Snow Leopard – Review September 1, 2009
Posted by Chaim Gartenberg in : Apple, Computers, First Look/Reviews , trackback
Roar.
Well faithful readers, the next round of the OS wars have been. And in a surprising move yesterday, Apple announced that they’ll be releasing their opening shot, Mac OS 10.6, a month earlier then expected: available today (!), for $30. So, is the upgrade worth it? Read on.
What’s New:
Of the features, the most obvious is the redesigned QuickTime 10, which, as you’ll see in a minute, is pretty awesome. Expose, a tool used to help switch between open windows and applications had also been revised, along with minor updates to Stacks as well. Also added are much needed improvements in terms of speed across the board – Finder, graphics, Sleep, Wake Up, connecting to Networks, Time Machine – you get the idea. More integration with business features were also added, but that’s not really important from my perspective.
In my personal review, I firstly find the new QuickTime, shown in the above screen shot, to be your first stop. The whole floating video interface just looks incredible, and the added features to the standard version including allowing you to upload videos straight to iTunes, YouTube, or MobileMe, as well as Full Screen support and the ability to trim videos are all welcome things that definitely needed to be there a while ago.
Expose and Stacks also were nicely upgraded, with Expose in particular getting some new visuals which make it a bit easier to use, and is now integrated with Dock: just hold down an app’s icon, and it’ll go and spread out all open windows of it, even separating between those that have been minimized or not– a pretty useful feature making it more practical to use. Stacks now can be scrolled through, meaning no more “Stack with 900 things in it all the size of a peanut” issues. Also, you can go into a folder in a Stack without closing the Stack now, making it actually useful to get things in folders out.
Finally, Apple made Snow Leopard faster. Really fast. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and everything just seems to work faster – Waking my MacBook from sleep is almost instantaneous, and when it opens, I’m already connected to the internet – no delay or load times for WiFi. Apple rebuilt the Finder on the code side, so it works much faster. Searches go faster in Spotlight, and Widgets load faster in Dashboard (nice when you keep 20-odd Widgets up at once…). Also, due to Apple trimming down extra stuff from the OS, instead of taking up space to install Snow Leopard, you actually gain about 6 gigs back.
Overall, Snow Leopard is not a bad upgrade. However, most of the features, primarily Exchange support, (a business server integration thing) are more aimed towards the business user. But, for $30 – I’d say it’s worth the upgrade.
Official Rating: a magnificent 5/5:
So readers – are you upgrading to Snow Leopard? Already have – what’re your thought? Sound off in the comments.
Comments»
I agree that snow shutdown more quickly.. but I haven’t seen any difference in time to mount/unmount.. and files copy… I honestly had to go come here read your review so I can spot what have been changed lol..