Review roundup: Snow Leopard sports subtle improvements

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Comments

  • Reply 141 of 169
    ivan.rnn01ivan.rnn01 Posts: 1,822member
    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?
  • Reply 142 of 169
    philipmphilipm Posts: 240member
    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.
  • Reply 143 of 169
    mcarlingmcarling Posts: 1,106member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Multimedia View Post


    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?



    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.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Multimedia View Post


    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?



    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.
  • Reply 144 of 169
    jensonbjensonb Posts: 532member
    I think the most important question is...



    Where the hell's my damn Ars Technica review?
  • Reply 145 of 169
    abster2coreabster2core Posts: 2,501member
    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.
  • Reply 146 of 169
    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.
  • Reply 147 of 169
    ilogicilogic Posts: 298member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by fourthletter View Post


    You do know that thousand of apps run on XP 64bit & Vista 64bit & Windows 7 64bit.

    Pretty much everything works in 64 Bit windows it just lacks 64 bit drivers for old equipment, which is considerably older than Power G5s.

    But happily forget that Steve Jobs told us first that Tiger was a 64 bit OS then Leopard and now finally we have Snow Leopard which is definitely a 64Bit OS, umm apart from the 32Bit Kernel that will run on most non-pro Macs.

    Jesus the 64bit move has been long and hard and both sides are doing very little to make it simple.



    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.
  • Reply 148 of 169
    iqatedoiqatedo Posts: 1,822member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mcarling View Post


    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.



    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.
  • Reply 149 of 169
    ilogicilogic Posts: 298member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tauron View Post


    The next Mac OS will be called (drumroll):



    Mac OS X 10.7 Pussy



    when Steve retires that's when Lion should roll-out, then they should license OSX.
  • Reply 150 of 169
    What? No mention that OS X now sports at least elements of SIX different interfaces all jumbled together?
  • Reply 151 of 169
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by ilogic View Post


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



    that's right, enough of these minor .point releases....
  • Reply 152 of 169
    c2poonc2poon Posts: 38member
    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.
  • Reply 153 of 169
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by c2poon View Post


    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.



    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 you?d get that much. I saved about 12GB on mine.
  • Reply 154 of 169
    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.
  • Reply 155 of 169
    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".
  • Reply 156 of 169
    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.



  • Reply 157 of 169
    multimediamultimedia Posts: 1,035member
    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?
  • Reply 158 of 169
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Multimedia View Post


    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.
  • Reply 159 of 169
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Multimedia View Post


    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?



    QuickTime X has absolutely no preferences at this point. You can?t 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 wasn?t 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.
  • Reply 160 of 169
    multimediamultimedia Posts: 1,035member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Logisticaldron View Post


    QuickTime X has absolutely no preferences at this point. You can’t 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 wasn’t 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? \
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