David Mitchell SmithI’ve come to view “software upgrade” as a term that meant, yes, “a software upgrade, but you will really need a hardware upgrade if you hope to actually use it even for what you used to use it for”. Especially with new OS versions. It has been a given that new versions of OSes would drive new hardware sales.
I’m testing today two new OSes – Windows 7 and Apple’s Snow Leopard. I’ve been using prerelease versions of the Microsoft offering for some time and am not surprised to see that it still has the property that it runs much better on the same machines that its predecessor (Vista) did. I had heard that Snow Leopard would have a similar property. But I wanted to see first (it does).
In addition, I recently updated my first generation iPod Touch to the latest OS (3.0).
Every one of these upgrades have given more and better functionality with better performance on the exact same hardware, much of it 2 years old or more.
OK, being better and faster than Vista probably wasn’t that hard to do. And if you talk to Apple a lot of the enhancements in Snow Leopard are designed to clean up the OS to prepare for future enhancements.
The question is: is this all a coincidence and the next upgrades will return to “normal”. Or is there a “New Normal” for upgrades as well? After all, beta doesn’t mean what it used to…
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