1) Nature versus Nurture. His sister is Mona Simpson but he didn’t know it until he was an adult. Mona Simpson was one of my favorite novelists from the late 80s. Her first novel, Anywhere but Here, was about her relationship with her parents. Which, ironically, was Steve Jobs parents. But since Steve Jobs was adopted (see below) they didn’t know they were brother-sister until the ’90s when he tracked her down. It’s proof (to an extent) of the nature versus nurture argument. Two kids, without knowing they were brother and sister, both having a unique sensibility of life on this planet to become among the best artists in the world in completely different endeavors. And, to me it was great that I was a fan of both without realizing (even before they realized) that they were related.

2) His father’s name is Abdulfattah Jandali. If you had to ask me what Steve Job’s father’s name was I never in one zillion years would’ve guessed that, and that Steve Jobs biologically was half Syrian Muslim. For some reason I thought he was Jewish. Maybe it’s because I wanted to be him so I projected my own background onto him. His parents were two graduate students who I guess weren’t sure if they were ready for a kid so put him up for adoption and then a few years later had another kid (see above). So I didn’t know he was adopted. The one requirement his biological parents had was that he be adopted by two college educated people. But the couple that adopted him lied at first and turned out not to be college educated (the mom was not a high school graduate) so the deal almost fell through until they promised to send Steve to college. A promise they couldn’t keep (see below). So despite many layers of lies and promises broken, it all worked out in the end. People can save a lot of hassle by not having such high expectations and overly ambitious worries in the first place.

3) He made the game  “Breakout”. If there was one thing I loved almost as much as the games on the Apple II+ it was playing Breakout on my first-generation Atari (I can’t remember, was that the Atari 2600?), and then Breakout on every version of my Blackberry since 2000. If he had never done anything else in life and I had met him and he said, “I’m the guy who made Breakout”, I would’ve said, “you are the greatest genius of the past 100 years.” Funny how things turn out. He went on from Atari to form Apple. Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, went on to form the greatest restaurant chain in the history of mankind: Chuck E. Cheese.

4) He denied paternity on his first child, claiming he was sterile. The mother had to initially raise the kid using welfare checks. I have no judgment on this at all. Raising kids is hard. And when you have a kid you feel like this enormous energy and creativity you have for the world is going to get misdirected into a… little baby (Jobs’ parents must’ve felt that way as well. Like father, like son). Heck, I originally wanted my first kid to be aborted. But people change, mature, grow up. Eventually Jobs became a good father. And that’s what counts in the end. Much worse if it was the reverse. I didn’t know this either: that the Lisa computer (the “Apple III”) was named after this first child.

5) He’s a pescetarian. In other words, he eats fish but no other meat. And he eats anything else a vegetarian eats (including eggs and dairy). Turns out if you compare pescetarians with regular meat-eaters they have a 34% less chance of dying of heart disease. And if you compare vegetarians with meat eaters, they only have a 20% less chance of dying of heart disease. I think from now on I’m going to be a pescetarian, just because Steve Jobs is one. Except when I’m in Argentina. In Argentina you have to eat steak. Ted Danson and Mary Tyler Moore consider themselves pescetarians. Somehow, even the word “pescetarian” seems like it was invented in California.

6) He doesn’t give any money to charity. And when he became Apple’s CEO he stopped all of their philanthropic programs. He said, “wait until we are profitable”. Now they are profitable, and sitting on $40bb cash, and still no corporate philanthropy. I actually think Jobs is probably the most charitable guy on the planet. Rather than focus on which mosquitoes to kill in Africa (Bill Gates is already focusing on that), Jobs has put his energy into massively improving quality of life with all of his inventions. People think that entrepreneurs have to some day “give back.” This is not true. They already gave at the office. Look at the entire iPod/Mac/iPhone/Disney ecosystem and ask how many lives have benefited directly (because they’ve been hired) or indirectly (because they use the products to improve their quality of life). As far as I know, Jobs has never even commented about his thoughts on charity. Good for him. As one CEO of a (currently) Fortune 10 company once told me when I had my hand out for a charitable website,  “Screw charity!”

7) He lied to Steve Wozniak. When they made Breakout for Atari, Wozniak and Jobs were going to split the pay 50-50. Atari gave Jobs $5000 to do the job. He told Wozniak he got $700 so Wozniak took home $350. Again, no judgment. Young people do things. Show me someone who says he’s been honest from the day he was born and I’ll show you a liar. It’s by making mistakes, having fights, finding out where your real boundaries in life are, that allow you to truly know where the boundaries are.

He’s a Zen Buddhist. He even thought about joining a monastery and becoming a monk. His guru, a Zen monk, married him and his wife. When I was going through some of my hardest times my only relief was sitting with a Zen group. Trying to quiet the mind to deal with the onrush of non-stop pain that was trying to invade there. The interesting thing about Jobs being a Zen Buddhist is that most people would think that serious Buddhism and being one of the wealthiest people in the world come into conflict with each other. Isn’t Buddhism about non-attachment? Didn’t Buddha himself leave his riches and family behind?

But the answer is “no.” It’s normal to pursue passions and outcomes, but just not to become overly attached to those outcomes. Being happy regardless of the outcome. A great story is the Zen master and his student walking by a river. A prostitute was there and needed to be carried over the river. The Zen master picked her up and carried her across the river and then put her down. Then the master and student kept walking. A few hours later the student was so agitated he finally had to ask, “Master, how could you touch and help that prostitute! That’s against what we believe in!” And the Master said, “I left her by the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

9) He didn’t go to college. I actually didn’t know this initially. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the famous college graduates that I knew about. But apparently Steve Jobs went to Reed College for one semester and then dropped out.  Guess you don’t need college to program computers, make computers, build businesses, make movies, manage people, etc.  (Of course, you can see all my other posts on why kids should not go to college.)

10) Psychedelics. Steve Jobs used LSD at least once when he was younger. In fact, he said about the experience, it was “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”  Apple’s slogan for many years was “Think Different.” Maybe using a drug which tore him from the normal frame of reference taught him how to look at problems from such a unique perspective. I don’t think LSD is for everyone, but when you combine it with the innate genius the man had, plus the many ups and downs that he experienced, plus the Zen Buddhism and all of the other things above, it’s quite possible it all adds up to the many inventions he’s been able to produce.

Steve Jobs’ story is filled with nuance and ambiguity. People study Steve Jobs by looking at his straightforward business successes. Yes, he started Apple in a garage. Yes, he started Pixar and almost went broke with it. Yes, he started and sold NeXT and he was fired as CEO of Apple, and blah blah blah. But none of that will ever explain the man behind the genius. None of that will explain all the products he invented that we use today. None of that will tell us about the iPad, Toy Story, the Mac Air, the Apple II+, etc. A man’s successes can be truly understood only if we can count his tears. And unfortunately in the case of Steve Jobs, that is one task that’s impossible.

Source: Businessinsider

1) Nature versus Nurture. His sister is Mona Simpson but he didn’t know it until he was an adult. Mona Simpson was one of my favorite novelists from the late 80s. Her first novel, Anywhere but Here, was about her relationship with her parents. Which, ironically, was Steve Jobs parents. But since Steve Jobs was adopted (see below) they didn’t know they were brother-sister until the ’90s when he tracked her down. It’s proof (to an extent) of the nature versus nurture argument. Two kids, without knowing they were brother and sister, both having a unique sensibility of life on this planet to become among the best artists in the world in completely different endeavors. And, to me it was great that I was a fan of both without realizing (even before they realized) that they were related.

2) His father’s name is Abdulfattah Jandali. If you had to ask me what Steve Job’s father’s name was I never in one zillion years would’ve guessed that, and that Steve Jobs biologically was half Syrian Muslim. For some reason I thought he was Jewish. Maybe it’s because I wanted to be him so I projected my own background onto him. His parents were two graduate students who I guess weren’t sure if they were ready for a kid so put him up for adoption and then a few years later had another kid (see above). So I didn’t know he was adopted. The one requirement his biological parents had was that he be adopted by two college educated people. But the couple that adopted him lied at first and turned out not to be college educated (the mom was not a high school graduate) so the deal almost fell through until they promised to send Steve to college. A promise they couldn’t keep (see below). So despite many layers of lies and promises broken, it all worked out in the end. People can save a lot of hassle by not having such high expectations and overly ambitious worries in the first place.

3) He made the game  “Breakout”. If there was one thing I loved almost as much as the games on the Apple II+ it was playing Breakout on my first-generation Atari (I can’t remember, was that the Atari 2600?), and then Breakout on every version of my Blackberry since 2000. If he had never done anything else in life and I had met him and he said, “I’m the guy who made Breakout”, I would’ve said, “you are the greatest genius of the past 100 years.” Funny how things turn out. He went on from Atari to form Apple. Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, went on to form the greatest restaurant chain in the history of mankind: Chuck E. Cheese.

4) He denied paternity on his first child, claiming he was sterile. The mother had to initially raise the kid using welfare checks. I have no judgment on this at all. Raising kids is hard. And when you have a kid you feel like this enormous energy and creativity you have for the world is going to get misdirected into a… little baby (Jobs’ parents must’ve felt that way as well. Like father, like son). Heck, I originally wanted my first kid to be aborted. But people change, mature, grow up. Eventually Jobs became a good father. And that’s what counts in the end. Much worse if it was the reverse. I didn’t know this either: that the Lisa computer (the “Apple III”) was named after this first child.

5) He’s a pescetarian. In other words, he eats fish but no other meat. And he eats anything else a vegetarian eats (including eggs and dairy). Turns out if you compare pescetarians with regular meat-eaters they have a 34% less chance of dying of heart disease. And if you compare vegetarians with meat eaters, they only have a 20% less chance of dying of heart disease. I think from now on I’m going to be a pescetarian, just because Steve Jobs is one. Except when I’m in Argentina. In Argentina you have to eat steak. Ted Danson and Mary Tyler Moore consider themselves pescetarians. Somehow, even the word “pescetarian” seems like it was invented in California.

6) He doesn’t give any money to charity. And when he became Apple’s CEO he stopped all of their philanthropic programs. He said, “wait until we are profitable”. Now they are profitable, and sitting on $40bb cash, and still no corporate philanthropy. I actually think Jobs is probably the most charitable guy on the planet. Rather than focus on which mosquitoes to kill in Africa (Bill Gates is already focusing on that), Jobs has put his energy into massively improving quality of life with all of his inventions. People think that entrepreneurs have to some day “give back.” This is not true. They already gave at the office. Look at the entire iPod/Mac/iPhone/Disney ecosystem and ask how many lives have benefited directly (because they’ve been hired) or indirectly (because they use the products to improve their quality of life). As far as I know, Jobs has never even commented about his thoughts on charity. Good for him. As one CEO of a (currently) Fortune 10 company once told me when I had my hand out for a charitable website,  “Screw charity!”

7) He lied to Steve Wozniak. When they made Breakout for Atari, Wozniak and Jobs were going to split the pay 50-50. Atari gave Jobs $5000 to do the job. He told Wozniak he got $700 so Wozniak took home $350. Again, no judgment. Young people do things. Show me someone who says he’s been honest from the day he was born and I’ll show you a liar. It’s by making mistakes, having fights, finding out where your real boundaries in life are, that allow you to truly know where the boundaries are.

He’s a Zen Buddhist. He even thought about joining a monastery and becoming a monk. His guru, a Zen monk, married him and his wife. When I was going through some of my hardest times my only relief was sitting with a Zen group. Trying to quiet the mind to deal with the onrush of non-stop pain that was trying to invade there. The interesting thing about Jobs being a Zen Buddhist is that most people would think that serious Buddhism and being one of the wealthiest people in the world come into conflict with each other. Isn’t Buddhism about non-attachment? Didn’t Buddha himself leave his riches and family behind?

But the answer is “no.” It’s normal to pursue passions and outcomes, but just not to become overly attached to those outcomes. Being happy regardless of the outcome. A great story is the Zen master and his student walking by a river. A prostitute was there and needed to be carried over the river. The Zen master picked her up and carried her across the river and then put her down. Then the master and student kept walking. A few hours later the student was so agitated he finally had to ask, “Master, how could you touch and help that prostitute! That’s against what we believe in!” And the Master said, “I left her by the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

9) He didn’t go to college. I actually didn’t know this initially. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the famous college graduates that I knew about. But apparently Steve Jobs went to Reed College for one semester and then dropped out.  Guess you don’t need college to program computers, make computers, build businesses, make movies, manage people, etc.  (Of course, you can see all my other posts on why kids should not go to college.)

10) Psychedelics. Steve Jobs used LSD at least once when he was younger. In fact, he said about the experience, it was “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”  Apple’s slogan for many years was “Think Different.” Maybe using a drug which tore him from the normal frame of reference taught him how to look at problems from such a unique perspective. I don’t think LSD is for everyone, but when you combine it with the innate genius the man had, plus the many ups and downs that he experienced, plus the Zen Buddhism and all of the other things above, it’s quite possible it all adds up to the many inventions he’s been able to produce.

Steve Jobs’ story is filled with nuance and ambiguity. People study Steve Jobs by looking at his straightforward business successes. Yes, he started Apple in a garage. Yes, he started Pixar and almost went broke with it. Yes, he started and sold NeXT and he was fired as CEO of Apple, and blah blah blah. But none of that will ever explain the man behind the genius. None of that will explain all the products he invented that we use today. None of that will tell us about the iPad, Toy Story, the Mac Air, the Apple II+, etc. A man’s successes can be truly understood only if we can count his tears. And unfortunately in the case of Steve Jobs, that is one task that’s impossible.

Source: Businessinsider

In one of its brilliant “I’m a Mac” ads recently, Apple lampooned the complexity of Microsoft Windows with a dizzying display of fine print that eventually filled up the screen and covered up both characters.

I thought of that ad when I saw Apple’s recent announcement that it was going to make its next Mac OS X upgrade, Snow Leopard, available as a $29 upgrade. That sounds so much better than the broad range of prices that Microsoft is going to charge its customers for Windows 7 upgrades. Too bad the $29 upgrade is not that simple. In fact, according to my analysis of Apple’s own sales figures, 57% of Apple’s customers who bought and paid for new Macs in the past five years are ineligible for those cheap upgrades.

That hasn’t stopped casual observers and even some seasoned analysts from falling for Apple’s ruse. Michael Gartenberg, for example, issued this critique in response to Microsoft’s announcement of Windows 7 pricing:

Apple showed the way. Snow Leopard is also not [a] major update but rather an enhanced version of Leopard. With an upgrade price of $29, that’s about where MSFT should be for the Home Premium version of 7…

Yes, $29 for an OS upgrade sounds like a great deal, if you qualify. But do you? I looked at the fine print for this offer, and was shocked—shocked, I tell you—to discover that the majority of Mac owners don’t qualify for that pricing. In fact, a significant number of Mac owners won’t be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard at any price.

Details after the jump.

According to Microsoft, roughly 90% of Windows users purchase the operating system preinstalled with a new PC. And if you ignore the Hackintosh crowd, 100% of Mac owners purchase OS X with a new Mac. Any PC purchased with Windows XP or Windows Vista since October 2001 qualifies for a discounted upgrade to Windows 7, for a price as low as $50. But only a select group of Mac owners qualify for those $29 upgrades. A large number will have to pay $169 for the privilege of installing Snow Leopard, and another large group of Apple customers won’t be able to install Snow Leopard at all.

So where do you stand? Find the date when you bought a new PC or Mac and look in the table below. The Windows 7 numbers represent the cost of a Home Premium upgrade, which will be available for the next two weeks for $50 and then will be set at an estimated retail price of $120 after the OS ships on October 22. The upgrade cost is $0 from June 26, 2009 to January 31, 2010, thanks to Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Option program.

Both Microsoft and Apple have announced technology guarantee programs for new PCs or Macs ordered before the new OS comes out. The Mac program starts on June 8, Microsoft’s program on June 26.

Apple’s core market for the $29 upgrade is its most loyal group of hardware buyers, who’ve already paid their “Apple tax” at the highest marginal rate. You qualify for that $29 upgrade price if you are one of the 15 million or so people who spent $1000 or more for a new Mac in the past 21 months. (Yes, I’m leaving out the Mac Mini, which sells for under a grand but represents a minuscule fraction of Apple’s sales—less than 7% according to one analyst’s rough estimate.) Any Mac purchased after October 1, 2007 satisfies the upgrade criteria: an Intel-based system running Mac OS X version 10.5 (Leopard).

Some most important Comparison

Price/Availability

Snow Leopard socks Windows 7 on both counts here: It's shipping in September for just $29. Windows 7 doesn't hit until Oct. 22, and we've heard it could be pricier than Vista, though it will, on the other hand, be cheaper for people who already have Vista. Nowhere near $29, we bet, but we can dream, can't we?

Storage Footprint

Both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are engineered to gobble less of your hard drive than their predecessors. Snow Leopard promises to give you back 6GB of storage—cutting out all the code for PowerPC-based Macs helped a lot there. Microsoft isn't touting how much extra space you'll have with Windows 7 vs. Vista, but an earlier version of Windows 7 used about 6GB of space, and they've been thinking about ways to make drivers take up less space.

If it says anything though, Snow Leopard requires 5GB of free disk space, while Windows 7 has a minimum recommended requirement of 16GB for the 32-bit OS and 20GB for the 64-bit OS—Microsoft doesn't put out absolute bare minimums, though the footprint seems to be about 6-8GB for Windows 7.

Startup/Shutdown/Sleep

Windows 7 smoked Vista with sub-30-second startup times, and RC1 is even faster. Shutdowns are quicker too. We had problems with sleep in the beta release, but it still seemed better than Vista, if not faster. Apple doesn't pimp a specific improvement in startup time, but promises doubletime wakeups and 1.75x faster shutdowns than Leopard.

64-bit

Windows 7 will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors—it's up to you to pick the right one (hint: 64-bit). The majority of Windows 7 install will likely be 64-bit—since you don't have to worry about compatibility issues as much as with Vista 64, and people are starting to want 4GB or more of RAM—so we're at a tipping point there. Snow Leopard will also more or less finish up OS X's transition to 64-bit, so it's something Apple's pushing hard as well.

Multicore Parallel Processing Powah

Some of the tweaks that Microsoft is making to the core of Windows 7 are to improve parallel processing—in short, using multiple cores to handle more simultaneous tasks than past versions of Windows. But these multicore-optimizing tweaks don't seem as extensive as Apple's parallel processing plans in Snow Leopard, headlined by what it calls Grand Central Dispatch.

What's key about GCD is that if it works like Apple says, it'll make easy for app developers to use multiple cores by handling threading for the programmers. The trick these says isn't the hardware, it's the software—the software tools that enable programmers to actually use multicore technology. (Just look back at our interview with Intel chair Craig Barrett, who explained why Intel hires more software engineers than hardware guys at this point.)

GPGPU—Processing Powah Continued

Again, since Snow Leopard is all about the plumbing, Apple's being the loudest about how they plan to tap your graphics card for even more processing power. Using the OpenCL language, programmers can more easily tap the hundreds of cores lurking inside of your graphics card for applications that might have nothing to do with graphics. OpenCL is a big part of Snow Leopard, if you haven't noticed. Snow Leopard will also use your graphics card for H.264 video acceleration (for smoother playback without overheating the CPU), if you've got a newer Mac with an Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset.

Windows 7 also uses graphics cards more smartly than Vista—it has native GPU-accelerated transcoding and some other refinements in the graphics programming. But its big GPGPU push we'll see a bit later when DirectX 11 launches in July.

Browser: Do You Want to Explore or Go on Safari?

Sorry guys, there's not much of a contest here: Internet Explorer 8 is by far the best browser Microsoft has ever shipped, but when you consider it needs a compatibility list for all the sites coded for IE's past shittiness, the real modern web standards support in Safari 4 gives this one to Safari without even considering the other features. It's also wildly better than IE8 at handling JavaScript, which is pretty key in the age of web apps.

Networking

Networking is waaaaaaaay better in Windows 7 than it was in Vista—you can actually get to wireless networking with fewer than seventeen clicks, and the networking UI makes more sense. It also seems to be a little smarter at finding stuff on your network, at least in our experience. We're still not totally sold on HomeGroups, but hey, Microsoft's trying. And (sorta) easy remote streaming built into the OS? Pretty good.

Apple's not really promoting any changes to networking in Snow Leopard beyond the metric that it's 1.55 times faster at joining networks than Leopard it's got more efficient filesharing. You could argue networking in Leopard didn't need to be reworked—it was definitely better than Vista's—but really, networking is one of those things that's still not easy to understand for regular people in either OS.

How Long's Your Battery Gonna Last?

Windows 7 supposedly improves notebook battery life by a minimum of 11 percent. On the Snow Leopard front, well, um, all of the new Macs have much bigger batteries? Since Apple didn't drop a slide at WWDC telling the whole world, we can presume there isn't any benefit.

So Much Media Playing

Windows Media Player will handle pretty much any kind of mainstream video or audio format you throw at it, be it H.264, Divx, Xvid or AAC. The UI is better too, but it still kinda sucks 'cause it's trying to do too much (kind of like iTunes nowadays). But it has a few pretty great tricks, like "Play To," that'll command any compatible device on your network and stream stuff to it by way of the newest DLNA standard. Not to mention it'll natively stream your whole library over the internets to anywhere. Oh yeah, and Windows Media Center still rocks.

Apple doesn't get too specific on whether or not QuickTime X can now handle a broader range of formats with its fancy new logo, just that it'll play "the latest modern media formats" like H.264 and AAC even more betterer. It's also got a pretty classy new UI and supports graphics-accelerated playback (mentioned above). But maybe the best new feature is built-in video recording and trimming.

If all this talk of video codecs and file formats is confusing, read our (hopefully) helpful guide on the subject.

Backgrounds

Have you seen Windows 7 acid-trip backgrounds? Incredible. What's Snow Leopard got? Some stupid purple star thing. Apple background designers needs more drugs, plz.

Backup/Backup Time

Time Machine is simply awesome because it's so incredibly easy to use and implement. It's 50 percent faster in Snow Leopard. Our only gripe is that it's still all or nothing—a few built-in scheduling and content preferences wouldn't hurt. Windows Backup and Restore is definitely improved in Windows 7, with finer control over backups and descriptions actually written in English.

Dock vs. Taskbar Round 3

Oh, this is a contentious one. We think Windows 7's taskbar is pretty damn excellent and even said that it was useful than OS X's dock thanks to Aero Peek, which lets you find any window in any app smoothly and instantly. Jump lists, which give you quick access to common functions right from the taskbar icon, were also a nice touch. In short, with these features and stuff like Aero Snap, more usable previews, and Aero Peek mixing it up with Alt+Tab, Windows 7 has the best UI of any Windows yet.

Snow Leopard's UI is mostly the same, but it manages to improve on one of its best features—Exposé—and the Dock at the same time. You can actually do a whole lot more stuff from the Dock now, so you can easily drop files in whatever app window you want to. Exposé, my "I would die without it" feature in Leopard, now arranges windows in a neat grid, rather than scattering them across whatever space is available. Stacks is actually useful now too, since they're scrollable and you can look in folders within stacks in Snow Leopard.

Exchange Support

Snow Leopard's got it built-in, your copy of Windows 7 doesn't. Freaky but true.

Overall Snap Crack and Pop

Both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are designed to be faster, leaner, stronger and more stable than the OSes they're building on. Windows 7 is markedly more responsive, and you simply feel like you're more in control. We'll have to see with Snow Leopard, but if it lives up to Apple's promises, we're definitely looking forward to the performance prowess.

There' s a whole lot that goes into deciding whether you're a Mac or PC, but whatever one you pick, you definitely won't go wrong upgrading your OS this fall.

 Check out Celebrities for a Good Cause: Pamela Anderson does for a good cause ‘Save the Seal’ – PETA  – Celebrity Fashion Watcher.

In one of its brilliant “I’m a Mac” ads recently, Apple lampooned the complexity of Microsoft Windows with a dizzying display of fine print that eventually filled up the screen and covered up both characters.

I thought of that ad when I saw Apple’s recent announcement that it was going to make its next Mac OS X upgrade, Snow Leopard, available as a $29 upgrade. That sounds so much better than the broad range of prices that Microsoft is going to charge its customers for Windows 7 upgrades. Too bad the $29 upgrade is not that simple. In fact, according to my analysis of Apple’s own sales figures, 57% of Apple’s customers who bought and paid for new Macs in the past five years are ineligible for those cheap upgrades.

That hasn’t stopped casual observers and even some seasoned analysts from falling for Apple’s ruse. Michael Gartenberg, for example, issued this critique in response to Microsoft’s announcement of Windows 7 pricing:

Apple showed the way. Snow Leopard is also not [a] major update but rather an enhanced version of Leopard. With an upgrade price of $29, that’s about where MSFT should be for the Home Premium version of 7…

Yes, $29 for an OS upgrade sounds like a great deal, if you qualify. But do you? I looked at the fine print for this offer, and was shocked—shocked, I tell you—to discover that the majority of Mac owners don’t qualify for that pricing. In fact, a significant number of Mac owners won’t be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard at any price.

Details after the jump.

According to Microsoft, roughly 90% of Windows users purchase the operating system preinstalled with a new PC. And if you ignore the Hackintosh crowd, 100% of Mac owners purchase OS X with a new Mac. Any PC purchased with Windows XP or Windows Vista since October 2001 qualifies for a discounted upgrade to Windows 7, for a price as low as $50. But only a select group of Mac owners qualify for those $29 upgrades. A large number will have to pay $169 for the privilege of installing Snow Leopard, and another large group of Apple customers won’t be able to install Snow Leopard at all.

So where do you stand? Find the date when you bought a new PC or Mac and look in the table below. The Windows 7 numbers represent the cost of a Home Premium upgrade, which will be available for the next two weeks for $50 and then will be set at an estimated retail price of $120 after the OS ships on October 22. The upgrade cost is $0 from June 26, 2009 to January 31, 2010, thanks to Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Option program.

Both Microsoft and Apple have announced technology guarantee programs for new PCs or Macs ordered before the new OS comes out. The Mac program starts on June 8, Microsoft’s program on June 26.

Apple’s core market for the $29 upgrade is its most loyal group of hardware buyers, who’ve already paid their “Apple tax” at the highest marginal rate. You qualify for that $29 upgrade price if you are one of the 15 million or so people who spent $1000 or more for a new Mac in the past 21 months. (Yes, I’m leaving out the Mac Mini, which sells for under a grand but represents a minuscule fraction of Apple’s sales—less than 7% according to one analyst’s rough estimate.) Any Mac purchased after October 1, 2007 satisfies the upgrade criteria: an Intel-based system running Mac OS X version 10.5 (Leopard).

Some most important Comparison

Price/Availability

Snow Leopard socks Windows 7 on both counts here: It's shipping in September for just $29. Windows 7 doesn't hit until Oct. 22, and we've heard it could be pricier than Vista, though it will, on the other hand, be cheaper for people who already have Vista. Nowhere near $29, we bet, but we can dream, can't we?

Storage Footprint

Both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are engineered to gobble less of your hard drive than their predecessors. Snow Leopard promises to give you back 6GB of storage—cutting out all the code for PowerPC-based Macs helped a lot there. Microsoft isn't touting how much extra space you'll have with Windows 7 vs. Vista, but an earlier version of Windows 7 used about 6GB of space, and they've been thinking about ways to make drivers take up less space.

If it says anything though, Snow Leopard requires 5GB of free disk space, while Windows 7 has a minimum recommended requirement of 16GB for the 32-bit OS and 20GB for the 64-bit OS—Microsoft doesn't put out absolute bare minimums, though the footprint seems to be about 6-8GB for Windows 7.

Startup/Shutdown/Sleep

Windows 7 smoked Vista with sub-30-second startup times, and RC1 is even faster. Shutdowns are quicker too. We had problems with sleep in the beta release, but it still seemed better than Vista, if not faster. Apple doesn't pimp a specific improvement in startup time, but promises doubletime wakeups and 1.75x faster shutdowns than Leopard.

64-bit

Windows 7 will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors—it's up to you to pick the right one (hint: 64-bit). The majority of Windows 7 install will likely be 64-bit—since you don't have to worry about compatibility issues as much as with Vista 64, and people are starting to want 4GB or more of RAM—so we're at a tipping point there. Snow Leopard will also more or less finish up OS X's transition to 64-bit, so it's something Apple's pushing hard as well.

Multicore Parallel Processing Powah

Some of the tweaks that Microsoft is making to the core of Windows 7 are to improve parallel processing—in short, using multiple cores to handle more simultaneous tasks than past versions of Windows. But these multicore-optimizing tweaks don't seem as extensive as Apple's parallel processing plans in Snow Leopard, headlined by what it calls Grand Central Dispatch.

What's key about GCD is that if it works like Apple says, it'll make easy for app developers to use multiple cores by handling threading for the programmers. The trick these says isn't the hardware, it's the software—the software tools that enable programmers to actually use multicore technology. (Just look back at our interview with Intel chair Craig Barrett, who explained why Intel hires more software engineers than hardware guys at this point.)

GPGPU—Processing Powah Continued

Again, since Snow Leopard is all about the plumbing, Apple's being the loudest about how they plan to tap your graphics card for even more processing power. Using the OpenCL language, programmers can more easily tap the hundreds of cores lurking inside of your graphics card for applications that might have nothing to do with graphics. OpenCL is a big part of Snow Leopard, if you haven't noticed. Snow Leopard will also use your graphics card for H.264 video acceleration (for smoother playback without overheating the CPU), if you've got a newer Mac with an Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset.

Windows 7 also uses graphics cards more smartly than Vista—it has native GPU-accelerated transcoding and some other refinements in the graphics programming. But its big GPGPU push we'll see a bit later when DirectX 11 launches in July.

Browser: Do You Want to Explore or Go on Safari?

Sorry guys, there's not much of a contest here: Internet Explorer 8 is by far the best browser Microsoft has ever shipped, but when you consider it needs a compatibility list for all the sites coded for IE's past shittiness, the real modern web standards support in Safari 4 gives this one to Safari without even considering the other features. It's also wildly better than IE8 at handling JavaScript, which is pretty key in the age of web apps.

Networking

Networking is waaaaaaaay better in Windows 7 than it was in Vista—you can actually get to wireless networking with fewer than seventeen clicks, and the networking UI makes more sense. It also seems to be a little smarter at finding stuff on your network, at least in our experience. We're still not totally sold on HomeGroups, but hey, Microsoft's trying. And (sorta) easy remote streaming built into the OS? Pretty good.

Apple's not really promoting any changes to networking in Snow Leopard beyond the metric that it's 1.55 times faster at joining networks than Leopard it's got more efficient filesharing. You could argue networking in Leopard didn't need to be reworked—it was definitely better than Vista's—but really, networking is one of those things that's still not easy to understand for regular people in either OS.

How Long's Your Battery Gonna Last?

Windows 7 supposedly improves notebook battery life by a minimum of 11 percent. On the Snow Leopard front, well, um, all of the new Macs have much bigger batteries? Since Apple didn't drop a slide at WWDC telling the whole world, we can presume there isn't any benefit.

So Much Media Playing

Windows Media Player will handle pretty much any kind of mainstream video or audio format you throw at it, be it H.264, Divx, Xvid or AAC. The UI is better too, but it still kinda sucks 'cause it's trying to do too much (kind of like iTunes nowadays). But it has a few pretty great tricks, like "Play To," that'll command any compatible device on your network and stream stuff to it by way of the newest DLNA standard. Not to mention it'll natively stream your whole library over the internets to anywhere. Oh yeah, and Windows Media Center still rocks.

Apple doesn't get too specific on whether or not QuickTime X can now handle a broader range of formats with its fancy new logo, just that it'll play "the latest modern media formats" like H.264 and AAC even more betterer. It's also got a pretty classy new UI and supports graphics-accelerated playback (mentioned above). But maybe the best new feature is built-in video recording and trimming.

If all this talk of video codecs and file formats is confusing, read our (hopefully) helpful guide on the subject.

Backgrounds

Have you seen Windows 7 acid-trip backgrounds? Incredible. What's Snow Leopard got? Some stupid purple star thing. Apple background designers needs more drugs, plz.

Backup/Backup Time

Time Machine is simply awesome because it's so incredibly easy to use and implement. It's 50 percent faster in Snow Leopard. Our only gripe is that it's still all or nothing—a few built-in scheduling and content preferences wouldn't hurt. Windows Backup and Restore is definitely improved in Windows 7, with finer control over backups and descriptions actually written in English.

Dock vs. Taskbar Round 3

Oh, this is a contentious one. We think Windows 7's taskbar is pretty damn excellent and even said that it was useful than OS X's dock thanks to Aero Peek, which lets you find any window in any app smoothly and instantly. Jump lists, which give you quick access to common functions right from the taskbar icon, were also a nice touch. In short, with these features and stuff like Aero Snap, more usable previews, and Aero Peek mixing it up with Alt+Tab, Windows 7 has the best UI of any Windows yet.

Snow Leopard's UI is mostly the same, but it manages to improve on one of its best features—Exposé—and the Dock at the same time. You can actually do a whole lot more stuff from the Dock now, so you can easily drop files in whatever app window you want to. Exposé, my "I would die without it" feature in Leopard, now arranges windows in a neat grid, rather than scattering them across whatever space is available. Stacks is actually useful now too, since they're scrollable and you can look in folders within stacks in Snow Leopard.

Exchange Support

Snow Leopard's got it built-in, your copy of Windows 7 doesn't. Freaky but true.

Overall Snap Crack and Pop

Both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are designed to be faster, leaner, stronger and more stable than the OSes they're building on. Windows 7 is markedly more responsive, and you simply feel like you're more in control. We'll have to see with Snow Leopard, but if it lives up to Apple's promises, we're definitely looking forward to the performance prowess.

There' s a whole lot that goes into deciding whether you're a Mac or PC, but whatever one you pick, you definitely won't go wrong upgrading your OS this fall.

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