Apple has sent out copies of its Snow Leopard service pack to its mates in the US trade press in the hope of scoring good reviews. As we have said in the past Apple has a list of half a dozen or so fanboys it sends stuff too and makes sure that people who have written nasty stuff about it in the past never get a wiff of anything. This way you can be assured that the reviewers are all Apple users who have little experience of other systems and will write nice things.

However even these guys appear to be having trouble with the minimal changes the Snow Leopard service pack has given them. This has not stopped them trying. Our favourite is Associated Press which is probably the more balanced reviewer we have seen. It waxes lyrical about how under Snow Leopard if you right click you can get information and when you try to get a disk out of the machine you can now do it quite quickly.

The built-in e-mail, calendar and address book applications will support Microsoft Exchange servers, the kind used by most companies. That means it will be easier to get company e-mail without using dedicated programs like Entourage or Outlook, which Microsoft is releasing for Macs late next year. Moving the mouse cursor over a program icon in the "dock" at the bottom of the screen reveals all the windows open in that program, tiled side by side. This is an extension of the "expose" feature, which shows all windows in all programs side by side. You can make the file thumbnails even bigger, giving you a better idea of the contents of your hard drive at glance.

Yep you got it, the “best new features” on Snow Leopard are those that Windows users have enjoyed for years. You can tell the reviewer has never used a PC because he thinks these are a pretty neat idea. AP said that web browsing and image and document previews should be “noticeably faster” because more of the software now processes data in 64-bit chunks. We notice that they failed to provide benchmarks for this but say that once developers start writing applications in 64-bit they will be faster too. Again they say this because Apple told them so. In fact 64-bit does not speed up things that much.

Another thing that has turned up in the reviews is a somewhat nasty trick that Apple has played on its users. In all the marketing it has said that Tiger users will have to pay the full price of $140 to upgrade their machines.

Now it turns out that if you stick a Snow Leopard upgrade into a Tiger machine it will upgrade. However you have to face the guilt of not paying huge amounts of unnecessary cash to Apple. Most Apple fanboys are happy to write a cheque for what ever Steve Jobs tells them too.