Snow Leopard performance improvements are there, but small

hear hear max howell

also, what a fascinating discussion following this article. much more informative than the article itself and the linked benchmarks, which as a few of you have pointed out uses very poor research methods and is therefore about as useful as anecdotal reports about speed improvements (which can actually be useful, the entire consensus of the many people i speak to about snow leopard is that the OS is faster).

to add to what max said, like most surveys and consumer research which pervades the internet and other media, the reader is treated gullibly. i say this because the "researcher" has approached the data/statistics with a lack of thoroughness, and (most of the time) the reader acts just as gullibly as they have been treated, tending to believe almost blindly the results quoted and then stating them as fact. how easily most of us are persuaded. Unfortunately this article so clearly exemplifies that there are extreme nuisance variables which have not even been discussed by the researchers, which may have greatly affected the results (hard disk access times, indexing/background processes, 32 vs 64 bit, to name a few mentioned).

I upgraded my Leopard on my 2Ghz (2GB RAM) Macbook to SL and I've noticed that the overall system feels "snappier."

FCP handles AVIs much better... a 20 minute audio render is now only 2 minutes.

I also claimed back 10GB of space... pretty impressive, I must say!

i got snow leopard installed with an upgrade and everything is working aokay

Definitely looking forward to those extra 6 GB... Can't wait for it to finally arrive in the mail!

Install this arvo (downunder), everything is much snappier, even Office lacks the significant lag it used to have on startup. Stacks improvements work well, has given my '07 iMac new life. AUD39 well spent!

Who cares what some empirical study in Macworld posits?!? If Steve says Snow Leopard is faster then Snow Leopard is faster for me. I don't have to see it. I don't even have to buy it. Snow Leopard is already making my Mac faster and I don't even have it. Steve told me so.

So. Apple maintains an OS that has, for as long as I can remember, been priced at $129 or so. And, with this latest update, they were really rather up-front about the fact that there weren't going to be as many easy-to-see or compelling "new features," but that it was a near-total re-write of the whole OS for quality, performance, and future-planning reasons. Considering these facts, they shaved $100 off the price.

I dunno, maybe you're right and people are "defending" Snow Leopard for all the wrong reasons. Me, I know why it's worth it. And I know full well that I'm not buying it to speed up my computer.

I'm sure you're correct: people will completely fail to understand what they've paid their $29 for. They'll completely forget that Apple lowered the price by $100 for the express reason that there really aren't many new things in there that are readily apparent or compelling.

But that's not the point of Snow Leopard. An operating system re-write of this magnitude is a "plan for the future" type of move. Not only that, but Apple has been trying to get developers to adopt Cocoa for years, even though Apple themselves hadn't ported the majority of their code off of Carbon. Probably because of this, there are some things that COULDN'T be done with Cocoa frameworks, only in Carbon. That needs to be fixed, and I'd imagine Snow Leopard is a catalyst for forward movement.

Me? I'd gladly pay $29 simply to re-claim the gigabytes that all the Rosetta and PPC compatibility crap used to suck up. (though, full disclosure, I'm eligible for the up-to-date program, so I'll only be paying the $9.95 fee)

Hey, does anyone know if Snow Leopard OS X Mail is a little less spazzy about the number of IMAP threads it leaves open? Leopard keeps four or so open all the time, which plays havoc with process-limited hosting accounts. (I'm not using the technical terms here, but you should be able to get my drift....)

Thanks!

Sounds like an odd set of results – every other piece I've read about Snow Leopard specifically mentions wake-from-sleep as being dramatically *faster*, not slower, in Snow Leopard. Andy Ihnatko's review, for instance: http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/1737229,ihnatko-apple-snow-leopard-review-082609.article (Incidentally, he did a similar test with a partitioned disk and seemingly got very different answers.)