So How Do You Find Snow Leopard?
September 5, 2009 by Rico Mossesgeld
Filed under Desktops, Laptops, software
Aesthetically-wise, there really isn’t any difference between Snow Leopard and Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.5 respectively. And without spending enough time to go over all the promised new features and improvements (see the reviewer’s guide here), I can say Snow Leopard brings speed and responsiveness improvements out of the gate. At the very least, that new Quicktime feature allowing screencast creation on the fly is a really great addition. It, as a friend says, will probably kill most of Screenflow’s current market.
Another good impression Snow Leopard makes is the price of the upgrade, which for a single-user license is only $29. It’s thus very affordable for Leopard and Tiger (10.4) users to make their OS up-to-date. Even better is the Family Pack variant, which carries 5 licenses for computers within one household. If you’d like to bundle iLife and iWork with your Snow Leopard installation, there’s the single-user Mac Box Set ($169) and its own Family Pack ($229).
The only worry I have about Snow Leopard is how it cuts off many loyal Apple customers, by being the first OS to run only on Intel-based Macs. This is still good news, as it marks the final completion of Apple’s transition to Intel, away from the poorer PowerPC platform. Ultimately however, I’m not really the best guy to share his thoughts on Snow Leopard. Long-time readers know that I’m usually irreverently critical of Apple’s practices and exclusivity-inducing marketing. So if any of you have tried out Snow Leopard over the last week, feel free to share your thoughts below.
Visit the Apple Store to buy Snow Leopard
(Image courtesy Tom’s Hardware Forums)
Upgraded and found general usage (Mac Pro) slightly more snappy than it was before. Noticeable change using Ableton Live (which is one of my main apps), CPU overheads are a little lower when you are hammering this particular piece of software. So far no real quirks or breaks and things like joining WiFi networks is definitely less cludgey.
So far, so good.
Downloaded Snow Leopard 2 days ago and:
1.Lost 95% of my c. 600 name address book. What survived were a totally random bunch of names. An Apple uber-tech on the tech support phone concluded they were gone, didn’t know why and said he’d heard of it happening to others. A slightly dated flash back-up helped, but I wonder what else I’ve lost that I haven’t discovered.
2. Diminished url pages now pop-up unbidden off the dashboard when I hit the Safari icon.
3. Airfoil no longer works (they’ll probably get a fix in some weeks)
Snow Leopard is somewhere between a menace and a gyp. Not worthy of the Apple I know.