Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

The Register has an interesting preview/review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard:

I like Snow Leopard, and found moving back to Leopard quite surprisingly painful. Was it really so slow? It didn’t feel so a week ago.

There’s some controversy about how “64-bit” this upgrade really is. I have no complaints about compatibility, and 10.6 promises to be a much smoother upgrade than going from 10.4 to 10.5. Leopard proved to be an excellent release in the end, but many people experienced driver issues and other gotchas.

By setting expectations low for its successor, and with a price to match, I’m sure a lot of people are going to be pleasantly surprised. If performance matters, it could be $29/£25 very well spent. Too bad G4 and G5 hold-outs don’t get their own optimised version – they need it the most.

Apple promises that Snow Leopard frees about 7GB from a comparable Leopard installation. This left me a bit puzzled. With X11 unchecked, but with the foreign language fonts installed, a clean install took up a shade over 10GB. Apple’s system requirement is 5GB of free space.

Nevertheless, there’s some serious shrinkage going on. Safari’s public beta on Leopard weighs in at 45MB, but the Snow Leopard Safari at just 14MB. The Address Book shrinks from 58MB to 15MB. Mail is now 77.5MB.

Can’t wait to snag it when it comes out on the 28th. I’m looking forward to some additional speed along with some hard disk space being freed up.

Most of the time my macs are fairly speedy but you can never have enough speed. Anything that makes them zippier and helps me get more done is appreciated. Snow Leopard looks like it’s going to be a great upgrade and the price isn’t bad either. I can handle $29 no problem for an upgrade.

Too bad about the non-Intel macs though. My mom has one and it could use an upgrade. Oh well though, at some point Apple was going to stop including them and I guess we’ve reached that point. Her mac still works fine though and will continue to for the rest of its computing life. So no worries.

What’s your take on Snow Leopard? Are you going to upgrade?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...