I’m not going to make any retarded predictions, because I’m no time traveler. But I do think there’s an obvious problem that nobody’s noticed yet. There’s two points of view on the topic that I’ve seen championed around the web so far.
First, we see the obvious
No new features!? What is Apple thinking?
This seems rather popular among those who don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, as well as the Microsoft fanbois.
Next, there’re those who say…
They just mean userland features. It’ll be chock-full of little perfectionist tweaks and developer delights!
This is more common among two groups: the developers, who know what they’re talking about, and the Apple fanbois, already preparing their arguments for when they have to justify their purchase of the new OS.
However, I was thinking about it, and there’s a whole third teir to the topic. Yes, there’s tons of non-userland improvements… and that’s great for developers… but that’s largely irrelevant. The developers obviously can’t utilize these features without making their app Snow Leopard only (or at least the improvements that stem from the use of Snow Leopard features won’t work). But users, seeing no userland features, won’t bother upgrading (unless they’re aforementioned fanbois) - and if the users don’t upgrade, then the developer won’t be upgrading his app, because that’s throwing away userbase.
In my humble opinion, Apple should have included at least one or two interesting and useful medium-sized userland features - maybe nothing as big as Exposé or Time Machine, but I’m sure they’ve got some ideas in the thinktank that could have been worked in. This would give users a reason to upgrade; this, along with all their favourite third-party software requiring it, would probably push them over the edge. With more users upgrading, more devs would upgrade, and so on in a cyclical pattern. As it is, I know a lot of people who are planning to wait for the next update with actual useful features.
Oh, and one more thing everybody seems to have missed, that makes all such arguments moot:
They got rid of the Aurora Borealis!
As a hardcore Alaskan, I resent this.