Macintosh OS 10.6 Snow Leopard

[1974Alfa5spd]

Appearance: 4
Performance: 2
Space Used: 4.5
Sexability: over 9000

Appearance (4): Overall, looks almost identical to Leopard (10.5) with a few minor changes here and there. The top drop-down menus now are semi-transparent (an opacity adjustment would be nice though), and the right-click menus in the dock have an opaque graphite and white appearance to them. Exposé has gotten a 75% redesign. Now, windows scale to fit all the available space, so smaller windows become larger and larger windows scale to fit. They take on a nice blue underglow around them when your mouse over them. Exposé now also shows windows that have been minimized to the dock, which is a nice feature.
Pic:


Performance (2): This is not Snow Leopards shining moment here, it's rather unstable. Short system lockups are somewhat common and Safari 4 still crashes constantly. Although the drop of PowerPC processor support has made startup and shutdown times unbelievable. <15s startup and <10s shutdowns are common on my machine*.

Space Used (4.5): Where Snow Leopard failed it makes up for in how much less drive space it uses. With the upgrade, I gained 25gb when Apple only claimed a 6gb gain. Other reports (RITmusic2k's facebook) claim 16gbs gains as well.

Sexability (over 9000): We all know Mac chicks are hot, right?


*Specs: 2.8GHz C2D, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 500gb SATA 5400rpm HDD

[mtheis]

Sexability (over 9000): We all know Mac chicks are hot, right?

No, just bland.

[VTECaddict]

I don't like the new Exposé. The relative window sizes on the old Exposé made it easier to find things IMO. Now that everything is the same size, you have to actually look at what it is, and small things like Stickies take up huge amounts of space. Dock Exposé is nice, but I don't like the two second lag. Apple should just offer a bunch of settings and options for Exposé so people can customize it to how exactly how they like it. But of course, being Apple, they have to do the "one size fits all" approach in an effort to make it more "easy to use".

+999999 on the performance. My Leopard was much faster from a usability standpoint. I now get constant HD activity at random times, which makes whatever I'm doing super laggy (especially if it's video). Some apps also take much longer to launch than in Leopard. Boot/shutdown times I think have been pretty close to Leopard, which were already fast.

How are you getting 15 second boots?!? What are your timing points? From power button press to desktop (including typing login password) for me is like 30-40 sec.

[1974Alfa5spd]

How are you getting 15 second boots?!? What are your timing points? From power button press to desktop (including typing login password) for me is like 30-40 sec.

I think it's the combination of new hardware and getting rid of 25gb of junk the computer has to load on boot. I also do an auto-login approach because I'm the sole user of it.

[RITmusic2k]

To clarify, the space gains are not quite as dramatic as they appear to be... it's a byproduct of the fact that there are two definitions of Gigabyte. One of them is based on 1,000-byte kilobytes, (which is the way hard drive manufacturers measure capacity), and the other is based on 1,024-byte kilobytes (which is the way operating system developers measure capacity). It's the reason that when you buy a "1TB" hard drive, your computer says that it's 930 GB.

So, between Leopard and Snow Leopard, Apple decided that they'd start counting the way the hard drive manufacturers do, and therefore a 1TB drive will show up as 1TB. You didn't add any bits, you just counted them differently.

So, the 16GB I gained and the 25GB Alfa gained was mostly due to the new OS having a smaller footprint, but partly because of the counting method. The bigger the hard drive, the more apparent gains will be. That said, it's still an amazing thing that a new OS actually got smaller.

I've had no stability problems myself, though I have had issues with Safari... but I think it's entirely Safari's fault, not Snow Leopard. Though my Time Machine is broken now... waiting for a fix for that.

[1974Alfa5spd]

To clarify, the space gains are not quite as dramatic as they appear to be... it's a byproduct of the fact that there are two definitions of Gigabyte. One of them is based on 1,000-byte kilobytes, (which is the way hard drive manufacturers measure capacity), and the other is based on 1,024-byte kilobytes (which is the way operating system developers measure capacity). It's the reason that when you buy a "1TB" hard drive, your computer says that it's 930 GB.

So, between Leopard and Snow Leopard, Apple decided that they'd start counting the way the hard drive manufacturers do, and therefore a 1TB drive will show up as 1TB. You didn't add any bits, you just counted them differently.

So, the 16GB I gained and the 25GB Alfa gained was mostly due to the new OS having a smaller footprint, but partly because of the counting method. The bigger the hard drive, the more apparent gains will be. That said, it's still an amazing thing that a new OS actually got smaller.

I've had no stability problems myself, though I have had issues with Safari... but I think it's entirely Safari's fault, not Snow Leopard. Though my Time Machine is broken now... waiting for a fix for that.

Well there you go, it's not all it's cracked up to be.


Still awaiting 10.6.1...

[VTECaddict]

You mean 10.6.2?

[1974Alfa5spd]

You mean 10.6.2?

I guess so, I assumed the original was 10.6.0.

[RITmusic2k]

You're right, but they rolled out 10.6.1 just weeks after the 10.6 release.

[1974Alfa5spd]

You're right, but they rolled out 10.6.1 just weeks after the 10.6 release.

That must be that software that Software update keeps bitching about...

[ElectroGhandi]

BETTER:

[VTECaddict]

I hate Tiger's stripes...

Leopard was best.

[ElectroGhandi]

So Apple destroyed their OS at the same time that Microsoft vastly improved theirs. NOW IT'S ON!!!!!1

[1974Alfa5spd]

Tiger was a great OS...


...for PowerPC computers.
If you've got an Intel Mac, you have no excuse not to have Snow Leopard.
But in all seriousness, Leopard runs like shit on a 1.25GHz PowerPC processor.

[1974Alfa5spd]

Why doesn't Apple just make a Netbook for chrissakes?
I mean they've got down the small-form-factor, why not just downsize a Macbook?
Now watch Apple make a $800 netbook.