The end of operating system age

It’s a week from the official launch date of Apple’s latest operating system – Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Snow Leopard is a significant update from technical perspective. If you are Mac developers and IT Pros, you will appreciate Apple’s craftsmanship to operating system. In layman terms, it’s an internal efficiency update.

There are loads of reviews and videos about Snow Leopard. You can check out some of them here:

More interesting to me is the implication of Apple’s move. Why the heck they upgrade the OS without too much compiling new features?

In collage operating system class, operating system is something like this:
Operating System - Computer Chronicles Back to that old days, geeks are cheered and excited by new features like multitasking, ability to support hard drive or address more than 640k RAM. These features all sound ridiculous today. My 2-year-old Macbook Pro has got 256 MB RAM just for the display card. 640 k (1024 k = 1 MB) for the whole system? In today’s standard, this is insanely tiny.

Technologies advance from steam engine to gasoline, to hybrid, to fuel cell… What’s the state of operating system?

Well, I think the golden age of operating system is officially marked to an end on August 28 2009. The moment when the first public received the 30 dollars Snow Leopard disk.

By “end”, I mean OS technologies have come to an age where most essential technologies have been put in practice for surveillance use. It’s no longer the time where there’s still a need to distinguish mainframe, mini-computer and micro-computer. Everyone now has a super computer on their lap be it Windows or Mac.

What’s next? Mobile computing? Pervasive computing? Or…?

Well… think we have to leave that for CEOs and scientists to define. As an indie, software is already in an age of user experience.