TechRadar just put an opinion piece online sure to grate with the Apple faithful. Rob Mead asserts that Snow Leopard is “little more than a service pack” and that “Windows 7 has raised the bar—and OS X 10.6 can’t reach it”.

The article goes on to lambaste Apple for having the audacity to release a system upgrade that doesn’t have any huge new features, and suggests that because of this it will “inevitably be crushed under the wheels of the mighty Windows 7 juggernaut”. I find that viewpoint perverse in the extreme.

First and foremost, criticising Apple for Snow Leopard being all about architecture rather than new features is rather like having a go at the driver in front of you for turning left after they’ve had their left-hand indicator flashing for the last quarter mile. Apple has been upfront about Snow Leopard from the start, saying that it’s about next-generation technologies and not new features.

Mead claims that this will make it a tough sale, and there at least I agree. But the fact that Snow Leopard looks much the same as Leopard isn’t something we should complain about. While I’d love to see a unified UI, I’m glad Apple—with the exception of QuickTime X—has avoided yet more pointless ‘make it look different in screen grabs to make people think it’s new’ gimmicky UI changes (see: the hideous Leopard ‘glass’ Dock and the semi-transparent menu bar, the latter of which subsequently caused much back-peddling).

Also, I’d sooner see Apple plugging the gaps for once, rather than losing focus by concentrating on the next big thing. It’s done the same with OS X iPhone 3.0, largely making important tweaks rather than wowing the audience. Likewise, Mac OS X 10.6 improves Stacks, Finder and Mail. AI for ‘intelligent’ PDF text selection in Preview might not be a show-stopping feature like Time Machine, but it’ll certainly provide the “real world benefits these changes will bring” that Mead thinks is missing from this release. The same is true for the 6GB you’ll claw back on your hard drive, the video-editing and sharing now built directly into QuickTime X, out-of-process Safari plug-ins, and the Exposé/Dock mash-up that obliterates one of the consumer-oriented Windows 7 features that had stolen the limelight—its revised taskbar.

Mead also complains about PowerPC support being ditched, and here I just say: tough. Technology moves on, and we’re three years past the Intel switch. It’s not like you have to bin a PPC Mac if the latest operating system won’t run on it (in fact, my sole PPC Mac quite happily waddles along on Tiger and is still regularly used), and to attack Apple by claiming people who splashed out on powerful Macs three or more years ago will lose out is risable.

Apple is a company that has always moved forward far more quickly than the likes of Microsoft, and it doesn’t look back. Apple shouldn’t compromise its important ‘overhaul’ upgrade, which sets the foundations for its future, just to cater for products that were end-of-lifed three years ago.