Mac OS X 10.6.2 to update nearly 150 Snow Leopard components

[AppleInsider]

Apple this week is equipping developers with a new beta of Mac OS X 10.6.2, the second maintenance and security update to the company's new Snow Leopard operating system that will perform upgrades to nearly 150 components.

The latest beta, labeled Mac OS X 10.6.2 build 10C535, comes one week after the Mac maker issued build 10C531 to address issues with Snow Leopard's Dock, ColorSync, QuartzCore and graphic driver components.

This week, Apple has asked developers to continue to provide feedback on graphics drivers while also tasking them with focusing their evaluation efforts on TrackPad preferences and the ability to create virtual machines, people familiar with the matter say.

As was the case with last week's beta, documentation accompanying build 10C535 reportedly lists no known issues. And while Apple has temporarily ceased its practice of providing a running list of bug fixes that will come baked into the impending release, it did identify 148 components that have seen tweaks.

Among those components are AppleBacklight, Battery Menu, Dictionary, Expose, FileSync, Family Controls, Fonts, Front Row, HFS, Inkwell, iPhoto, MobileMe, OpenCL, Parental Controls, QuickTime, Screen Sharing, Spell Checker, Spotlight, Time Machine, and USB.

In bare bones Delta form, Mac OS X 10.6.2 currently weighs in at roughly 480MB. It's expected for release sometime next month.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[mcarling]

Hopefully, this a release candidate that we'll see released to the public in the next few days.

[main1event]

Hopefully they'll be bug fixes for mail. Even the Apple Boards are full of problems. My mail constantly downloads thousands of repeat emails. It apparently happens when 2 mail clients are checking the server at the same time.

[ghostface147]

Battery menu. Good. Odd how it shows it taking 30 minutes left to charge one second, then over an hour the next, then back down to 45 minutes. The test builds of SL and 10.5.8 never exhibited this behavior.

[georgetang]

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

[aplnub]

Originally Posted by georgetang;

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

I completely disagree.

[steviet02]

Originally Posted by georgetang

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

I won't go as far as you, but I have to say I'm not really impressed either by it's stability and performance. Clean install too.

[buceta]

Originally Posted by georgetang

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

You should ask your doctor of Prozac is right for you.

[MacTel]

It'll be a good Christmas present for my Mac to get the bug fixes. Though I haven't had an issue for awhile now.

[Garamond]

Originally Posted by georgetang

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

That's just plain wrong. Snow Leopard is the best Mac OS so far.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by georgetang

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

I haven’t had any of your issues and I’ve been using SL since the first developer builds (not including the preview release). I’ve found it quite stable and has better performance over Leopard. If you are having crashes you might want to look elsewhere for the problem or try a fresh install.

[foljs]

Originally Posted by georgetang

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

You understand that crashes of individual third party applications cannot be attributed to the OS, do you?

That said, what exactly is your problem?

"Crash all the time, and make everything else crash..." is just vague. Do you see kernel panics on a regular basis? A particular app crashes? What exactly? Have you checked for faulty memory modules or a problematic logic board? Do you use shitty third party haxies and/or APE?

Snow Leopard has been rock solid for me. (Not strange, considering that was its' stated goal).

And from reading the forums I follow, including Apple support lists, it has been rock solid for most people. The complaints I see is a magnitude below of what was for Leopard 10.5 to 10.5.1.

[steviet02]

Originally Posted by solipsism

I haven’t had any of your issues and I’ve been using SL since the first developer builds (not including the preview release). I’ve found it quite stable and has better performance over Leopard. If you are having crashes you might want to look elsewhere for the problem or try a fresh install.

It's funny, Schillers own PR campaign against windows was because users were going to have to do a fresh reinstall.... Go figure.

[ch2co]

Originally Posted by solipsism

I haven’t had any of your issues and I’ve been using SL since the first developer builds (not including the preview release). I’ve found it quite stable and has better performance over Leopard. If you are having crashes you might want to look elsewhere for the problem or try a fresh install.

I've had no problems whatsoever with SL since I got my printers working. It runs faster and I'm very happy with the upgrade. Each is its own individual case I guess.

[steviet02]

Originally Posted by foljs

And from reading the forums I follow, including Apple support lists, it has been rock solid for most people. The complaints I see is a magnitude below of what was for Leopard 10.5 to 10.5.1.

Of course there are less, they didn't add a ton of features like they did between 10.4 - 10.5. Besides that, alot of the functionality/enhancements that were made are not even being used yet. Jury is still out as far as I can tell.

[solipsism]

I think Georgetang is the new Teckstud. Just jacked the thread by us responding. Esh… Have to learn to ignore these posters better.

[DJRumpy]

Agreed. SL has been rock solid. The only issue I've seen is with the USB noise using Virtual Machine applications like Fusion and Parallels. Unfortunately, the VMWare folks said a fix was not included in 10.6.2.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by steviet02

It's funny, Schillers own PR campaign against windows was because users were going to have to do a fresh reinstall.... Go figure.

That is not the typical way to do it. Apple made the steps for installing OS X much easier. Your problems are obviously not representative of the majority. Sucks that you have them, but you might to look in other places for answers instead of just saying Snow Leopard sucks.

Originally Posted by steviet02

Of course there are less, they didn't add a ton of features like they did between 10.4 - 10.5. Besides that, alot of the functionality/enhancements that were made are not even being used yet. Jury is still out as far as I can tell.

They added tons of features. One’s inability to not directly see the feature does not mean it wasn’t added.

[rickguilfoil]

Originally Posted by georgetang

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

"Bitter? Table for one." Snow Leopard is very solid. No issues as you refer to. You must have no idea how to use a computer.

[BertP]

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

…QuartzCore and graphic driver components…][/url][/c]

I really have not had many problems with SL, and it definitely improved the performance of my iMac. Really like the new screen recording feature in QuickTime X.

However, I do experience some jerky screen behavior with Zoom, which did not exist in Leopard. My iMac has an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro card. Somehow, this behavior got introduced in SL.

This new point release should reflect fixes to user complaints from the field for the first time, so it should be more robust.

[steviet02]

Originally Posted by solipsism

That is not the typical way to do it. Apple made the steps for installing OS X much easier. Your problems are obviously not representative of the majority. Sucks that you have them, but you might to look in other places for answers instead of just saying Snow Leopard sucks.



They added tons of features. One’s inability to not directly see the feature does not mean it wasn’t added.

No, they didn't add tons of features. They re-wrote alot of code. Big difference. And BTW, I wasn't the one that said it sucks. I agreed that the performance and stability were not impressive to me so far.

[Quadra 610]

Originally Posted by rickguilfoil

"Bitter? Table for one." Snow Leopard is very solid. No issues as you refer to. You must have no idea how to use a computer.

It's deliberate. He's trolling.

[georgetang]

Migrating from 10.4 to 10.5 was smooth like butter....

Nothing crash as often as I am today with 10.6....

Fresh install might be a solution, but never had to do a clean install from 10.3 to 10.4 and then to 10.5....

So, now? I have to? Systems hangs most of them time under 10.6.... and I always have Activity Monitor open to monitor what's going on, and most of the time, it's either because Free memory goes to less than 100MB...

BTW, I have 4GB RAM DDR3 from Factory on my current Unibody MBP

There are several times programs showing red with not responding and this happened once in a while in 10.5, but it's happening several times per day under 10.6

Right now at this moment I have only 6 tabs under Safari, and the memory is taking close to 600MB (Real Memory) and under 62MB from Flash Player (Safari Plug-in)....

And in the past running 10.5, I hardly ever had to restart my MBP.... now with 10.6 I am force to do so several times per week, because the system does not response...

Especially after coming back from sleep mode or hibernation mode (secure sleep mode)...

[MacCrazy]

I am an experienced Mac user, I have been using Macs since 1991 and I must admit Snow Leopard is not as good as I had hoped. I have not really noticed any speed improvements, apart from startup and shutdown times. Time Machine seems to be backing up a lot more than it used to, not a problem itself but when it does my entire system becomes noticeably slower. I sometimes have to wait over a minute for an open/save/print dialogue box.

My girlfriend has updated to Snow Leopard and has noticed the same problems. I have other friends who have had major issues with programs no longer working reliably and the machines being generally unstable. We are all designers who use CS3 or CS4 and I'm sure a lot of issues could be due to Adobe not doing thorough testing but problems are occurring in Apple's own apps too. I regularly get a video card error when creating a new tab in Safari for example.

However, if I look back I remember there being problems with Leopard and Tiger immediately after released and I think that's just the nature of upgrading early. If only my geeky nature would let me wait the few months needed to iron out all the bugs testing cannot uncover.

[Mazda 3s]

Snow Leopard is OK, but I have been getting 30 second beachballs in the OS ever since firmware 1.7 with my June '09 13" MacBook Pro in its default configuration and with an SSD. Apple simply won't respond to the issue even though there's a 118-page thread regarding the matter on their support forums.

[alansky]

There are a number of very annoying bugs in 10.6.1 that are well-documented on the Apple Discussions forum. One could hope that the latest build of 10.6.2 has "no known issues" because Apple has fixed the bugs and not merely ignored them.

[mrkoolaid]

What is all of this complaining about? I personally find Snow Leopard to be the best bang for $29 I've ever spent.

[hzc]

As much as I love Time Machine, it can be quite problematic at times. I welcome any updates to it.

I hope 10.6.2 brings us back one step closer to "it just works". Don't get me wrong, OS X is still the BEST operating system out there and I thoroughly enjoy using SL.

Rock on!

[gearhunter]

Originally Posted by georgetang

From the first Mac OS X....

You notice improvement and enhancement.... So far Leopard is the best, and Snow Leopard sucks...

Crash all the time, and make everything else crash...

And has become like Microsoft Windows, whopping tons of memory for nothing....

Worst OS by far....

Leopard is the best....

Are you running it on a Psystar machine?

[Robodude]

Snow Leopard is hardly perfect, performing a clean install made it work like 'it should', fixed issues with Finder, iPhoto and Safari (haven't tried Mail). While not a bad experience by any means, some ironing out would've helped as most would simply upgrade rather than clean install.

[DJRumpy]

Originally Posted by hzc

As much as I love Time Machine, it can be quite problematic at times. I welcome any updates to it.

I hope 10.6.2 brings us back one step closer to "it just works". Don't get me wrong, OS X is still the BEST operating system out there and I thoroughly enjoy using SL.

Rock on!

I find the best way to use Time Machine is to disable the auto-schedule, and just kick it off when I really want a backup. If it had any sort of scheduling options, it would be a bit more palatable to use. It's an awesome backup product. It just needs some features other than On/Off.

[mrkoolaid]

Originally Posted by DJRumpy

I find the best way to use Time Machine is to disable the auto-schedule, and just kick it off when I really want a backup. If it had any sort of scheduling options, it would be a bit more palatable to use. It's an awesome backup product. It just needs some features other than On/Off.

I find there is no need to run Time Machine as my Macs running Snow Leopard never crash.

[hyunbum11128]

they better fix internet problem if it is software issue

[MacTripper]

I'm not beta testing any more OS X builds without getting paid for it.

Updates to 150 components? Apple is off it's rocker, call the medics.


All Apple has to do is get a fleet of volunteers to beta test the new OS before release, it's been impossible to keep it under wraps anyway, so what's the problem?

Give a full version for compensation of reports etc. A mere $30, big deal.

I can just imagine all the support calls Apple is generating and the damage done to "It just works". thats costing Apple plenty.

[PaulMJohnson]

I've actually been a little disapointed with Snow Leopard. Whilst things for me have not been as bad as the first poster suggests, there have been issues. I had bother with my printer, Safari crashes quite a lot, I get the beachball quite a bit when I open new Finder windows. I've not seen the guest account/deleted data issue, but it's a concern to me.

It's nothing that bad to be honest, and I'm prepared to put up with a few glitches in the early days of a new OS, especially when so much of the code has been re-written.

I do think that the release of Leopard was better though. That was the first upgrade of a Mac operating system I'd ever done, and I'm still amazed at how smooth the install went and how stable everything was.

Apple are in the odd position now that they have set the bar so high, a slight slip-up is news.....

[DJRumpy]

Originally Posted by mrkoolaid

I find there is no need to run Time Machine as my Macs running Snow Leopard never crash.

You do realize that backups are also for hardware failure? More so than any simple OS crash. It's foolish to think you don't need a backup.

[DJRumpy]

Originally Posted by PaulMJohnson

I've actually been a little disapointed with Snow Leopard. Whilst things for me have not been as bad as the first poster suggests, there have been issues. I had bother with my printer, Safari crashes quite a lot, I get the beachball quite a bit when I open new Finder windows. I've not seen the guest account/deleted data issue, but it's a concern to me.

It's nothing that bad to be honest, and I'm prepared to put up with a few glitches in the early days of a new OS, especially when so much of the code has been re-written.

I do think that the release of Leopard was better though. That was the first upgrade of a Mac operating system I'd ever done, and I'm still amazed at how smooth the install went and how stable everything was.

Apple are in the odd position now that they have set the bar so high, a slight slip-up is news.....

Why all of this concern about the guest account? If you don't need it, you should be turning off the guest account anyway. Problem solved.

[MacCrazy]

Originally Posted by DJRumpy

You do realize that backups are also for hardware failure? More so than any simple OS crash. It's foolish to think you don't need a backup.

I assumed mrkoolaid was joking.

[antosh]

Anyone know if the OS updates ever include RAW compatibility changes, or are these only delivered separately as the 'Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Updates'?

I've just got a Panasonic GF1 and not only does Aperture not yet support the Panasonic RW2 raw format, but somehow Apple have managed to break DNG-from-Panasonics support in Mac OS/Preview/Aperture (in update 2.6) - so even if I use Adobe DNG convertor, the resulting DNGs aren't recognised!

Alternatively, anyone know of a workaround for this? It's driving me up the wall since I really don't like the obvious option, Lightroom...

Thanks

[MacCrazy]

Originally Posted by DJRumpy

Why all of this concern about the guest account? If you don't need it, you should be turning off the guest account anyway. Problem solved.

It is a really bad bug and completely unacceptable. It's worrying that there's still no fix for it to be honest.