Review roundup: Snow Leopard sports subtle improvements - Page 4

OSX Big Pussycat..?

Brilliant, I love that tag line!

I think I recall PCWorld having some pretty favorable reviews of Macs, especially since the switch to Intel processors.

Keep living in your little world

That is, in your little dream world

There, fixed.

To ne more accurate with that analogy, Vista pre-SP1 was a very heavy, clunky car with a lot of weighty features and a lot of mechanical problems. The mechanical problems were fixed with SP1 so that it's now a good version of Windows if you have a powerful enough engine for all those hefty features. Win7 on the other hand is mainly Vista SP1's engine with very few tweaks, but with a lot of the weighter features taken of the chassis so it has the appearance of being faster.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! he is Sooooo Soooo wrong i want to go to the AP and throw $hit in his face to match all the other parts of his body which is Ooosing Micro$hit from every orifice on this A-hole- that he can't smell the roses -- how much is Micro$hit paying this guy??!? is he for real???

Windoze 98, 2000, XP, Me, VISTA crap has NEVER EVER caught up to Apple's great OS experience and they never will and when Windoze 7 comes out with all the BUGGY CRAP they always produce I want Mr. Peter Svensson to shove it up his A$$... so keep eating that Micro$hit Mr. Peter Svensson

Like The Donger always say, It is good for girl to meet boy in park, but better for boy to park meat in girl.

No more time for you. Donger need food!

I'll be picking up SL tomorrow at the Apple Store in Fresno, but honestly, I'm not expecting much.

It will be nice and all, that Finder is re-written and faster, speed improvements to networking, QT, some under-the-hood, etc, but I already have Safari 4 big whoop, and many of the major improvements in SL will not be in it for me, as while I have an Intel Mac, I don't have a brand new Intel Mac (I have the Mini with the GMA 950).

If it wasn't $29, I would say screw it, and stick with Leopard. But for $29, I have nothing really to lose, and speedups and less beachballing can't hurt. Maybe by the time 10.7 rolls around, I'll get a new Mac, and be floored, but this does seem like more of a lateral update, depending on what Mac SL is being installed on.

"Benefits for blind users: one new feature turns the trackpad into a "touchable map of the screen,"

Anyone else see foreshadowing of the fabled iTablet?

That sentence is such a huge lie it makes my skin crawl.

What planet is he living on? Like comparing a 2010 Mercedes Benz to a 1995 Yugo clunker as if the Yugo is way better.
Leopard has been running on most of those older Macs for 2 years already which is great for them considering how their hardware is more than 4 years old. Plus their hardware architecture is not modern 64-bit. It's like he fails to recognize computing technology evolution.
LOL. Snow Leopard's benefits will be IMMEDIATELY apparent - FASTER - and get even more apparent every day of the road less traveled. Duh.
I see he can read minds. If anything, Snow Leopard gives consumers even that much more of a reason to want to buy a Mac over a Windows 7 PC still mired in a foundation of DOS.
All the reports we've been getting from developers with the final version indicate there are few bugs and even fewer installation problems. There's no reason to delay immediate early adoption. I can't think of any. Can anyone here?

Peter Svensson is an irresponsible Microsoft Troll.

My copy arrives tomorrow morning FedEx Overnight Standard. So Stoked.

These AP & USA Today idiots must have never actually used win7. I installed the 64bit version on my winbox (losebox, whatever) and it is slower than molasses in a Siberian winter, plus it takes forever to load. XP is much faster (I have Athlon 2.7 core2duo, maybe I need two or three 6ghz quad cores).

All it is, is eye candy and it's nasty surgary, sickly candy at that. So far I cannot find a good reason to keep it on there to be honest, except my XP install is corrupted by some crappy HD software I installed on it - so I don't want to roll back to that. I never used Vista because everyone said it sucks, so I don't know how big an improvement win7 could be over that. But if they are going to "unleash" win7, watch out, don't blink or you will miss the tortoise race. 123...... pfffft...... where did it go? oh it's not out of the gate yet.....duh.

I'm still running Tiger on my early intel MBP and it gets along just fine. I'll upgrade to SL after you all are done testing it..... if it is all that and the dog's biscuit, then the $229 family pack may be the way I will go so my brother can have it too.

Apple admitted today that the $29 - $25 on Amazon - Snow Leopard DVD will let you install it on any Intel Mac even if it's just got Tiger on it or it's just a blank HD. So you don't need to wait. And you don't need to pay all that extra money for the expensive paks.

Please forgive me if this is covered elsewhere. I have just upgraded a MacBook Pro 5,3 - 3.06 GHz, 4 GB RAM (July 2009) and the system profiler shows that it is not running a 64 bit kernel or extensions. Performed an installation over the top of 10.5.7 without setting any options. Is this result to be expected?

Regards.

Edit - so this is to be expected

Absolutely. If you want a 64-bit kernel then go for it. Do some comparitive testing to see startups and app launching speeds.

While everyone here knows iam pro apple but call it like it is, said prices would drop, slower glu in snow, and more, even I am taken aback by the windows comments. Why are theses reviewers mentioing windows?


NE way I have a problem. If i have logic 8 and rapid weaver installed on a partition 10.5.7 and do a migration from that to a disk that's 10.5.8 with logic 9 and NO rapid weaver. What happens? Will osx leave logic 9 alone, copy both, what Bout my iPhoto library, which I will back up but would prefer that any duplicates, it just skips.

Advice needed.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by AppleInsider
The Associated Press' Peter Svensson:

Snow Leopard not as big of an improvement as Windows 7.


No brainer ! ! !
VISTA desperately needed "big" improvements.

Yes, 10.6 installs both the 32-bit and, where possible, 64-bit kernels. By default, everything but the X-serve boot the 32-bit kernel. Hold down the 6 and 4 keys while booting to boot with the 64-bit kernel.

My guess is that 10.7 will also include both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels, but will boot the 64-bit kernel by default on all systems that are 64-bit clean. I expect 10.8 to drop the 32-bit kernels altogether and run only on systems that are 64-bit clean.

This is the first I've learned of this boot option. Will this way of booting speed up the system on pure 64-bit hardware? I'm on early 2008 Harpertown Penryn Mac Pros and 45 nm Penryn C2D MacBook & MacBook Pro which I believe are all true 64-bit models. Will this way of booting make some programs not work that do work when booting from the 32-bit kernel?

How are you a Mac user since August 1983 when Macs didn't come to market until January 1984 when I started being a Mac user? Were you on the Mac development team at Apple?

What I will never get is why on earth Boot Camp and the possibility to run Windows, being so hated on the surface, is "specially welcome" and is put in the very first sections of articles, even in abstracts.
For decades of having been using Macs at home for pleasure I never had any vaguest need in some Windows stuff.
Does it mean all your Macs are actually your office machines, which you can never afford for yourself? Are you fluent with Mac OS? Can you really use it?

Compare this with the average commercial OS upgrade. Big improvements under the hood, low price. I'm sick of the expectation that we should go gaga over eye candy and feature bloat.

Really happy to pay a low price for something that works better.

Good on Apple, as they say in the land of Oz.

In theory, your Mac should run a little faster and be less vulnerable to some kinds of attacks when running the 64-bit kernel. However, the 64-bit kernels may be rock-solid, but don't have the benefit of years of real-world use by many millions of users that the 32-bit kernels have. I'm fairly risk-averse when it comes to kernels, so I'll probably try booting the 64-bit kernel with 10.6.2 or so if there are no reports of stability problems. If it's rock-solid stable for a month, then I'll make it the default.


Good guess, but not correct. I didn't keep a copy of the NDA and I don't remember the terms, so I'm not comfortable answering in any more detail -- despite the passage of 26 years. Sorry.

I think the most important question is...

Where the hell's my damn Ars Technica review?

Could you image the impact by the so-called auto experts if GM announced that they could provide the same relative increase in performance and improvement that Snow Leopard offers over Leopard for a one-time price of $29 for their vehicles?

Now imagine the response of the experts not owning a GM vehicle.

While excited about the potential performance enhancements and all, I am super excited about Exchange Support.

I am picking up SL today simply so I can shitcan that horrible piece of crap called Entourage.

Hey, many of us appreciate knowledgeability on a topic, and interesting opinions, but when expressing indifference and using a persons name, whether it be a mortal, a deity, or a group of people, it's uncalled for and rude. Would you use your loved one's / child's name to preface and indifference. Thanks.

Thanks very much for the heads-up - interesting.

My company used the Lisa and then went straight to Macs when they were released. I bought one from them for $50, a 512 k Mac.

All the best.

when Steve retires that's when Lion should roll-out, then they should license OSX.

What? No mention that OS X now sports at least elements of SIX different interfaces all jumbled together?

that's right, enough of these minor .point releases....

I have been waiting for this new OS ever since the rumours about it came about. I have always liked the idea of a more efficient and refined OS.

In regards to shipping, I am surprised it arrived at my door today (I'm in Canada). Pretty quick service, considering I only selected standard shipping. I'm surprised the box that it was shipped-in via Purolator was so big - a waste of space if you ask me.

Installed Snow Leopard on my early 2008 Macbook Pro - install took about 50 minutes. However, the first installation quit mid-way saying my disk was dirty. It worked the second time of course.

Some first impressions:

After install, I saved 20 GBs on my HD! I'm not sure how that happened, as most are consistently reporting a savings of about 7 GB.

The new Quicktime is quite lovely, and I always do enjoy some of the desktop backgrounds provided with a new OS.

The new stacks update is pretty cool, and quite practical for my purposes with finding files.

I'm curious about those Chinese characters that can be written using the trackpad.

Hope you enjoy the new OS as much as I am. Peace out Apple Insiderz.

I think that is from a base install, but if you did a full install with all the goodies and had a lot of apps, maybe Apple apps installed, that youd get that much. I saved about 12GB on mine.

One thing I think may be causing some confusion about the amount of HDD space people think they're saving is this. In SL, Apple calculates KB, MB and GB in multiples of 1,000 bytes and not 1,024 bytes as has traditionally been the case. A new 500GB drive will now show 500GB free instead of ~488GB like it used to show. Existing files will now be reported as having a correspondingly larger file size than before (though the actual number of bytes is the same) and more free space will be reported as well.

Finder reported I gained 45.2GB when I installed SL today. I gained just over 12GB in reality - still quite good.

I'm not saying this is the case here but I'm hearing from many people who think they now have much more free space than they actually do. Either way you slice it, it's the same - more free space but each file is larger vs. less free space but each file is smaller. You still run out of space at the same time.

I think I would agree with most of their reviews, and Im still debating if its worth me buying a copy of SL or if I would just be doing it because its new for Apple. After all every other time they've claimed a speed increase in something I've never been able to notice the difference. Im also not running out of hard disk space and if I was I could always just delete all the files that don't need to be in Leopard that according to an older article on AI is where a lot of the space savings came from anyway.

Compared to Win7 I would say SL is more of a service pack. Fine there may be all this stuff "under the hood" but how many programs that I use actually use any of those things. Do any Adobe products? We no Microsofts ones certainly don't. With most of the world also still using XP that also kinda prooves that where we going to almost a decade ago to a large extent is also all people need.

Win7 also does have a better new features list. Fine people can say its crap you don't need, but in all the last iterations of OS X we were getting excited about crap in OS X we didn't really need, and I happen to think the new ways to organize windows looks quite cool.

Lastly maybe the deciding factor on SL will be if it fix's all the bugs in Leopard. I only use it at home which makes it odd that i constantly have to force quit apps, or I'll get issues where Safari just stops loading pages. Lets hope we can return to the good old days of OS X where Apple could claim "It just works".

I've put together 23 tweaks that I noticed since installation on my blog

They include:

Preview.app has numerous improvements, specifically around cropping, usability and annotations.

Various animation changes - specifically in Finder and Spaces.

System Preference tweaks - Firewall settings simplified.

Anyone know where the Quicktime System Preferences went? I installed the legacy Quicktime as well as the new one. But I can't figure out where the Quicktime Preferences are now. Anyone know?

That's just the way it is.

QuickTime X has absolutely no preferences at this point. You cant even use Control J to access some cool controls. QuickTime 7 has preferences in the app and all the cool editing features I have been missing since moving to Snow Leopard several months ago (QT 7 wasnt an option until the last beta. ) If you wish to get the Pro features of QuickTime 7 the Registration option is accessed in the app.

Yes my QT 7 Pro registration stayed with my new install. So QT X is a work in progress?

I did notice I was able to save originally Windows Media Video files that had been saved as .mov files to iPhone Movie files without the Flip4Mac watermark anymore. That's a big improvement. QT X appears to transcode Windows Media Videos on the fly when you expose a folder full of them and then they become native QT X files I think. That's very cool. But I'm just mucking around in here. I'm not sure what I just wrote is true or not. Can I get a witness?

Also is it just me or did we lose the largest font size in Address Book? Large looks a lot tinier to me now. Wasn't there a 4th Very Large font size choice in the Leopard Address Book preferences? \