Weighing Snow Leopard after a Month

By Morgan Mayhew on September 30, 2009

At ConCrave, we got our hands on Snow Leopard as it shipped last month. Rather than wait to place it on our production machines, we went ahead and did the no-so-bright thing and installed it on all of them. <!-- break -->

Here’s a quick review of Snow Leopard after about a month of use.

Installation:

What can be the trickiest part of moving to a new operating system (or simply upgrading) is the installation.

With Snow Leopard, beads of sweat were rolling of the installer’s forehead (and I have a large one) during the upgrade of the first production machine.

Working with a 2009 Mac Pro, the installation did not go as smoothly as expected. The first attempt mysteriously suspended itself after 20 minutes.

For the second attempt, same thing, upgrade quits without prompting and returns to Leopard.

We placed a call into Apple and their Care Specialist, while knowledgeable, was stumped.

“It just quit?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“Can you hold down the power button and then try again?”

“Sure.”

The exchange went on for a bit until he said, “After the reboot, what did it do?”

“Reboot?”

“Yes, it reboots in the middle of the installation.”

“Oh, well it’s spitting out my disc as that’s what happens every time I reboot. So I guess that’s the problem.”

To work around the issue, the Care Specialist had me boot from the disc, which did the trick.

After upgrading the Mac Pro, Snow Leopard was installed on our other Macs including a MacBook Pro and iMac. Subsequent installations were without incident.

Now for the good stuff . . .

. . . ummm . . .

Actually, there’s not much of anything outstanding to report. Snow Leopard is essentially a backend upgrade. Mac lovers will immediately notice improvements to the taskbar and particularly, their stacks – you can scroll through stacks now – but other features are less noticeable unless you’re a power user.

Expose now shows minimized windows and you can also now consolidate minimized windows to an icon.

The preview feature has been improved and allows text selection directly from the viewing window – a handy little upgrade.

Quicktime has been upgraded to Quicktime X. We had some problems playing some Windows Media videos in Quicktime as Flip4Mac was out of date for Snow Leopard. We had to make due with VLC but eventually downloaded the F4M beta to work with the new OS.

Quicktime now offers screen capturing. What was a snapshot of a screen before, can now be a video. Before this, users had to shell out big bucks for third party applications like SnapzPro X (still a great program).

As for performance, improvements are noticeable from startup to shutdown. While we haven’t clocked it yet, video rendering in Premier Pro CS4 seem to be faster as well.

Apple has obviously had to struggle with marketing Snow Leopard, which may account for the low price point (selling for $29.00.) Apple has had to resort to Chinese Olympics terms by branding it as “Better. Faster. Easier.”

Speaking of Chinese Olympics, one of their major changes listed on their product page was the obscure improvements for Chinese character support. Huh?

Despite their marketing woes, is Apple’s Snow Leopard worth the upgrade? Definitely, Yes.

Do you want to wait a few more months to give developers more time to upgrade third-party applications? Probably, but it’s always fun to break stuff.