of Leopard). Based upon leaked system requirements, Snow Leopard is expected to work on all Intel-based Macs.

Windows 7 would largely have the same system requirements as Windows Vista. Neither operating system is designed for the next generation of computers, but rather to make the most out of the current generation.

Interestingly, neither Snow Leopard or Windows 7 appear designed to scale down to work effectively on the new generation of netbooks. Similarly, Windows 7 is not designed to scale down to the performance of netbooks, which currently run either Linux or Windows XP.

As for the actual release date, Snow Leopard is expected to be seen on sale in June 2009.

The release date for Windows 7 is a little more unclear.