Snow Leopard: Yeah or Nay?
So Apple’s Snow Leopard comes out tomorrow. I had mine pre-ordered via Amazon but they are only shipping starting Friday. Which means I’d have got it on Tuesday. So I cancelled the order and will pick it up from the local Apple shop.
This is an upgrade without the “gee whiz” features of previous editions. It’s mainly cleaning things up, making things faster and smaller, and eliminating the beachball of terror that crops up in many apps. (Finder and Safari, I’m looking at you)
There’s lots of minor fixes as well such as a dialog telling you which applications are keeping you from ejecting that external hard drive.
So are you upgrading? And, if you have, are you happy?
I personally was hoping to go Rosetta free but my fax software (eFax) and my Epson scanner driver are both PPC only. (Ugh)
The nice thing about the upgrade is that it’s cheap. ($29 list) It will also install over Tiger if for some inexplicable reason you hadn’t upgraded yet to Leopard. Pretty cheap compared to Windows 7.
Posted on August 27, 2009, in Web/Tech. Bookmark the permalink. 23 Comments.
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I’m interested. I hear it frees up 7GB of space on your hard-drive that was formerly occupied by the previous operating system.
We definitely need that space.
I like the idea of focusing on getting everything just right rather than adding the next big thing. Some of the smaller tweaks sound nice (Dock Expose, customizable Services) and the price is right.
I heard a local Mac seller will be selling it at Hogle Zoo but I’ll probably just go to the Apple Store at Gateway.
I’m definitely upgrading my computers. It looks like FedEx is on track to deliver my copy tomorrow. Leopard has been a pretty stable release overall, but I am excited to benefit from a faster, leaner, more refined system release.
That’s probably Simply Mac. They sponsored a couple of exhibits at the zoo. It’s where I’ll be buying it since we don’t have and Apple Store out here in the netherlands of Utah County. (Heck, we don’t even have good grocery stores – not even a Whole Foods!)
Can’t upgrade. Still using the dinosaur G5 PowerMac that keeps on clicking. It’s not on the Intel chip.
David Pogue speaks well of the upgrade, but mentions a few incompatibility issues with Photoshop CS3, among others (see the Snow Leopard compatibility list).
If you never upgraded and are still running Tiger, you can buy the upgrade disc for $29 and get the full Snow Leopard install.
I’m running a laptop so I’ll be getting it just for the HD space it supposedly frees up. Plus it’s just so cheap, stability and storage for $29 can’t be beat. The only reason I didn’t preorder was to see if Lightroom 2 was compatible. Now that I know it is, I’ll probably run and pick it up.
If the only reason to upgrade is to save on disk space, wouldn’t buying a larger hard drive give you more bang for the buck?
It seems that the real benefit to a smaller operating system is that it requires (at least in theory) less memory to run it; i.e., it’s faster.
The size is a benefit for laptops and especially the Air. I have about 20 G free on my MBP but would highly value getting that up aways.
I just finished installing it 15 minutes ago. Here are my initial thoughts.
1. Benchmarks may show only slight speed improvements but the “feel” is that of immense speed increases. This suggests that most of the changes are small latency issues for UI interaction. And it is very noticeable. I think that’ll affect the psychology and enjoyment quite a bit more than whether some task objectively finishes quicker. It’s too early to say whether the spinning beach ball has largely been banished in applications like Safari.
2. Parallel 3 doesn’t work. Time to decide wether to upgrade or sidegrade to VMWare…
3. The Logitech Driver doesn’t work. This is very annoying, even though the LCC driver was the cause of probably 95% of my crashes. USB Overdrive says it’ll to work in 32 bit kernel mode though. (Which realistically is what you ought be running anyway) However when I install it Apple says it won’t and disables it.
4. They finally got rid of the Sys9 flags for the input menu. (i.e. where your extra keyboard, character viewer and input language) I’m not sure the new icon is much better. But at least it doesn’t look 10 years old and out of place.
5. Old 32bit pref panes require System Preferences to quit and then reopen in 32bit mode rather than 64bit mode. Which wouldn’t be so bad, just annoying, except they make you click “yes” in a dialog box to allow this. Every time. Ugh.
6. Double Command thankfully still works for all you PC style home/end key users. So does iKey (which was my big worry as I have a lot of Macros)
7. My Epson scanner still works although I haven’t checked to see if its PPC driver is what is running or if Apple replaced it with their own. (I’d heard Apple had written a lot of scanner drivers)
8. If you system seems a bit slow look at the Spotlight icon. Chances are it’s reindexing your hard drive.
9. Apple, as expected, diabled Glims. I’m still trying to figure out what is going on with 1Password.
Other than that thus far it looks and acts pretty much the same. Just “snappier.” Significantly so.
And don’t forget to install XCode – it’s buried in a folder on the install disk. Doh! Obviously a lot of shell stuff won’t work without it.
And Apple did write a nice shiny 64bit Intel driver for my scanner!
As I use my machine for development every day I’m reticent to upgrade mid-project. My Leopard upgrade had issues due to Double Command that were hard to diagnose and I still haven’t gotten OpenVPN working as well as it was under Tiger.
In general though I think that this sort of release is a great idea. There has been enough change in the Mac world that it makes all sorts of sense to deprecate PowerPC, and to move more fully to 64 bit.
My problems have been with mySQL and the Logitech mouse drivers. Other than that it’s gone remarkably smoothly.
Clark,
If it screwed up my Postgres install I would be very unhappy. I’ve never installed any Logitech drivers at all, I just use USB Overdrive, but even that worries me a bit.
It wasn’t the install so much as Python stuff like py-mySQL that I’ve been struggling with. USB Overdrive works but misses a few of my Logitech buttons – as much as I hate the Logitech drivers.
Oh, even better. If it messed up my python I’d be dead in the water. I can wait.
Apparently, I don’t speak Apple.
Glims is a very popular Safari plugin that does such things as put your downloads in dated folders, adds thumbnails to Google searches, and lets you have a pulldown menu of multiple search engines beyond Google (such as Bing, Amazon, etc.)
Like many Safari plugins it used an undocumented hack to patch Safari. This still works with 32bit Safari but not 64bit Safari. You can either wait until the new version is out (reportedly later this week) or run Safari in 32bit mode. (It’s a checkmark in Get Info)
I think the greatest thing about Glims is that it’s diable.
(This is me trying to speak Apple. You’re welcome.)
When it’s cool on its own, who needs extra spices?
I just installed Snow Leopard on our Macbook. It definitely cleared up hard disk space. I imagine in the next couple of days I’ll get a better sense of how much better (or not) it actually is.
Danithew,
hard drive upgrades on MacBooks are pretty painless. You could put 320 gb in there for less than $100. Now older MacBook Pros are another story but still doable.
ARJ, that is good news. I’m going to work on getting that additional GB in this thing. We are going to need it.