Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard"

[fumanstan]

I installed it on the Macbook I have at home. Don't really notice much of a difference, especially since I prefer Firefox to Safari, but more disk space is always great.

[Michael Corvin]

Originally Posted by BigDaddy

Tell me about it I have a G4 800 iBook. It is time for an upgrade.

Not me. I have a G5 that's just over 5 years old. Seems ancient by computer standards but it still does everything I need. Plus the 4GB of RAM helps.

I wonder how the MacMini would fare by comparison. That's cheap enough to fit it in the budget at some point. I'm just not looking forward to the next 'tower' purchase.

[Superboy]

I'm going to wait on the upgrade. It feels like this should have just been a free software update.

There's not a whole lot of new features so much as a refinement of features that were implemented in Leopard and Tiger. Which I might add, are not something that I'd really think that people should pay for.

A lot of the graphical changes in Leopard were, in my opinion, for the worse.

I like how it's 64-bit FINALLY but you have to constantly command it to boot in 64-bit mode at startup. It should be automatic. They should have gone 64-bit with leopard.

It sort of feels like this is what Leopard was going to be, but they released it as quickly as possible with many unfinished, unrefined parts. Hence this mini-update.

[joeblow69]

Well I installed it the other day, and I would say the speed increase alone is worth the $30 unless you're some starving college student or something.

One thing I haven't seen anyone else mention ... on my iMac, colors seem much more vivid now, and fonts more crisp. It's very noticable while playing World of Warcraft. Not sure if it just is using some different defaults or what, but it just plain "looks" better.

[GizmoDVD]

Freed up 10GB on my MacBook and 12GB on my Mini.

Delicious Library keeps crashing though...arg.

[Kevin M. Dean]

Originally Posted by joeblow69

One thing I haven't seen anyone else mention ... on my iMac, colors seem much more vivid now, and fonts more crisp. It's very noticable while playing World of Warcraft. Not sure if it just is using some different defaults or what, but it just plain "looks" better.

It now defaults to the same darker Gamma setting as Windows does, basically the native game for all gfx cards as well.

I've always felt the same that, with LCD screens especially, the darker gamma makes things look richer and the fonts more crisp. I've always manually calibrated by displays to the darker gamma.

[NiCK Crush]

gained 72.22GB on my iMac

[shaun3000]

huh?

[NiCK Crush]

Originally Posted by shaun3000

huh?

before installing Snow Leopard I had 866.66 GB of free hard drive space. After installing, it reads 938.88 GB of free space.

866.66 + 72.22 = 938.88

[NiCK Crush]

Originally Posted by porieux

Things seem to be a bit snappier in general.

Agreed. This is my first evening using Snow Leopard and this is definitely what I notice most.

[shaun3000]

Got that part. I don’t see how you saved that much space, I thought it the savings was supposed to be more like 6-10 GB...

[Kevin M. Dean]

Originally Posted by NiCK Crush

before installing Snow Leopard I had 866.66 GB of free hard drive space. After installing, it reads 938.88 GB of free space.

866.66 + 72.22 = 938.88

Snow Leopard now uses decimal to figure out GB instead of the previous binary, so your original space of 866.66 would be more like 908.76 in decimal GB without changing any files. So, you more likely only gained 30 GB of free space (which is still a nice amount).

One advantage of Snow Leopard's New Math is no longer needing to multiply or divide numbers by 1024 to convert from bytes to KB, MB, GB, etc. and now 500GB hard drives actually show approx. 500GB of capacity instead of formatting 465 GB or so.

[wmansir]

I don't like the fact that the deceptive storage mfgs have "won" but I can see the advantages of using decimal size count on the OS.

When an internal HD shows up on the system smaller than advertised it is annoying, but that's about it. When a user has several flash drives and/or portable HDs of varying sizes it can be more of an actual inconvenience when the device size does not match the label.

[NiCK Crush]

Originally Posted by Kevin M. Dean

Snow Leopard now uses decimal to figure out GB instead of the previous binary, so your original space of 866.66 would be more like 908.76 in decimal GB without changing any files. So, you more likely only gained 30 GB of free space (which is still a nice amount).

One advantage of Snow Leopard's New Math is no longer needing to multiply or divide numbers by 1024 to convert from bytes to KB, MB, GB, etc. and now 500GB hard drives actually show approx. 500GB of capacity instead of formatting 465 GB or so.

Yea, I realize that. I was just going strictly by what it says.

[BartleyR7]

Originally Posted by Superboy

I like how it's 64-bit FINALLY but you have to constantly command it to boot in 64-bit mode at startup. It should be automatic. They should have gone 64-bit with leopard.

I understand why they decided to default boot to the 32-bit kernel (for the original Intel Core Duo machines). I've not really noticed that much of a difference between the 32-bit kernel and the 64-bit kernel. The kernel is really just another application (albeit an important application) running on your system. No matter which one is running, the OS can still run other 64-bit applications (just like 10.5 could run 64-bit applications). The major difference most people will notice is that most of the standard Apple applications (such as Finder) have been rewritten as 64-bit apps.

Ars has a well-written and in-depth review of Snow Leopard, for those that like to read 20+ pages of OS-level detail.

While I have a (bad?) habit of agreeing with Leo and friends most of the time, I have to say that I disagree with them about OS X 10.6. Sure, it doesn't change much graphically in the OS, but I feel its under-the-hood changes (Grand Central Dispatch, anyone?) more than justify the $30 (or $40-ish if you opt for the family pack) price tag.

Update: Gizmodo has a gallery that outlines a few of the many new features in 10.6.

[Tarantino]

I'm installing it on the iMac right now.

[Tarantino]

It freed up about 12GB of HD space for me.

[BadlyDrawnBoy]

I think that's been explained by now - the freed up space

[flair]

I picked this up for an older macbook and upgraded from 10.4. Definitely worth the $25 I paid for it. 10.4 always chugged along for me but this is definitely a bit snappier. I decided to upgrade to a 400gb drive as well during this, both were a very easy process.

[BadlyDrawnBoy]

10.6.1 is out now via Software Update

The 10.6.1 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes for:
compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems
an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly
some printer compatibility drivers not appearing properly in the add printer browser
an issue that might make it difficult to remove an item from the Dock
instances where automatic account setup in Mail might not work
an issue where pressing cmd-opt-t in Mail brings up the special characters menu instead of moving a message
Motion 4 becoming unresponsive
For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3810.
For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

[BadlyDrawnBoy]

And it seems like the latest Firefox Update has got rid of my beachball / firefox hanging issues.

[Jason]

Originally Posted by BadlyDrawnBoy

And it seems like the latest Firefox Update has got rid of my beachball / firefox hanging issues.

Yeah. About damn time too.

Now all I need is for Final Cut Pro to be able to burn a blu-ray without crashing after 6 hours of encoding...

[Tarantino]

Originally Posted by BadlyDrawnBoy

I think that's been explained by now - the freed up space

No shit.

People were posting how much space it freed up. I did the same.