Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Posted on : 31-08-2009 | By : Erika Marie | In : Technology
Tags: Apple, Mac, Microsoft, operating system, Snow Leopard, software
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I wish I had a Mac. Perhaps some generous person at Apple will send me one to review, but I won’t hold my breath. Nevertheless, they have released enhancement software for Leopard.
Apple notes that the software is faster and runs smoother than the plain ol’ Leopard using Mac’s 64 bit hardware to its fullest extent. The so-called ”Grand Central Dispatch” is said to process applications at an accelerated speed.
QuickTime usually annoys the crap out of me but on the Snow Leopard, QuickTime X allows you to record video and audio. You can play a movie, click the Share button, and convert the movie into a file compatible for your iPhone, iTouch, iPod, and any other Apple device that might come around the corner. If you’re chatting away on your webcam and the other person is doing something interesting that you want to remember, you’re able to record that too! It also makes video editing a snap by allowing you to cut out clips as if you were looking at a movie reel.
There are several user interface tweaks and added capabilities that will make finding and accessing various files easier and faster than ever. If you’re using Microsoft Exchange 2007, Snow Leopard will allow you to connect to the Exchange Servers without having to go through any additional applications. Snow Leopard; however, was built for Intel Macs only, so PowerPC users will have to stick to their current functionality. If you do have an Intel Mac, this $29 upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard appears to be worth the money. If you don’t have Leopard already, you can purchase Snow Leopard for $169. What is Microsoft charging again? Can you believe $319.95 for Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 64-bit? Are you kidding me? Seriously? Why are they even still selling Vista?
My next computer will be a Mac.
I am awaiting my copy as we speak. Sadly, it didn’t come with the Mac I just bought, but they deducted the cost of upgrading to it from the sale price of the computer.
Saw it running the other day on my brother’s Mac Pro, though… and it does seem rather zippy, particularly with the dual quad core processors. Granted, this is an atypical set-up, but it’s still interesting to see Safari load in an eye-blink while several sessions of SETI@home are running in the background.
When you get your copy, please let me know how you feel about it!
I suspect that I will go on at great length about it to anyone who will listen.
Well, I’ve been using Snow Leopard for a few weeks now on my MacBook Pro 13″ 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo. As far as upgrades go, it’s not especially flashy. There’s a few visual differences, some refinements to the Finder (improved searching). Printer driver handling has also been improved, and I think they included some kind of upgrade to iChat (which I don’t use much).
The real changes occurred under the hood, in the form of “Grand Central Dispatch” (to make more effective use of multi-core processors) and optimization for 64 bit processing. So I was a little underwhelmed at first, until I noticed that just about everything was running faster. It starts up faster, shuts down faster, loads applications faster. But where it’s most apparent is in the graphically intensive stuff. Quicktime definitely shows it, but where it really came to light is… games (which I don’t have much time for nowadays).
Now, to the best of my knowledge, there is no Mac version of Crysis to use it for benchmarking. I’m not sure Snow Leopard would do much for such a monster anyways, particularly with my fairly modest graphics card (256MB 9400M). But I’ve found that with I’ve been able to turn graphical detail up to high in everything I have, and it runs well, even in the case of some rather bloated, inelegant ports.
So, I think I buy Apple’s claims that this upgrade is good for a 1.5x speed boost. I’m also able to verify the claim that the upgrade takes up ~7Gb less hard disk space than my original Leopard install did. How strange and perplexing to have an upgrade that actually reduces demands on the underlying infrastructure.