From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same…same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso…the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven’t noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins. So, just having paid thousands of dollars for new hardware and software, I have what feels like my same old stuff.

—

Jason thinks Apple has an upgrade problem and I’m kind of inclined to agree.

On background: I went through almost the exact same set of upgrades recently. I ditched the dulling chrome of my first gen iPhone for the virginal white of a 3GS (with compass!) on the first day the new phones were out. And last week, work finally took back the creaking first gen Intel Macbook Pro I’d been using the past three years for a beefy MBP bursting at the seams with gigahertz, gigabytes and RAM. Migrating my apps and data was flawless, even my preferences copied over intact, thanks to the $100 annual MobileMe tax. I’m still waiting on Snow Leopard, but the upgrade was pretty … boring.

But maybe it’s we power users who have the upgrade problem? Now, it’s all built into the OS and the cloud and the ever increasing size of firewired drives. For the ubernerds, it’s perhaps hard to come to grips with the fact that this is the way computers ought to be for the 99.9% of people who’d rather go outside than spend a weekend stripping down and building up a new computer. Maybe the shiny new is no longer as much an upsell as the awful mundanity of it should just work. Maybe boring is a feature.