Randall C. Kennedy of InfoWorld:
Mac OS X Snow Leopard is truly an underwhelming release, one that borrows most of its “new” ideas from Windows Vista. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to drive OS evolution forward, introducing a raft of truly innovative features with Windows 7. The new Taskbar puts Apple’s clumsy Mac OS X Dock to shame, while its enhanced support for multicore CPUs means that even non-optimized code gets a boost – no Grand Central Dispatch tweaking required.
Well, Snow Leopard is here. I — like millions of other users — upgraded my Macs yesterday to 10.6.
Snow Leopard is a curious release. It doesn’t introduce a lot of end-user features, but rather, is a refinement of what was already there — for the most part.
After 9 years, Apple has changed the install process for OS X. They’ve simplified it, which is pretty surprising considering how easy it was before. This PDF on Apple’s site outlines the new process. One thing that bugs me is that by default, Snow Leopard doesn’t include Rosetta, which allows PPC apps to run on Intel machines. Apple’s obviously closing the door on PowerPC Macs with this release, but turning off Rosetta this early seems rash. It’s an optional install I recommend for everyone.
MacInTouch has a page up dedicated to Snow Leopard issues found by readers.
There’s also a very lengthy page up on wikidot regarding Snow Leopard and third-party apps.
It’s this kind of stuff that makes me love the hardcore Mac population so much.
From Mark Jardine at TapBots (the creators of the excellent Convertbot iPhone app) has written about their recent App Store rejection:
We’re no strangers to silly app rejection emails from Apple, but this one seems to take the cake (at least in our opinion). Convertbot 1.4 was rejected because our icon for Time is too similar to one of Apple’s default resource icons for History/Recent. They say users might get confused that our Time category might mean History or Recent. Now I might be able to understand if this happened when we first submitted Convertbot, but there have been multiple releases already so why is this a show-stopper now? It does worry me that our product has to be held back for another 1–2 weeks for something so trivial.
Apple has previously stated that while Leopard users simply need to purchase the $29 DVD to upgrade their machines to Snow Leopard, Tiger users with Intel machines needed the $169 Mac Box Set to upgrade. As a bonus, those users get iWork ’09 and iLife ’09 as well.
It seems that the $29 Snow Leopard DVD can indeed update users still running Tiger, however.
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! If you’re a Leopard user you have virtually no reason to skip over 10.6, unless you’ve somehow built a mission-critical production workflow around an InputManager hack (in which case, well, have fun with 10.5 for the rest of your life). Sure, maybe wait a few weeks for things like Growl and MenuMeters to be updated, and if your livelihood depends on QuickTime you might want to hold off, but for everyone else the sheer amount of little tweaks and added functionality in 10.6 more than justifies skipping that last round of drinks at the bar – hell, we’re guessing Exchange support alone has made the sale for a lot of people. If you’re still on Tiger, well, you’ll have to decide whether or not you want to drop $130 on what’s essentially a spit-shined Leopard, but if you do decide to spend the cash you’ll find that the experience of using a Mac has changed dramatically for the better since you last upgraded.
Once rumored for extinction, Apple’s entry-level polycarbonate MacBooks are on the verge of a refresh that will solidify them at the base of the Mac maker’s notebook offerings for the foreseeable future, AppleInsider has learned.
People familiar with Cupertino-based company’s plans say the 13-inch portables are presently undergoing an industrial design overhaul that will see them reemerge in the coming months with a slimmer, lighter enclosure and restructured internal architecture to boot.
Topher Kessler over at MacFixIt has posted an article on installing Snow Leopard, and it reveals some interesting changes:
Inserting the Snow Leopard DVD I double-clicked the install icon, expecting to have it reboot to the DVD as all other OS X installations have required. This was not the case with Snow Leopard, which instead launched a grey-themed installer program that allowed for me to select various options such as printer drivers, QuickTime 7, and Rosetta, all while OS X 10.5 was still running in the background. There are no options to select the installation method (archive and install, or otherwise), which was rumored to be the case before Snow Leopard’s release. In order to do a clean install, you click the “Utilities” button and the installer will then boot directly to the DVD and allow you to use Disk Utility to format your hard drive. Quicktime 7 is installed by default and can be deselected, but on the contrary Rosetta is not checked by default, which is surprising because it is only a single 1.9MB application; however, having it this way clearly shows Apple’s progressive intent to move away from PowerPC. I decided to install Rosetta because a variety of utilities and other packages I use are still PowerPC only.
Snow Leopard is Apple’s lowest-priced OS update in eight years. Granted, it’s a collection of feature tweaks and upgrades, as well as under-the-hood modifications that might not pay off for users immediately. But the price of upgrading is so low that I’ve really got to recommend it for all but the most casual, low-impact Mac users. If you’ve got a 32-bit Intel Mac (that is, one powered by a Core Solo or Core Duo processor), the benefit of this upgrade will be a little less. But for most Mac users, especially the kind of person who reads a Web site devoted to the subject, the assorted benefits of Snow Leopard outweigh the price tag. I’d pay $30 just for the improved volume ejection, the ability to create services with Automator, and the improvements to the Dock and Exposé — though I admit I’d pay slightly more to not have the misguided QuickTime Player X as a part of the package. If you’re a user who connects to an Exchange server every day, upgrading to Snow Leopard really is a no-brainer. For everyone else, maybe it’s not quite a no-brainer — but it’s awfully close. Snow Leopard is a great value, and any serious Mac user should upgrade now.
According to this very helpful chart.
Adobe has posted a .pdf outlining the current state of compatibility between Snow Leopard and their products:
Working closely with Apple, Adobe has tested and determined that our Adobe Creative Suite 4 products and components are compatible with Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
[…]
Older versions of Adobe creative software were not included in our testing efforts. While older Adobe and Macromedia applications may install and run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6), they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may therefore experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6).
Watch Jason Calacanis’ rant all the way through:
I’ve watched this three times today, and am still not sure where to start.
His main point goes something like this: Apple and its founder Steve Jobs are sellouts because their closed systems have become popular. Oh yeah, and all of those people who buy into this are idiots.
To answer Calacanis’ rant, I’ve broken this down into several different chunks.
Back in 1970s and 80s, Apple was rebelling against IBM, whose mainframe computer systems were only available to business people and university staff. No one had a computer at home — there mere idea of it was laughable.