For a while the blogosphere has been running its mouth off about how “Snow Leopard is just a service pack Apple has the gall to charge for.”

TechRadar.com reports, “Despite all of the necessary ‘under the hood’ improvements in Snow Leopard, this release has the inescapable air of a service pack about it.”

Gina Trapani says, “Even though David Pogue says this is an ‘uninformed wisecrack,’ I’m still calling Snow Leopard a service pack. ‘Snow Leopard Fixes Leopard’s Bugs’ is not the headline you’re going to see in the NYT or WSJ.”

Merlin Mann snarks in this tweet, “Wow. 10.6. If some of these ‘refinements’ were any more ‘subtle,’ they’d seem kinda like ‘bug fixes.’”

To a certain degree I can see their point. We’re used to Steve Jobs getting on stage and touting an OS upgrade with 300+ new features as well as moving any purchaser to the front of a liver transplant line. Frankly, the parts of Snow Leopard the average user would notice are incredibly pedestrian. Boring, even. Apple priced it a boring, $29 price point to make it a no-brainer.

I’m going to go through some of the marquee features and break them down into areas I think would be in a service pack, could be in a service pack, and are too invasive for a service pack.

Service Pack Candidates

Just to show some partisanship, I’m going to reach across the aisle and tell you the features I think Apple could have released in a 10.5.x update: the new Exposé and Stacks, signal-strength meters in Airport, quicker Time Machine, QuickTime X, hi-res iChat and improved disk eject. All of these could have been added into the eight sub-releases of Leopard. Maybe there’s something to the theory that Apple held them back just to have something to sell users on. Maybe there were two gunmen in Dallas, too.

Borderline Candidates

Built-in support for Exchange: I know Microsoft dot-released the new Exchange features into Entourage, but I’m labeling this one borderline because I’m not sure the underlying code in Mail, Address Book and iCal would have been feasible for a .x release.

Rewrite of Finder: For the same reasons above, I’m not sure the Finder rewrite could have been done in a service pack. I’m erring on the side of caution and theorizing as a central part of the OS, it needed to be done in an upgrade.

Not Service Pack-able

The 64 bit transition, Grand Central Dispatch, and Open CL: I believe these could not have been done as a service pack. They are too central, too invasive, and are also key parts that require the Intel chipset to work. Since Snow Leopard will not run on Power PC machines, and I doubt Apple would have ever released a dot upgrade to Leopard that didn’t work on both platforms, to me these are the features that required an upgrade.

The perception problem is while these are likely to be the most important parts of Snow Leopard long term (once developers upgrade their apps), to the average user they are seriously unsexy because we don’t see them.

I think Bertrand Serlet’s comment at WWDC ’90 “[Snow Leopard] is a better Leopard” has been misinterpreted as Apple’s way of saying Leopard had some issues and needed some serious love. I don’t read it that way. I think Apple is fairly happy with how Leopard turned out — at least once it got a lot of the Spaces issues worked out. I do agree that Leopard was released too early, but by 10.5.5 or so it was in fine form.

With Snow Leopard, Apple wanted to refine some of the user interface elements while building an underlying architecture that will continue to take advantage of Core Duo 2 (and better) chipsets and decent video chipsets. When you look at the enhancements Open CL can give, it’s no mystery why Apple got away from the crappy integrated chips in even the low-end products — it wanted all Apple products to be able to take advantage of it.

People claiming that Snow Leopard is just a service pack need to look past the handful of interface improvements and focus on the underlying architecture. It may not be a sexy upgrade, but I think it will be a very important upgrade as apps are upgraded to take advantage of its features.

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Microsoft has been busy today, releasing security updates, announcing a new service pack and committing to restoring functionality to their Mac office suite.

Yep, It’s Patch Tuesday Again

Microsoft released security bulletin MS08-014 today that contains a patch to a remote code execution vulnerability effecting Microsoft Office 2004 & 2008 for Macintosh. Office 2004 is bumped up to version 11.4.1 and primarily contains security & stability fixes. Office 2008 bumps up to version 12.1.0 and includes security fixes along with a plethora of other improvements. Both updates are available via Office software update or via direct download from the aforementioned links.

Get Your Red Hot Office 2008 SP1!

Microsoft MacBU announced the availability of Office 2008 SP1 today in conjunction with the security patch. The 180MB download contains over 1,000 fixes including – what apparently was a major annoyance – the return of custom error bars and axis tick manipulation in Excel charts.

The full release notes are available for your perusal. Here are some other SP1 highlights:

Microsoft Office Excel

• Compatibility. Improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows
• Custom Error Bars. Restored formatting option on the Error Bars panel for data series
• Printing. More reliable printing for elements on Excel 2008 workbooks

Microsoft Entourage

• Calendar. Significant enhancements to improve calendar view and all-day reminders with reoccurrence
• Exchange Server support. Overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server
• E-mail images. Ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools

Microsoft Office Word

• Printing. Improved accuracy when orienting tables with cell shading
• Document map. Improved reliability and responsiveness to select items
• Notebook layout. Updated formatting, recording status and a variety of display options

Microsoft Office PowerPoint

• Printing. Improvements to eliminate crashing when printing documents to high-dpi printers and increased overall printing speed by 10 times on some large presentations
• Mobile viewing. Ability to view Mac .PPTX files on Windows Mobile phones
• AppleScript. Ability to use the PowerPoint selection object in AppleScript to implement custom scripts that operate on the current selection in PowerPoint

Restoring Functionality (& Vulnerabilities)

Microsoft’s MacBU also announced (official press release) the return of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support to the next major release of Office for Mac. This is a mixed bag since VBA macros are a juicy vector for vulnerabilities but that same functionality is critical to many business processes that have been developed using the suite.

From the announcement:

Sharing information with customers as early as possible continues to be a priority for the Mac BU to allow customers to plan for their software needs.2 Although the Mac BU increased support in Office 2008 with alternate scripting tools such as Automator and AppleScript — and also worked with MacTech Magazine to create a reference guide, available at http://www.mactech.com/vba-transition-guide — the team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms. The Mac BU is always working to meet customers’ needs and already is hard at work on the next version of Office for Mac.

When you install the security update or try out SP1, drop a note in the comments with your experiences and definitely let us and the MacBU know if they didn’t fix any of the issues you were having pre-SP1. Also, if you have any thoughts on the revival of VBA for Mac Office make sure to let us know in the comments as well.

(post updated to fix version errors & links)

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