With the latest release of the apple operating system called Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server Apple has made a statement.  The question is what the statement means.  It could be “Watch out Microsoft, we have you in our sites and are coming after you” or “We are going to teach you a lesson”.

Lets take a look at each new release starting with Snow Leopard.

First off, this upgrade is an unprecidented $29.  $29 is really low for any operating system upgrade.  I cannot remember ever only having to pay $29 (and free shipping) for a new operating system.  That in itself is amazing but when you see what has changed it makes it almost unbelievable.

First, the new Snow Leopard is 100% 64 Bit which means it can use all of the memory you have in your machine at one time, do calculations faster and really take full advantage of the full power of the new CPU’s.  And it does this without worry about driver updates, etc unlike windows that requires you install a 64 bit version of vista and hope you can find drivers.  Snow Leopard also automatically supports older 32 bit application.  This is totally transparent to the end user.

Next, they actually shrunk the operating system (by 7 Gigabytes).  And they did not remove anything to do it.  The OS is smaller on your disk so by installing the upgrade you actually uses less space than before.  What a novel concept, rather than bloat the operating system they are keeping it clean and efficient.

In addition to shrinking the size of the operating system, they made it faster.  And it is noticably faster when opening programs.  So rather than requiring new hardware to run the operating system, this release actually speeds up your machine.  Are you listening Microsoft?  No new upgraded hardware required.

Although the big things in this release are what we just mentioned there are a few new things that have been added.  They have included a new and improved Quicktime that lets you edit directly in Quicktime, a new version of Safari that has built in video support.  They changed how expose works so that you can see just one applications windows and changed the look of large Stacks.  They added a feature called grand central dispatch that will tell you why you cannot eject that CD, DVD or disk.  Time machine is 80% faster than before.  Faster Wake Up and Shutdown.  Higher resolution i-chat, better service integration between apps, automatic printer drivers, automatic time zone settings, better and more reliable file sharing and a few more.

But there is one new feature that is amazing in itself and this is the first slap at Microsoft.  Included in this new release is Microsoft Exchange support.  And guess what…  It costs nothing, free, no dinero.  Just like back in the day when you had to buy the Netscape web browser and Microsoft gave theirs away for free.  Apple has pulled a Microsoft because you no longer have to buy office or outlook to get access to your email and calendar information on your exchange server.

Ok, from just that it looks like Apple is trying to teach Microsoft a lesson.  But let look at the new release of Snow Leopard Server.

Snow Leopard Server is built on the Snow Leopard operating system.  With this latest release Apple has taken it to the next level.  All of the features we are going to discuss come in the $499 Snow Leopard Server and there are no per user costs.  $499 gets you everything and with unlimited users.

Just like Snow Leopard, the server edition has a big performance increase.  According to Apple up to 2 times as fast as the previous version.
Lets first look at what is included in the server:

• iCal Server
• Address Book Server
• Email Server
• File Sharing
• iChat Server
• Mobile Access Server
• Wiki Server
• Web Hosting
• Client Management
• Network and VPN
• Spotlight Server
• Podcast Producer

Ok that is a long list but here is the amazing part.  This server can replace: Your Exchange Server(mail, calendar, contacts), Your Spam and Virus email program (if you have one on your exchange server), your file server (with easier and more security control), your bigfix or other client management program, your indexing server, your web server, your sharepoint server and you VPN firewall.

Plus you also get a very secure remote connection with mobile devices and there are iPhone apps for accessing all of this securely while out of the office.

If you have an Airport base the server can even configure it to be your secure gateway (firewall) to the internet.  If you do not have one, you can use any mac that has dual nics and the server will become the firewall for your entire network.

The client management in Snow Leopard Server is the best.  It can do all the regular security stuff that windows can do and actually does some of the permissions better.  It can setup remote machines to not allow updates, updates can be pushed and a machine can even be setup to boot from an image on the Snow Leopard Server so that all macs are running the same image.

That is a great option in a classroom environment, you can have a new machine image in a few minutes by either remote booting or pushing the new OS when the student is done for the day.

So let’s compare this to Microsoft Solutions for 20 users:
Windows Server $670 (no user licenses)
20 user licenses: ($33 a piece) $660
Microsoft Exchange $690 (no user licenses)
20 user licenses: ($25 a piece) $500
Spam and Anti-virus for exchange: ($26 per year per user) $520 per year

I am not sure of the costs of a program like bigfix for client management, remote control tools, sharepoint or the VPN, Firewall and remote access equipment.

So on a very basic comparison we are looking at $499 for the Apple server or $3040 for the first year for the Microsoft Equivalent.  And that was only fo 20 users.  It would be an even greater difference if we had more than 20 users.

And, the Apple server is Rock Solid, no blue screen of death or CTRL-ALT-DEL required and the administration is the Apple super easy to use and understand interface.

So now what do you think?  Is Apple putting Microsoft in their sites or just teasing them?  With the recent popularity of Apple, I think it is possible in the future Apple will be one of the leading Enterprise Operating Systems.
Just look what they have done with cell phones in just a couple short years.

Next Post: Bye Bye Drobo

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