5 Reasons Why I Love Mac OS X Snow Leopard!
Last Tuesday I got an email from Apple saying that I could order Mac OS X Snow Leopard and have it delivered by today. Since I planned to buy it anyway, I hopped on the offer since it meant free shipping too. So instead of having to drive to the nearest Apple store (which is about 30 miles or so away) I was able to simply wait for Fedex to deliver my copy of Snow Leopard today. And sure enough, it arrived this afternoon.
As soon as I heard the doorbell ring, I freaked out and ran down the stairs like a madman. I flung the door open and snatched my package out of the Fedex woman’s hands. “Been waiting for something from Apple eh?” she said knowingly. Apparently I was not the only one in New Hampshire who had ordered Snow Leopard. After signing for my package I bounded up the stairs and slammed my door closed.
I headed into the kitchen, made a cup of coffee and ripped my Snow Leopard disc out of its packaging. Woohoo! Finally! After waiting for what had seemed like an eternity, it was mine! Mine, mine, mine! At last!
Getting Ready to Install
I have to confess that I didn’t do a whole lot before I installed Snow Leopard on my Macs. But one thing I did do was to install the latest updates to Parallels, VMWare and VirtualBox. I use them to run Linux and Windows at times and I wanted to make sure that I had the latest and greatest versions before installing Snow Leopard. Not that Apple said to do that or anything, it was just my own preference.
Other than that, I did absolutely nothing special to prepare for my Mac OS X Snow Leopard installation.
Installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard
After I had my coffee in hand, I went into my living room and sat down to install it on my 24 inch iMac. I popped the disc in and started the install. It took about 45 minutes or so and could not have been any easier. Frankly, it was rather boring.
As you may know I write a blog about desktop Linux and sometimes Linux can throw you a surprise or two during an installation. Not so with Snow Leopard. I literally didn’t have to do anything after the install started.
Virtual machines in VMWare, Parallels and VirtualBox worked well in Snow Leopard.
After the Install: Virtual Machines in Snow Leopard
After about 45 minutes, my install was done and my machine rebooted. I logged in to find that everything seemed to be working fine. My iMac logged onto my network without a problem and everything seemed quite zippy.
I started Parallels and I was pleased to find that Windows XP worked immediately (I don’t use it for anything these days but I did when I was working for Ziff Davis Media at my last gig on ExtremeTech.com). I tested VMWare and had no problems starting Sidux Linux in it. I also had no problem running PCLinuxOS in VirtualBox.
So Snow Leopard seems to work quite well with existing virtual machine software. And I was pleased to note that the performance of Parallels, VMWare and VirtualBox seemed faster than it was before I installed Snow Leopard.
(7 votes, average: 4.86 out of 5)
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The Collective
Did your icon sizes change at all? I know Apple has greatly increased the default size on a clean install, I believe so the little previews work on docs, movies, music, etc. It’s a bit annoying to me, but I guess I’ll get used to it. I set them to Leopard default 48×48, but that’s too small for the previews to work apparently.
I have it–received it about an hour before you did, it seems–I agree with and highly commend you assessment; I will be glad when MenuMeters is banged into shape to fit in to Snow Leopard, but I am a patient man, especially in regard to freeware . . . .
So far my only concern is that I have been unable to get this aluminum MacBook (one of two now remaining in the universe, I suppose, after the sudden birth of the smallest aluminum MacBook Pro) 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR 3, OS X 10.6, actually to print on the printer connected to my antic iMac G5 1.8 Ghz PowerPC (OS X 10.5.8), previously available via a (new) AirPort Extreme network. Direct connection via USB from the MacBook works flawlessly, so I infer the MacBook has the correct driver installed. Just another reason to hate printers, I guess.
As I say, your essay is far more worthy of attention than that of The Wall Street Journal, which has evidently been written in the spirit of their editorial pages, always wrong about everything. Keep up the good work!
I went and purchased mine from the Apple store in SLC UT where I live. So far I am quite pleased with the upgrade. The changes made to stacks alone is worth the entire upgrade price to me. I loved stacks. Now with the ability to navigate folders in stacks, this little feature has gone from merely useful to functionality I can’t do without. All in less than a day.
I have QT7 Pro and have added some customized exports and make frequent use of its various features. At first I freaked when I found that QTX did not have those features. Then I remember the last time I did a major OS upgrade and how I had to purchase a new QT Pro key. Imagine my reaction when I found that there appears to be no pro version of QTX. Imagine my relief upon finding that my QT7 Pro was moved into the Utilities folder. Now I have two versions of QT and I only really want one. What I want is a pro version of QTX. I am even willing to pay another $30 to get it.
@ MRCUR:
Hi MRCUR,
I did not notice any icon size changes but I may have stared right at it and not even noticed as I was much more preoccupied with a lot of the other stuff.
@ Douglas W. Reynolds, Jr.:
Hi Douglas,
Thanks so much for the kind words about my column. I very much appreciate it. I will be doing more in the future so I hope you will subscribe via RSS or email.
@ Gardner D. Underhill:
Hi Gardner,
I’m finding that I’m loving Dock Expose. I had not expected to like it or use it as much as I have. It just feels right to me, like it should have been there all along.
Michael Miller has a good column up about Snow Leopard. He has some details about the “under the hood” features that you guys might want to check out.
http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2009/08/snow_leopard_my_first_impressi.php
In point 3, you say:
I’m fairly confidant you meant you’re officially switching to Safari for you daily browsing needs [grin]
Otherwise, good job. You seem to be in a minority of people who are impressed with this release, but only because everybody else seems to have been expecting some kind of sea change rather than what’s really not much more than a service pack.
Heh, heh. Thanks for catching that KG! I’ll do an edit right now to fix it.
If you’re looking for a great review of Snow Leopard then be sure to check out the Ars Technica review. It’s good stuff.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars
“why wasn’t Leopard itself this good when it was first released?
There are those who think dark thoughts and who might feel that Apple screwed people by releasing the original version of Leopard too early and that Snow Leopard is what Leopard should always have been.”
There is no need for conspiracy theories. A lot of hard work went into these improvements.
There are simple reasons for leopard not being as good; Snow Leopard was completely rewritten, line by line, to remove excess code and to optimize the system. It lost half of its bulk. A number of new API’s were included. Many system applications were rewritten in Cocoa API’s. Apple couldn’t upgrade the OS before the Carbon API’s were relegated to obsolescence in about five years.
The new XCode 3.2 IDE is much better than previous versions, thus produces streamlined code which runs much faster. Snow leopard, also, takes better advantage of Intel’s hardware.
Almost every upgrade, but Leopard 10.5, was reputed to be faster than the previous one. This one is likely to be faster than Tiger 10.4 was.
You got back an average of 12gb hard disk space? Just how big is OSX? I mean most large Linux distros are in the 4gb range.
I am using PCBSD right now, but have no idea how much room it takes up. Heck, I have not even figured out the disk format in BSD. I have about 10 apps installed already that range from 75-150mb in download size. With all that, I still have 222gb left on my 250gb drive.
I guess one could assume that the recovered space in OSX is the missing support code for Power Macs, and possibly other optimizations.
It lost most of its bulk—and you got your disk space back—because it lost PPC support. This isn’t amazing efficiency, folks. It’s just garbage day for the powerpc computers.