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Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) previous version of its Mac OS X operating system, Leopard, was already great, so what does Apple's latest upgrade -- Snow Leopard -- bring to the table? More importantly, is it worth bothering with? I've been using Snow Leopard since FedEx brought it to me late last month, and at the upgrade price of just US$29, yes, it's worth getting. Not convinced?
First of all, you should know going into a Snow Leopard upgrade that you're not going to come out it oohing and awing over any major new features. No, Snow Leopard's value comes from all the little things most users never even see -- the hundreds of under-the-covers refinements that will make your Mac snappier and more stable than ever. Snow Leopard is half the size it was before and can free up to 7 GB of drive space over its Leopard predecessor. In fact, Apple says its engineers refined 90 percent of more than 1,000 projects that make up Mac OS X.
The result:
The Finder is more responsive (definitely snappier with fewer spinning beach balls). Mail loads messages up to twice as fast (yup, I experienced this too, with a Mail program packed with thousands of messages and a variety of accounts and folders). Time Machine boasts an up to 80 percent faster initial backup (didn't try this fresh, but Time Machine picked up where it left off in Leopard just fine --but it does seem to make faster backup updates than it used to).
The first thing I noticed that was different was that my built-in desktop background photo had changed from my previous stone pebble photo to a new stone pebble photo, and the old stone pebble file was nowhere to be found in Snow Leopard. Surprising, but not a big deal.
The New Exposé -- Was That Fast?
Exposé has changed in at least two new ways. First, on my black MacBook, it's much faster than before. It's so fast, in fact, that I find it a little disconcerting. Previously, when I had a dozen or more files and browser windows open, I could flick my mouse to a designated hot corner to invoke Exposé and my brain could follow the shrinking and exploding view of my desktop. So as I was looking for a particular document, I could see it as it was shrinking and finding its place in the Exposé presentation. Now, Exposé does its thing so quickly that I have to scan the results to find my files or windows. Yeah, it's a bittersweet improvement.
Second, Exposé now includes dock integration. Previously, Exposé would only shrink and display the open windows on your desktop; now Exposé creates images of your open files, apps or windows that have been docked. The presentation is a horizontal list just above the bottom default position of the dock. This new feature is handy when you forget if you minimized something or if your workspace gets cluttered.
While we're at it, if you know which document or window type you want to find, you can click and hold on the icon in the Dock and only the files for that application will show up in Exposé. Looking for an open Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Word document? Click and hold the Word icon in the Dock and only Word files will appear. Nice.
Stacks, which gives you the handy pop-up list of file icons in your Downloads folder on the Dock, is now much more customizable for both look as well as behavior. Personally, I'm a big fan of sorting the downloaded files by the date in which I downloaded them, making recent files pop to the top of the list.
Meanwhile, restarts seem to be at least twice as fast, if not faster, plus my MacBook wakes from sleep quicker and shuts down faster. Apple says wake-ups are twice as fast, while shut-down is 1.8 times as fast. For those who are aware of Apple's built-in Disk Utility application, some of its actions are faster, too. Repairing disk permissions is much faster than before, and the long list of pesky permission errors that were noted by Leopard but left alone is now gone. Granted, they weren't causing any problems before, but their very presence, noted in black and white, could be a bit disconcerting for Mac owners.
QuickTime X
The new QuickTime in Snow Leopard includes a cool sleek new player, which lets you lightly edit your (unprotected) movie files directly from the app itself. This is handy for snipping out the boring portions of home video clips, but it goes one move better -- after snipping, you can easily publish to MobileMe or YouTube. Quite handy for those of us who are into that.
In addition, the player will now also let you record audio and video using the ubiquitous built-in cameras on MacBooks and iMacs. Video blogging just got easier than ever.
Plus -- while most people might not have an immediate use for this feature -- you can also create screencasts of actions taken on a Mac, which should make it easier for people to make tutorials, which may in fact end up helping Mac owners learn new applications. Plus, the ability may be used by instructors for creating video lectures or podcasts for any topic.
Tons of Subtleties
In Snow Leopard, there are lots of tiny little refinements, like the ability to page through a PDF and other types of multipage files directly from within the finder. Two overlay arrows appear when you have the opportunity, but beware: If you click the arrows too quickly, Snow Leopard will interpret your action not as a fast page switch but as a double-click that will launch the application and open the file -- which was what you were presumably trying to avoid in the first place.
Another tidbit I like is the ability to show the date in the tool bar (top right). Previously, you could only show the time. Of course, there are other features which I couldn't care less about but which may appeal to others. Take, for instance, the restore feature for the Trash. If you toss a file in the trash, you can restore it to its original location using a new Put Back command from the File menu. Personally, this would be a heckuva lot more handy if you could simply select a file and hit the Delete key to send it to the trash.
For users who have attempted to eject external disk drives and run into slow responses, Apple says it has fixed this little problem, too.
Safari is now 64-bit, twice as fast, and more resistant to crashes. I haven't noticed it being particularly extra speedy, but after several days of browsing with lots of open windows and tabs, it hasn't crashed once. Apple says it's more resistant to faulty plug-ins or pages. Previously, Safari tended to crash after a long day of hard use, which may have had nothing to do with the hard use -- just the likelihood of finding an incompatible Web page.
Of course, there's much more, and while most people will only care about a few items, Apple has a variety of Web pages that outline the refinements and enhancements. To learn more about the under-the-cover elements that lead to better OS X performance, namely Apple's transition to 64-bit computing, Grand Central Dispatch, and Open CL, there's a page for that, too.
For enterprise customers, Snow Leopard now includes built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server, which will make it easier to use Mail, iCal, and Address Book to access Exchange services. Basically, Mac users can communicate with their PC-using colleagues in an enterprise without needing to leave their Apple productivity apps behind.
The Upgrade Process
There are several schools of thought on the upgrade process. One is to do a clean install, then migrate your files, applications, and settings from a backup disk or Time Machine (by the way, there are two backup applications, Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper!, that are widely used for creating bootable backup drives, and both work well).
The other major option is to simply do an upgrade install of Snow Leopard over your previous installation of Leopard -- this is following the basic default steps on the Snow Leopard DVD. For my Snow Leopard upgrade, I made a bootable backup copy of my entire hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (this, in addition to having a Time Machine backup, too) then forged ahead with the basic upgrade. I chose to not install a gob of printer drivers I don't use, electing to install drivers for only the printers near my machine. The installer told me the process would take 45 minutes or so. Rather than babysit it, I left. When I came back a couple of hours later, my MacBook was upgraded and ready to roll. There were obviously no problems that required my interaction. I did the same thing with an older white MacBook, and it, too, upgraded without a hitch.
I did run into one problem: I lost the printer driver to my HP (NYSE: HPQ) OfficeJet all-in-one printer, fax and scanner. I had to reinstall that manually, but I consider it a small price to pay for not having to install gobs of printer drivers I'll never use.
On the down side, Snow Leopard is only available for Intel-based Macs, so if you've got an older PowerPC-based Mac, make sure you don't buy a Snow Leopard upgrade. I've got an old titanium PowerBook G4 that's still kicking, and while it would be nice to reclaim 7 GB or so of hard drive space there, it'll never happen.
Overall, while Snow Leopard is an excellent upgrade, it's hardly mandatory for Leopard users. It won't revolutionize how you interact with your Mac, but like I noted above, at $29 the price is right. Kind of silly not to upgrade, really, which seems to be Apple's intent.
