Torrents of gushing press releases are being printed in tech magazines and news papers in a desperate bid to flog Apple's latest operating system Snow Leopard. What is alarming is most of the press releases are being written by people paid to work for the magazines or newspapers who are apparently journalists.

The fact that Snow Leopard, or Snow Leper, as it has been dubbed by the INQ, is hardly a change on previous versions of the Operating System and indeed will not run on non-Intel powered machines, has been entirely played down. Instead there are gushing terms such as “Apple is emphasising performance over new features” it has been "refined, not reinvented". All material from a press release, but not actually substance.

The other thing that keeps being banged on about is the price. “Snow Leopard low enough to make it almost an automatic upgrade from the current, already-good OS X 10.5 Leopard: just $29, $100 less than what Leopard sold for at its debut.” This would be the Leopard operating system which was to OS-X what Vista was to Windows XP, but leaving aside that issue, that $29 price is not exactly universal. It is part of an upgrade deal with Snow Leopard.

The tame hacks are comparing it to the price of upgrading to Windows 7. “Why should I pay $120 for a Windows 7 upgrade when I can have Snow Leopard for $29?” wrote one. Well the difference between Vista and Windows 7 is a lot greater than Snow Leopard and Leopard. In fact most users will install it and not notice the difference, unless their Mac still has a PowerPC chip, in which case, it will not work. Snow Leopard is basically an 'upgrade' from Leopard. If Snow Leopard is only an incremental change, with some performance changes, that is what we call in Windows land “a service pack”. So effectively Steve Jobs has just made his users pay for a Service pack which switches off all those people that still run PowerPC chips. In Windows land a service pack is free.

Then there is the small matter of pricing for those who still run 10.4 Tiger which is a damn fine OS in comparison to the more spotty Leopard and can run on any Apple machine you like. If you want to upgrade from that, you'll have to buy the "Mac Box Set," a $169 bundle of Snow Leopard and the latest versions of Apple's iLife media-creativity and iWork personal-productivity suites. So in other words you are punished for not upgrading sooner by being forced to buy loads of software you don't want.

Apple has pushed forward the date of the Snow Leopard release, probably in a bid to secure its base before Windows 7 hits the shops. However, despite what most of the tech press will tell you, OS-X will never seriously challenge Microsoft. What Jobs Mob are doing is making sure that its fanboy base get their new computers before Windows 7 comes out. When that happens the backlash Microsoft suffered with Vista will be gone. Windows 7 is pretty good and a service pack from Apple is unlikely to stop it.