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Since Snow Leopard’s release date was announced, I’ve been more excited about the new OS. I’ve also had a good look at Windows 7 and found it a good upgrade.

But when looking at the new features advertised for each OS, I can’t quite see what Windows 7 is offering.

A quick glance at Apple’s Full List and you’ll see the streams of new features. The biggest ones Apple are toting are the 64-bit support, Exchange support in the OS (which as Apple appropriately points out is missing from all versions of Windows), overall speed increases in boot up and shutdown, a happy gift of up to 6GB of disk space back (worth mentioning later), faster Time Machine backups, all the features of Quicktime Pro for free (previously £20) and many more worth looking over.

When you look through Microsoft’s own pages you see a much more reduced list of features. You’ll see a new Start bar (resembling the OSX Dock more now), Jump lists (enhanced right-click menus suitable to each app), a nice hide all desktop view, less interuptions from UAC, and better network management from the Start bar but to name the main ones.

To me, looking at this as a casual home user (or office user) Snow Leopard far surpasses Windows 7 for new features. Something about the Microsoft list just whispers “We fixed all these things people didn’t like or we got wrong” and that doesn’t quite sell it to me.

I also really like Apple’s new way of supporting printers. Rather than install all the drivers on your system, when you plug in a new printer, the OS pulls down the drivers from the web, meaning you automatically have the latest versions available to you. And further more, Software Update now supports these effectively third party drivers. What interests me is that this is new for Apple, to allow non-security/system updates or program updates to propergate out via the OS tools itself. A feature like this, properly supported in Windows would save so many people so much time. I know Windows 7 should go get new drivers, but I’ve seen many examples where its failed to find drivers itself. Further more, I’m not even sure if it updates them as new versions become available.

I would love to see this support expand, to allow Software Update to update third party apps, perhaps submitting them via Apple (possible App store-type situation) to help ensure users have the correct version, rather than requiring all software developers to use the Sparkle framework (which does work rather well and provides a familiar view to users for updates. MS, catch up)

Of course I’m a bit biased. I work in a corporate Windows environment and anything that will make my life easier is more than welcome. But I am a Mac user at heart and it excited me more.

All I know is that come Friday 28th, I will have a disc in my hand, and be upgrading post haste.