Filed under: Reviews, Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard reviews roundup
With only a few hours more to wait until the packages start arriving and the stores start selling Snow Leopard, the reviews are beginning to pour in. To summarize: it's faster, it's (mostly) stable, yay new Finder, mostly yay new QuickTime (good thing you can still install the QuickTime 7 player), and in the words of our colleagues at Engadget: "Here's the thing about Snow Leopard, the single inescapable fact that hung over our heads as we ran our tests and took our screenshots and made our graphs: it's $30. $30!"
- Uncle Walt Mossberg at AllThingsD: "Overall, I believe Snow Leopard will help keep the Mac an appealing choice for computer buyers, and I can recommend it to existing Mac owners seeking more speed and disk space, or wanting to more easily use Exchange. But I don't consider Snow Leopard a must-have upgrade for average consumers. It's more of a nice-to-have upgrade. If you're happy with Leopard, there's no reason to rush out and get Snow Leopard."
- Gizmodo's Brian Lam: "Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible."
- Macworld's Jason Snell: "Failing a massive makeover, then, we've got to take joy in the little gifts that Snow Leopard gives us. And there are a lot of them. I'd like to pick my favorite, but the fact is, they're all small enough that I can't really choose one. But if I could gather up the whole lot of them in my arms, I'd give them a hug."
- Ed Baig at USA Today: "In my experience, Mac OS X was already a superior operating system to Windows. With Exchange and other technologies, Snow Leopard adds bite, especially for business. But as upgrades go, this one is relatively tame."
- Wired's Brian X. Chen: "This upgrade won't deliver any radical interface changes to blow you away (not that we would want it to), but the price is more than fair for the number of performance improvements Snow Leopard delivers."
- Jason Parker at CNET: "Overall, we think that Snow Leopard did almost everything Apple says it set out to do: it refined and enhanced Leopard to make it easier to use. Though the system performs well in everyday use, many of our tests indicate it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more intensive application processes. Still, we highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Exchange support."
- David Pogue in the NYT: "[I]f you're already running Leopard, paying the $30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer. You'll feel the leap forward in speed polish, and you'll keep experiencing those "oh, that's nice" moments for weeks to come. If you're running something earlier, the decision isn't as clear cut; you'll have to pay $170 and get Snow Leopard with Apple's creative-software suites -- whether you want them or not. Either way, the big story here isn't really Snow Leopard. It's the radical concept of a software update that's smaller, faster and better -- instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint."
- ...and the aforementioned Engadget review, with lots of delightful videos (captured with QuickTime X's new screencasting feature).
If you've got Snow Leopard questions, we've got answers. Throw a comment in this post, send us a tweet over at the Ask TUAW account, or visit over on the Facebook page. We're also hoping to put together a late-night Friday liveblog to take live feedback from upgraders, and then we'll be live again Sunday night for the talkcast where it will be all Snow Leopard, all the time.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Just Cause said 11:34AM on 8-27-2009
Anyone seeing a networking bug in Snow Leopard, two MacBook Pros connected via Linksys router 100Mb take forever (minutes) to connect for screen sharing or AFP? Same two systems and cables under 10.5.8 it works fine or direct connect the two under 10.6 and it's fast.
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ryan said 11:42AM on 8-27-2009
I use a programming language called IDL. The software company that makes this also sells an image processing software call ENVI. I noticed that both of these applications are Power PC. Will they still run after I install Snow Leopard?
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bill said 11:43AM on 8-27-2009
I believe you'll have to choose to install Rosetta during your install under Customize.
Ryan Trevisol said 11:45AM on 8-27-2009
According to reports, Rosetta is not installed BY DEFAULT with Snow Leopard, but it works. You just have to choose it (I'm assuming there's a customize screen for the installer).
Scott said 11:48AM on 8-27-2009
I noticed a theme in the reviews. Several of the reviewers appeared to downplay the significance of Snow Leopard because it doesn't make significant interface changes to the OS. What they take for granted is that Apple's upgrade is easier on the casual computer user.
My parents, the typical "casual" users, never upgraded from Windows XP because of the significant changes to the user interface in Vista and now 7. They could have been the end-all-be-all of operating systems and they still wouldn't have upgraded willingly due to the need to relearn the OS.
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Scotty said 12:07PM on 8-27-2009
Scott hits it right on the nail. Then again, with a name like Scott, I really can't disagree.
Why does everything have to be extremely radical? What some of the reviewers don't understand in the "it just works" mantra is the central tenant: Don't confuse the user.
I still don't understand Office 2008's layout. In fact, when I can I jump over and use Apple's pages. I figure, if I have to learn a whole new layout I might as well as use one that is more efficient.
Change for change sakes and bigger/better/extreme is such an American ideology, whether for good or bad. What Steve understood with his one click mouse that often times less is more.
In so many ways, with Apple not changing the finder layout, nor adding new killer apps and streamlining and getting rid of old code is not mundane nor a simple maintenance fix. I consider it to be truly revolutionary.
Hutch said 11:50AM on 8-27-2009
If i get the upgrade, can I still clean install to a new hd in my macbook?
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Mo said 1:56PM on 8-27-2009
Yes.
harveylubin said 11:53AM on 8-27-2009
There are a lot of pleasant surprises added into Snow Leopard, but there is one very dumb change that has been intoduced, and unfortunately there is no option to change it.
Starting with Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to show disk and file sizes the same non-standard way that hard drive manufacturers have been advertising and selling their hard drives in order to convince people that they were buying larger hard drives than they were actually getting.
Bits, Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes, and Gigabytes etc. have always been measured as a multiple of 2. But with Snow Leopard all sizes are now calculated at a multiple of 10. This may not sound like much of a difference, but you may have noticed that the "Terabyte" hard drive that you buy is not a Terabyte at all.
A Terabyte = 2 to the 40th power bytes (1,099,511,627,776 bytes. But when you buy a "Terabyte" hard drive you are only getting 10 to the 12th power bytes (1,000,000,000,000 bytes). In other words you are getting almost 100GB less than an actual Terabyte. This is a huge difference.
Now if you had bought a Terabyte hard drive, it shows up as 1TB instead of the slightly over 900GB that showed up correctly in the Finder before. This also means that all of your files are now shown larger than they actually are. For example, a 3.77GB video file that I have now shows up in the Finder as 4.05GB. But if you open that video file in QuickTime Player it shows the correct file size as 3.77GB.
This isn't the only inconsistency. Although hard drives and files are now measured in the inflated base-10 numbers, your RAM still shows up correctly as real Gigabytes at base-2. For example, a 2GB DIMM still shows up as 2GB (2,147,483,648 bytes) NOT as 2.15GB using the same base-10 calculation that the hard drive manufacturers (and now Apple) use.
This makes no sense, and it just makes things that used to be very straight-forward confusing now.
IMHO the hard drive manufacturers should be mandated by the government to go back to selling hard drives with the actual storage sizes, rather than conning people with inflated numbers. Also, Apple should not be going along with what the hard drive manufacturers are doing, and supporting them in their immoral sales tactics.
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IQ said 12:32PM on 8-27-2009
You can't really complain that they're following ISO standards.
accolon said 1:53PM on 8-27-2009
You're wrong, although I understand what you're saying.
What you're referring to as "non-standard way" is indeed the standard for using those prefixes. If you're using base 2, the prefixes would be "kibi", "mebi" "gibi" and so on, "-bi" referring to "binary".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefixes
Kevin said 7:36PM on 8-27-2009
You certainly CAN complain if they are using one method to report the size for some things, and a different method to report the size of other things.
That's the sort of thing that causes expensive spacecraft to miss their target and crash in to the surface of Mars.
EMoShunz said 12:02PM on 8-27-2009
i want to hear some real examples of the upgrade process for people who have had leopard on for a year or so. is it really as good as they say, no clean install required?
on the other side, if a clean install is needed, can i use the upgrade disk i just ordered? cause the would suck if i can't.
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Just Cause said 12:14PM on 8-27-2009
I upgrade two systems, one went perfect, the other on a MacBook Pro C2D failed. So it's time to pull the backup out.
Binja said 2:21PM on 8-27-2009
You can use it in exactly the same way as you did your leopard disk. You can upgrade from leopard or tiger either erasing your drive or saving it. The install is even more seamless than leopard. I kept time machine backups of both of the systems I upgraded but did not need them because they were already functional as if nothing had happened upon startup. I had to look for the differences to be sure the upgrade worked on the leopard machine.
EMoShunz said 2:47PM on 8-27-2009
Binja, were both of yours upgrades? or was one a clean wipe? just curious if you saw more improvement one way over the other.
i ask because believe it or not, my imac is starting to get more and more beach balls, and get slower and slower (the same way windows would act before i'd wipe it... mind you that was every 3 months or so).
i guess i'm wondering if the upgrade will help... suppose i can try it, and if it doesn't work then wipe...
LD said 12:06PM on 8-27-2009
The CNET review seems to be the only one with performance tests that show Snow Leopard is slower.
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Lindsay said 12:10PM on 8-27-2009
A little while ago, there was a post about Snow Leopard possibly including netoworks (like Facebook) in your AddressBook... I haven't seen anything more about it, so am I right in assuming that the original idea was just a myth?
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Scotty said 12:14PM on 8-27-2009
It was a myth.
slakr007 said 12:49PM on 8-27-2009
The MacBreak Weekly guys hit on something that I think the reviewers are missing. Snow Leopard is about making OS X lean and mean, but it is also about OpenCL, Grand Central, making the OS fully 64-bit, etc. The price point may be about getting everyone on board immediately, so that Apple can say: "OK, now that you are all on 10.6, we are going to blow your minds with apps that take full advantage of everything we gave you for $29."
I agree with them that there seems to be a larger plan at work. The $29 upgrade is not simply because there were no major front-end features.
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