With more than 300 new features in Leopard alone, I know the following list is going to disappoint some of you--picking just eight means I've certainly overlooked a number of key features, probably including many that you feel should be listed here. So please, feel free to share your list of eight favored OS X features.

1. Stability: Remember the days of unexpected restarts, a single app bringing down the entire OS, and troubleshooting extension conflicts? Neither do I! OS X has, barring certain hardware failures, put an end to my worrying about the stability of my machine.

2. Multitasking: Assuming you've got enough real RAM, OS X does a wondrous job of multitasking. On my Mac Pro, after doing a , I'll often be surprised to find that I've got 15, 20, or even 25 apps open. As the project progresses, I just keep opening the apps I need, not really paying any attention to quitting others first. Even when I exceed the 8GB physical RAM limit on my machine, OS X does a decent job at swapping virtual memory, making the process not nearly as painful as it was in prior versions of the OS.

3. The Unix underpinnings: Sure, not everyone is going to use Terminal every day, but even if you don't, the stability and multi-tasking goodness in OS X comes from its solid, long-developed Unix core. Add in the ability to access that Unix system via Terminal--not to mention running many Linux applications, such as , natively--and OS X emerges as a do-it-all OS for pretty much any type of user. If that's not broad enough coverage, of course, you can use Boot Camp (and/or a virtualization application) to run Windows on your Mac as well.

4. The bundled applications: Sure, I can occasionally grouse about some of the bundled apps--hey, Apple, did you know people actually play more than Chess on their Macs?--but by and large, the overall quality of the OS X bundled apps is quite impressive. Sure, some are overly simplistic (perhaps Snow Leopard will include thousands separators in Calculator!), but many can ably compete with paid-for solutions. Dictionary is a useful utility to look up words locally or by tap into the power of Wikipedia. iCal is a reasonably powerful calendaring solution. iChat is probably the most-used application on my Mac. iTunes handles most all of my media needs (which are admittedly simple), Mail has handled probably hundreds of thousands of messages for me over the years, Preview has evolved into a multi-talented image- and PDF-handling utility, and Safari is simply the dominant browser on the Mac.