So Apple released Snow Leopard on August 28th, their newest version of OSX. It has come with mixed reviews because a lot of the nerds out there were saying it really wasn't an upgrade it was more of a service pack. In my opinion it was kind of in between, it isn't exactly an entirely new system but it also isn't just at a level of a service pack.
There aren't any real huge improvements from a graphical user look all of the significant changes have been in the underlying code. Primarily because most of the key apps in OSX are written in 64 bit now. Like the Finder, Mail, Address Book etc. I've noticed these apps are a notch faster and snappier, in fact overall the entire system feels faster and more nimble. But let me start at the beginning.
I purchased my Snow Leopard DVD at the Apple Store, naturally I got the family pack with 5 licences for the bargain price of $49 ($29 for single license). Actually I got it for only $40 due to my Fox/PwC discount. But either way it was a steal.
I got home and I popped in the disk and let it work it's magic, on my Macbook Pro the entire install took about an hour. First it loads a lot of data onto your local drive, then it will reboot and this is where a lot of the actual install takes place. It's replacing a lot of the old 32 bit code with 64 bit code also installing Grand Central and Open CL, which are two of the main new "under the hood" features of Snow Leopard. I'll get into those a little later.
Once the system fully installed I got the familiar welcome video with the nice happy music and "Welcome" in a lot of various languages and I was ready to play around in my new system.
Like I mentioned previously everything felt quicker and snappier this could just be a placebo effect and a desire for me to want to think that it's faster because I just spent $40 on it but it really did feel faster.
I mean loading Safari, iTunes, Calendar, Address book everything seemed to be faster. Spotlight searches appeared to be quicker as well.
One big thing that Snow Leopard advertised to do was that it was lighter about 6 gigs lighter than Leopard, well I give Snow Leopard an A+++ because it actually saved me about 20 gigs of space. Very very impressive.
It also advertised 50% quicker sleep and shut down time, in my experience I noticed a marginal speed increase but it wasn't dramatically faster.
Then I started to check to see if all my apps worked, which they should have because I checked in my system profile that all my apps were intel or universal so no surprises there. Although on my iMac I still had Office 2004 and that was a power PC app and that no longer worked, it required Rosetta to be installed which is not a standard install of Snow Leopard, partially why you save HD space. But no big deal I'm waiting for the new Office of Mac to come out so I should be good.
The other cool improvement is Quicktime X, it has a slick new interface and you can crop videos on the fly. Also you can do audio and video capturing without having to pay for Quicktime Pro. I tried this and it was quite easy to use. Also it has easy buttons for exporting to iPod, iPhone, Moblie me or Youtube. So it's convenient. I did hear that they excluded some of the features from the previous Quicktime 7 Pro that some people who are power users have complained about but for the normal user Quicktime X is a vast improvement. But you still have the option for Quicktime Pro if you want it's included on the install disk as a separate install.
Also big in this release is full Exchange support so you can use your Mac on corporate enviorments running Windows Server 2007, not really applicable to a lot of us but it is nice to have.
Other smaller improvements are improved stacks, cover flow with page preview built in, and an enhanced expose that allows you to "expose" groups of Windows of similar apps vs all of your windows a very nice touch.
The bigger improvements are native 64 bit support as well as legacy 32 bit support. So now with 64 bit you can potentially use up to 16 exabytes of RAM. You're probably wondering what the hell is a exabyte, well one exabyte is one billion gigabytes so 16 exabytes is 16 billion gigabytes, that's a shit load of RAM : )
Now to the more techie stuff, first there is Grand Central, this new piece of software built in OSX Snow Leopard will enable programs to more efficiently use the multiple cores that most newer Macs have from the dual core Macs to the 8 core Mac Pros. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) in Mac OS X Snow Leopard addresses this pressing need. It’s a set of first-of-their-kind technologies that makes it much easier for developers to squeeze every last drop of power from multi core systems. With GCD, threads are handled by the operating system, not by individual applications. GCD-enabled programs can automatically distribute their work across all available cores, resulting in the best possible performance.
Now a new technology in Mac OS X Snow Leopard called OpenCL takes the power of graphics processors and makes it available for general-purpose computing. No longer will graphics processors be limited to graphics-intensive applications such as games and 3D modeling. Instead, once developers begin to use OpenCL in their applications, you’ll experience greatly improved speed in a wide spectrum of applications.
Recommendation:
For $29 bucks it's definitely worth the upgrade the snappier performance plus the future built in support of GC and Open CL will be awesome once more software is written to take advantage of this.
That's about it, got any questions email me: richmlee@gmail.com
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