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.

I suspect that I will go on at great length about it to anyone who will listen.

When you get your copy, please let me know how you feel about it!

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.