You hardly think there’s much anyone can say about Apple’s Snow Leopard that hasn’t been said over and over again, almost to the point of excessiveness in recent days. Starting with the favored members of the media who contributed their words of wisdom, and extending to individual bloggers around the world, it seems almost every respectable publication, and some other than respectable, has had something to say on the subject.

Now it’s a sure thing that a lot of people have been working with Snow Leopard for weeks and perhaps months. That includes Apple’s registered developers and, of course, the folks who wrote books on the subject that have just been released, or will be shortly. So now it can be told, but I won’t spend half this review writing about the features you already know about, or you can find described at Apple’s site in exquisite detail. I don’t believe in wasting your time.

As a cleanup release, Snow Leopard acquits itself nicely, thank you. Unlike most operating system upgrades, which excrete evidence of excessive bloat, Apple decided that it wanted to take stock of the situation, fix what ailed the operating system and build a secure foundation for the future. That, indeed, may take us through to Mac OS 11 and beyond, assuming they all bear the reasonably standard Mac OS numbering scheme.

It’s clear that Apple rethought the installation process carefully, because they’ve refined it to the nth degree. For most of you, all you need do is put the Snow Leopard DVD in your Mac’s drive (or a shared drive if you’re using, for example, a MacBook Air) and, when the disc mounts simply launch the Installer and begin the setup process. The Archive & Install routine that power users demanded is no longer present, although you can still wipe the drive, install Leopard and restore your files via Apple’s Migration Assistant or your preferred backup tool.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

As you may have noticed, Apple has lifted the confidentiality agreements on members of the press who got a somewhat early look at Snow Leopard. So the reviews are now pouring forth and, for the most part, the response is excellent, very much what you’d expect from a release that was actually never represented as a major upgrade.

What might come as a surprise to some, particularly if you’re new to the Mac, is that Apple basically operates on the honor system when it comes to installing a Mac OS X upgrade. You see, there is no horrendously lengthy serial number to enter, and there is no network or online activation procedure that awaits you. There’s no network check either, to determine whether or not two Macs are running a copy with the same license number, since there is no license number.

Yes, a fresh install may end with a brief registration panel, but you send only your basic contact info to Apple; they aren’t going to use it as a gauge to determine just how many copies you’re actually running on your home or business network.

The end result is that Apple expects you to be honest and buy the requisite number of user licenses for your Macs. There are family versions and, via Apple’s enterprise sales channels, business licenses. However, they will not send the software police to your door unless they have evidence of some sort of heavy-duty piracy. Apple trusts you do to the right thing, and since they do not overcharge for their software, most Mac users do just that.

As to the Snow Leopard DVD that ships with the $29 package, it’s a full installer. You don’t have to have Leopard present, and you can restart and erase your hard drive if you prefer a clean installation rather than the standard “in place” upgrade. Even more surprising to some is the fact that you could actually use it to upgrade an Intel-based Mac running Tiger.

Yes, there is a special boxed version for $169 meant for Tiger users, which also includes iLife ’09 and iWork ’09. In essence, you are paying just $11 extra for the addition of Snow Leopard to the bundle. So it essentially makes sense that there is nothing to stop you from avoiding the box and going straight to 10.6. Besides, if you are already running the latest versions of iLife and iWork, Apple still ends up earning an extra $18 in this encounter, when you consider the standard price for the two Apple software suites.

What reviewers are also discovering, to their surprise, is that you usually no longer have to concern yourself with an “Archive and Install” process to assure yourself of a stable upgrade. You can just run the installer and depend on Apple to have figured out how to address most potential installation troubles and be assured everything will proceed without incident. In fact, if you happen to have a power outage during the setup process, you’ll actually be able to pick up where you left off.

You don’t have to concern yourself about the technical niceties either. Indeed, I am already running Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro and 17-inch MacBook Pro. With a somewhat jaundiced eye, my son was skeptical when I suggested he upgrade his black MacBook to 10.6 as well. But his disbelief was short-lived. While he was at work, with his prior approval, I ran the installation; again it was a simple upgrade. When he returned, I asked him if he noticed much of a difference, and the answer was a surprised “no.” That is a good thing.

Looking across the aisle, you just know that Microsoft doesn’t trust anyone. They’ve played nasty tricks on users with versions of Windows and other products that are deemed as improperly activated, and they have so many versions and installation alternatives, the mind boggles. Basically it’s far easier to just buy a new PC preloaded with whatever version of Windows you want and be done with it.

Of course by expecting their customers to be pirates by temperament, Microsoft does a lot to create the appropriate environment. While they will certainly audit businesses for evidence of illegal copies of their software, large numbers of individual users don’t bother with legal copies. Windows piracy is rampant around the world, except for those who have simply given up on that misery and have migrated to Macs or to free alternatives, such as a version of Linux.

Now you are going to be reading articles from some media pundits over the next few months pretending that Windows 7 is a major upgrade, while Snow Leopard is little more than a glorified service pack. The truth is that the term “service pack” applies equally to Windows 7, which is mostly a cleaned up version of Windows Vista with a new name and some interface refinements (or at least changes) to make you believe that it’s actually something new and different.

This is not to say that Windows 7 will necessarily be bad. The people I trust in the tech industry tell me that it’s a pretty usable operating system, and that Microsoft did indeed address many of Vista’s failures. That’s a good thing, since so many companies went for Windows — and it doesn’t matter much why.

However, even a successful Windows 7 launch won’t convince Microsoft to trust their customers. Then again, they also forget that trust is something that has to be earned.

Depending on whom you believe, Apple’s early release of Snow Leopard is either a brilliant marketing stroke or won’t make one bit of difference in the end. What some people forget is that maybe, just maybe, Apple is shipping 10.6 this week because it could. The work was wrapped up, the DVD pressing plants had the capacity and so they went for it.

Now some suggest that this wider window of opportunity will give Apple a change to expend a tremendous amount of money to push Snow Leopard adoption. However, with a $29 purchase price and over a year of advance publicity, I don’t think selling upgrade kits is a major problem; that’s going to take care of itself. Apple’s focus is on selling Macs, and the ones on which Snow Leopard is preloaded are no doubt already on their way to dealers.

What you’re seeing instead is what are essentially two heavy-duty service packs being marketed in diametrically opposed ways, may the better product win.

Now whether or not Snow Leopard arrived early isn’t such a big deal to Apple. After all, the majority of Mac users have already upgraded to Leopard, and the surface differences aren’t vast. Yes, there are highly-touted performance advantages to 10.6, but a lot of that also depends on Mac developers coming out with apps that take advantage of the improved multiprocessor and graphic card features. Having a Cocoa-based Finder doesn’t really do much, if anything, from a visual standpoint. It’s just back-end programming stuff that may impact performance and compatibility, but won’t be obvious to most of you.

The enterprise will be pleased to find a more complete Microsoft Exchange Server experience. As some have observed, Microsoft’s Entourage component of Office for the Mac can be a maddening application to use, and its support for Exchange has never been all that good. True, maybe its successor, Outlook for the Mac, will have more significant features and decent reliability, but having  most of what they need available speedy and reliable apps that come free with the system might be sufficient.

And, besides, Microsoft must be truly enjoying those Apple checks that cover the ActiveSync licenses for Snow Leopard and the iPhone.

In any case, Snow Leopard is a refinement, period. End of story.

When it comes to Windows 7, Microsoft wants to create the fictional message that it’s somehow a major OS upgrade, when it’s really nothing of the sort. In large part, Microsoft is doing to Windows what Apple did to Mac OS X. They are cleaning up many of the rough spots in Vista, making it leaner and meaner, in the hope that more businesses will choose to upgrade from XP.

However, the name Vista carries with it the stench of failure, so Microsoft, in its infinite lack of wisdom, decided the best approach to take was to rename the product. That’s why MSN Search became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. If at first you don’t succeed, call it something else and pretend it is different.

With Windows 7, Microsoft also added some surface fluff to enforce the impression that there is really something new, and their band of fanboys have been polluting the net with loads of puff pieces about how the upgrade is the bee’s knees of operating systems.

Microsoft desperately wants to change history. They want to pretend that maybe Vista never existed, and that they’ve come up with a brand new product that will set the PC world afire.

They surely need some good news. Remember that most Windows 7 sales won’t be for upgrade packs, but to PC makers, who are coming off a serious sales slump and want to move customers past netbooks and other cheap flirtations and back to the gear from which they make real profits.

Oh yes, Microsoft claims that Windows 7 will deliver decent performance on a netbook too, and maybe it will. But I won’t accept fawning reviews of prerelease versions of the OS as evidence that this is true, or close to true. But let’s not forget that the reason so many netbooks ship with Windows XP is because Microsoft has cut prices to the bone. Do they plan to do the same with Windows 7? And if they don’t, are we really going to see a big uptake, or will tens of millions of netbooks still ship with XP until Microsoft shuts the door for once and forever on such practices?

While I realize that businesses can’t suddenly dump millions of PCs and get Macs to replace them, the real question is whether Microsoft can recover all the ground it lost as the result of the Vista debacle. Let’s forget about all the nonsense that spews forth from the mouth of their chief maniac, Steve Ballmer. Will tens of millions of Windows users want to subject themselves to the drudgery of an OS upgrade, or will they be willing to buy a new PC and not downgrade to XP?

That remains Microsoft’s worst nightmare, whereas Apple has little or nothing to worry about when it comes to the Snow Leopard upgrade. It’s already a huge success. Just check the sales charts at Apple’s online store and Amazon.

You just knew that, as soon as Apple announced the actual shipping date for Snow Leopard, some media scribes would come out of the woodwork and deliver their reviews. Only the actual copies of the finished product have yet to reach anyone’s hands, except, perhaps, for a favored few journalists who have already been sent copies by Apple. Thus you wonder just what they are reporting on.

Well, after reading a few of the stories, it’s painfully obvious: They got ahold of a prerelease version, perhaps the one that is rumored to be the Golden Master, and they are providing their stories based on same. Unfortunately, you have to wonder where they got their copies. If they are authors or developers who were seeded by Apple directly, have they been released from their confidentiality agreements prematurely? It would seem unlikely, since the usual methodology is to prohibit such parties from talking about anything other than what’s already public knowledge until the product is actually shipping.

Now it may be that the copies of Snow Leopard in question all came from other sources, so the writers aren’t directly bound by any Apple NDA. Or perhaps I’m just being charitable about the whole thing. At this point, just a few days before millions of Mac users get their copies, perhaps Apple will cut them all some slack in order to get some additional advance publicity. Since we’re in the dog days of summer, and the only other story of note is whether Steve Jobs is really taking a hands-on approach to the rumored Apple tablet computer, any other publicity is good publicity.

In any case, you can be assured that, even though Apple has been pretty descriptive in its online information about Snow Leopard, some Mac sites will somehow get their facts wrong anyway.

I read, for example, a story claiming that, even though PowerPC based Macs couldn’t run Snow Leopard, they’d get all the features anyway. How so? In Leopard? Would Apple suddenly go back to the drawing boards and attempt to graft those 100 or more “enhancements” into 10.5 so people who can’t upgrade won’t lose out? Really?

If Apple could do that in the first place, why dump PowerPC support? Why indeed!

This is a story that surely doesn’t past the logic test, and I can only assume that the author of the piece in question, which shall remain unnamed in the hope it’ll soon be corrected, doesn’t understand what’s really going on or what Apple did to make Snow Leopard leaner and meaner.

You can take this to the bank: There will not be a plain Leopard Finder based on Apple’s Cocoa development environment. There won’t be expanded Exchange Server 2007 support, a faster installation process and a smaller operating system footprint. Apple is not in the business in taking features from new operating system and duplicating them in an old system. Much of the underpinnings of Snow Leopard have been reworked in order to provide many of those new features. Why would Apple charge for Snow Leopard and then give Leopard users the very same thing as a free maintenance update?

At the same time, I expect Apple will continue to deliver security and other critical fixes for Leopard until 10.7 arrives. It’s not at all certain there will be similar support for Tiger, though I expect there will be for a short while.

One thing you can count on: As the uptake to Snow Leopard expands, app developers will ditch regular Leopard support to take advantage of the new features. This is particularly true for software that exercises the limits of your Mac’s processor cores.

As far as PowerPC-based Macs are concerned, there will be a rapidly diminishing selection of new software. Where just building a Universal version presents no compromise, I suppose they’ll continue to appear. But Adobe set the bar here. The next Creative Suite will be all-Intel, and you can probably assume that future major upgrades to QuarkXPress will be as well.

Remember when the PowerPC took over in the mid-1990s? It took a few years for things to settle down and software compatible with older Macs to be phased out. Nowadays, you can expect that a trickle will become a flood almost overnight. Indeed, I’d be extremely surprised of the forthcoming Office 2010 for the Mac isn’t Intel-only. Microsoft may not tell you that now, but there’d be no point in doing otherwise a year or so from now. Do you disagree?

Now I’m not willing to talk about prerelease software either. Why should I look down on the process if I don’t follow my own advice? I will, however, suggest that Snow Leopard is not being rushed to market. There’s no real need to get it out a few weeks early, right? This does mean that, while a 10.6.1 is inevitable, it won’t come quite as quickly, because there will be fewer fires to put out.