We’re a few weeks away from the official release of Snow Leopard and I’m here to tell you things are really heating up in the realm of Exchange Support, OpenCL, and being able to click on an icon to make all of its windows appear.
Sorry. I’m just a crank. Every time Apple comes out with a new version of OS X I expect bells, whistles, and dancing dogs. This is an incremental upgrade, as we described it back at WWDC, and it’s a strong one. However, it’s not nearly as exciting at first blush – at least visually – but it does give countless IT guys some serious tentpole action especially considering built-in Exchange support.
This review is based on the purported Gold Master, 10A432, the version that will be shipped to stores world-wide this September. It may or not be the official final version but I’ve been using versions of Snow Leopard for about two months now.
This release is described as a “refined” Leopard. What does that mean? It means everything you like about Leopard has been made faster and more responsive and, in a way, this is just a huge bug fix. QuickTime has been turned completely Pro with screen capture, audio capture, and movie capture built in along with an editing/trimming ribbon right in the app. Shutdown is faster as is wireless connectivity. There is automatic printer driver download (WOOT!) as well as automatic timezone setup (DOUBLE WOOT!). See where I’m going here?
It also has Chinese character input, faster installation, and faster Time Machine backup. It also is 6GB smaller than the original Leopard. Then there’s Exchange support in iCal, Mail, and Contacts. I can keep going but you get the gist – lots of improvements under the hood.
Stacks has been updated as well with a new icon style and menu color. Previews are much more powerful now and you can cut intelligently from PDFs.
You’ll be able to install it on most modern Macs. It requires an Intel processor – no PowerPC support – 1GB of memory and 5GB of disk space. If you bought a Mac on or after June 8, 2009 it will cost you $9.95. Leopard users will pay $29 while a family pack for five computers will cost $49. Generally any Mac purchased within the past two years should run this OS.
So how does it run? I’ve noticed very few differences in my user experience on a Mac Pro 2.66GHz dual core Intel Xeon with 7GB memory. I have experienced some software problems with VMWare and SuperDuper, two utilities I use. I suspect these problems will be fixed upon official release but it is a bit disconcerting when your backup program breaks because of an update.
I haven’t used Expose’s new “show application” feature much. It seems like a good idea when you think about it but most of the work I do involves only one window. Video, photo, and music folks will love it, however, because it lets you find buried windows while you’re working.
In terms of speed I haven’t see much improvement. The new Grand Central Dispatch system is a thread management system which is supposed to spread out multi-threaded apps over your full processor array. Apple says:
More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central Dispatch also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.
All of the applications are also 64-bit and OpenCL allows you to use more of your GPU. Finally, QuickTime is built Core Audio, Video, and Animation and all of the major apps are rebuilt in 64-bit.
So again, what does that mean? An ostensibly faster computer. Again, I didn’t notice anything amazing between the old Leopard and the new, but stress testing this machine is a bit difficult considering the current speed and RAM. I did notice a slight improvement in video conversion – the above video took about 4 minutes versus five or six minutes usually – but nothing to call the president about.
Apple knows they’re not going to excite Joe and Jane Average-Home-Office-User with this release. That’s why it’s $29 in a box and essentially for upgraders. Devs and IT guys will be able to point to OS X now and say it’s ready for the office environment, but I’m almost positive that any CEO with an iPhone also has a MacBook on his desk and IT guys in most major corporations have been supporting something in the Apple family for the past few years. This is the release for those still on the fence about OS X’s business-ready features, however, and that means a lot on the corporate side.
As for us fanbois I’m sure an upgrade is in the cards. However, I think the upgrade will come sooner in the form of a new MacBook purchase than in a boxed version of the software. Apple wanted to release plenty of bug fixes and add some great features and so they rolled them into into a new release. To call this a new version, per se, is incorrect. It is more of a major update.
So don’t line up outside of the Apple store for this one, lads, but rest assured that you will notice some little differences and the nerds among you will notice a lot of differences. Just don’t tell me that Exchange support is really exciting for end-users who use Gmail and hopefully OpenCL will create a huge ecosystem of amazing games for OS X. But I doubt it.
Bottom Line
Leopard… refined. Don’t rush out to get this but rest assured it’s chock-full of improvements you’ll rarely consciously notice.
“You’ll be able to install it on most modern Macs. It requires an Intel processor – no PowerPC support – 1GB of memory and 5GB of disk space. Of you bought a Mac on or after June 8, 2009 it will cost you $9.95. Leopard users will pay $29 while a family pack for five computers will cost $49.”
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Small typo correction :). It is supposed to be “…If you bought a Mac…”
OpenCL is NOT about games or graphics; this crunchgear noobies piss me off; how do I take this second-rate stuff from the techcrunch feed?
@ Alex
I agree completely. What an annoying article!
“To call this a new version, per se, is incorrect” – does he not know, for a start, that 90% of the projects within OS X have been re-written?
What a terribly arch review that only shows up the author’s own immaturity. Try a new angle, John.
I don’t fault the author so much. As exciting as a new OS version can be for geeks, this one is underwhelming for everyone else. Of course that was part of the intent, as we understand it, but for most users it’s like walking into the same room you just left and being asked to believe it’s remarkably different.
Clearly, a lot of work has gone into this release and it is exciting on a technology level. It is though, eerily the same as 10.5. Your best advice is to expect nothing. There are not a lot of toys here. Santa has left the building. It maybe one of the most conservative releases in Apple history. Good for them.
New plumbing is nice even if there is nothing to see. If the toilet always flushes and the shower drains that is far better than the alternative even if it is the same tile on the wall.
Also, I know some developers who are PSYCHED about 10.6. They love the tools. They love the technical direction. Frankly, if they are so happy there must be some real deep goodness there for them and ultimately for us.
There is also some kind of satisfaction to know that things have been cleaned up. It’s the same as when you go thru the junk drawer in the kitchen and everything gross is tossed. Only the useful stuff remains in nice little bundles. That sort of clean up makes me happy even if I don’t open that drawer again for 6 months. So Apple’s OS teams says they’ve gone thru and cleared away the legacy junk and given me back 6 gb of disk space or more, there certainly is satisfaction there – no question about that.
Isn’t this what we want from our institutions some of the time. To take a sober look at things and spend some time cleaning up messes. To take on a hard challenge and leave the flashiness aside for a moment. I want that, even if there is not as much of a cherry on top when they are done.
And when you can finally get to the point where you are looking at SL with fresh eyes, you will find that here and there a few gems are hidden. New scanning functions bring sanity to a formerly broken area. Preview has new powers. It’s more and more a pdf and document powerhouse. iCal has a new hidden palette for editing events without clicking so much. Adding a google calendar is now very easy; anyone could do it. QT UI looks hot when you need it and disappears the rest of the time. Things work a little better in many small ways. An ejected disk dims until its put away. The OS feels crisper. More responsive. I don’t know how much faster it is but I buy that it works better.
And then you consider that we’ve taken another step into a 64 bit future and it seems to work well. There are few rough edges and incompatibilities that will likely be resolved in the next few weeks and months but those will be worked out.
We’ll see what happens next but I’m at least hopeful this will lead somewhere good.
I think ones of the reasons the speed increases aren’t immediately apparent is that applications need to be reworked to get the most out of grand central. So the benefits of SL will probably increase with time as apps are updated.
good point. lots of stuff is still wonky.
4- and 8-core Mac Pros, and the likely upcoming Quad Core iMacs are probably going to make the most of Grand Central.
I’m hoping we can hack OpenCL to use the recent ATI HD2400 cards. I don’t want my barely-year-old iMacs left out in the cold.
I’m on a 2.2 macbook pro with 2GB ram and I notice quite a big improvement in speed when running this release. I find that it all works snappier and that it doesn’t get any slower when having an uptime of multiple days. Also there is a significant speed difference when getting out of hibernate & when booting up the system.
Aside from speed improvements, the fixes in usability are quite nice & worthwhile as well. I especially like the quicktime feature where it can run full screen on one screen when you are working on dual screens.
As for the other fixes, I find that quicktime is a great improvement in how it looks. The automatic ical sync with gmail was quite nice too. Although it didn’t prevent me from going back to Fluid+Gcal.
In general, there are small fixes in usability ( for example, the analog clock + digital clock when pressing it ) and the improved dock + exposé makes me never wanting to go back to leopard 10.5 again.
As cheap as 4GB is you really should upgrade.
There’s tons of other little improvements that you notice as you go. For example, the screen-zoom feature implementation was changed up a bit and it’s much nicer to use.
or Screen-sharing… Being able to Cmd-Tab within the shared computer as opposed to your own is awesome.
tons of little improvements like that.
Automatic sync with Gmail from iCal has been possible through the CalDAV protocol for quite some time. Works flawlessly.
yeah but they made setup super easy now.
setting up a caldav used to be very geeky. now you just put in your name and password, it does the rest.
The only reason why Apple optimized so much its OS is for the forthcoming Apple Tablet.
Wrong.
At least refer to it with its proper name…the iPad.
HAHAHAH I agree.
It is definitely faster and I regained about 10GB on my MacBook. Have you heard of QuickSilver or the Google QuickSearchBox, your dock looks docktarded, and I’ve totally given up on Mail.app and have moved on to just using Google Notifier for my google apps account.
i like my retarded dock
Why can’t I ⌘Q you?
because ⌘-Space works just as well.
I call my children ⌘D even if they’re not twins.
What’s with the CD/album cover? It looks less like a software release and more like some wannabe emo band is calling themselves Snow Leopard.
bonus points if you can figure it out
Snow Patrol
Funny, non?
Ah… so it was TechCrunch joke that I’m obviously too old to get ;-)
I have held off upgrading to iLife and iWork ‘09 until Snow Leopard comes out, so that I can get the Box Set family pack of everything for four of my family’s Macs at a huge discount! That’s one good reason go upgrade sooner rather than later!
We really need to stop with this tablet stuff, every year for last 5 years I’ve been in the mac verse it picks up this time of year and dies by February! It’s just silly….
It’s hard to tell the diffrence of snow leopard on a mac pro (or frankenmac equivelint) but on note books you NOTICE it. Even my early 08 MBP with 4 ybs of ram doesn’t get bogged down, and just daily futzing feels like I am on my quad core frankenmac beast…
To me they need to release it as a download, people won’t go to the store for this (or give free shipping) but we all know how easy it is to impulse buy with iTunes.
Think biggest reason it’s a 10.x release is for dwvlopersto be able to be able to set requiremnts better. It is not for the money LOL. the amount of cash they have on hand can let them throw it for free and use it as a marketing tactic against Microsoft.
I want my iPad!
Phil; it could be worse – atleast it isn’t that damn xmac thread again.
I am dying to try this out! I’ll love to see how much faster my computer will run with snow leopard as apposed to the version that I am using now. Generally when I have all of of those big applications open, jogging down my CPU.
Yet another so called tech review that fails to understand the significance of Grand Central, Open CL, and the very extensive under the hood improvements in speed.
No other OS has the framework and development tools to take advantage of multi-core procs and memory as Snow Leopard using Grand Central.
What does that do for real world scenarios. Most of us aren’t folding proteins.
No but a lot of us are doing development, video editing and photo editing. Just because you and your tech blog peers are not at all technical, doesn’t mean your readers aren’t.
Wow… chill out. A simple “thank you” would do just fine… or if you don’t like the posts… don’t read.
Well done John and Techcrunch crew. We who read your blog appreciate your efforts.
Why would I have to say “thank you”? He’s getting paid because of us, the READERS.
There is a lovely new version of Final Cut Pro hitting the streets at about the same time. Additionally, all of this “tightening” in required for smaller more efficient systems like a tablet. I am impressed that they decided to dig in remove huge amounts of inefficiency. Redmond could learn a thing or two in that regard.
The weird thing is, whenever I complain about macs being slow (I’e had at least one mac in the house since 2003), I normally get bombarded by the fanboys about how “mine’s fast – I never have any problems” etc. Then there’s a bunch of hoopla about how awesome Apple is because their upgrades make things go faster “on the same hardware!!”
All that says to me is that they shouldn’t have had all that inefficiency in the system in the first place, and people who complain about things being slow are correct in the first place. Maybe MS can’t learn much about it because their stuff is already as fast as it can be already???
Michael, it is obvious, almost painfully so, that every newer version of Windows ever released has run slower than the previous version on the same hardware. How has this escaped your attention?
OpenCL is of very little significance to many of us using ATI GPUs-based Macs (thank you lots, Apple!).
@me2
Thanks for the laugh! No other OS indeed…
“I have experienced some software problems with VMWare and SuperDuper, two utilities I use. I suspect these problems will be fixed upon official release but it is a bit disconcerting when your backup program breaks because of an update.”
Perhaps because it is NOT an update. Although many of the results of the changes present in Snow Leopard appear to be items that would be present in an update to an operating system, the actual changes (and not their results) makes Snow Leopard a different operating system.
There you go again, bringing logic and reason into a TC article.
you nerds are just angry that i called you nerds
I have been running Snow Leopard for a while now and can say that on the MacBook Pro (17″) with 8gb of RAM, there is really not all that much speed difference, but it does feel like it is more stable and reacts better with the more complex apps like the CS4 suite, Parallels, VMWare Fusion, xCode, and (don’t kill me) the Office 2008 suite.
Am I going to upgrade our home computers? probably not. The upgrade process itself, I found only slows down the computer and I am not about the rebuild my daughters’ computers anytime soon.
Just my two cents.
I really don’t think its wise to comment on Snow Leopard if you’ve “..been using it for a while now”, since you’ve probably been using a much earlier build. Save the comments for the release version.
Well, using it for 2 months, I appreciate the work done to make everything more polished… It is something like the MacOSX version we were waiting for 10 years… almost
For exemple something very important for me, is the new behavior of SL when using windows sharing, the previous version of OSX was a lame when the share disappeared, forcing me to reboot to get a well behaving finder…
The way the computer now shutdown or wake up is very very smooth
And yes the under the hood improvements with the frameworks, OpenCL, Grand Central, ObjectiveC 2.1… is something very important for developers but not so obviously important for users, excepted that the global improvement of Leopard has been made possible with the help of these technologies IMHO, and that future application will use these
Grand Central Dispatch is a technology which allows to delegate to the system the hard work when making something multi threaded, for a big part of this kind of features, but some of them will need the normal way, working hard with mutex, lock and others hard stuff :-) I think that with the help of GCD a lot more stuff in the new application will be made more responsive.
…
Well Snow Leopard is a very good work, worth the 29$ it’s cost
For me, the big feature is that older Macbooks will get all of the trackpad features (3 and 4 finger gestures, pinching, rotation, etc.) that Apple introduced two generations ago. Between that, the Quicktime overhaul and the bonus 6 gigs of hard drive space, it’s a no-brain $29 for me.
John, it isn’t because of Leopard’s unsuitability as an enterprise class OS that we don’t by Macs in business, it’s because of Apple’s rubbish support and commercial agreements.
A shiny new OS isn’t going to change that. Oh yeah and your Apple loving CEO may have a Macbook but guess what he’s running on it 90% of the time?
Nerd engineers are typically the ones that make technology so frigging hard to use. How many times in life have you thought to yourself, “who actually designed this POS?!?!”. I do it every day. Apple is no exception. Time Machine rots, and so does most of anything having to do with Apple wireless networking. iPhone “remote” app should be a killer app, it totally blows ass.
Snow Leopard doesn’t sound exciting at all. If you’re using Outlook email still, you should have your head examined. Unless Snow Leopard can make Google Voice on the iPhone work as designed, or finally get an iPhone to have real-time blackberry-level email from gmail, who cares?
Roku is making Apple look stupid in the living room too.
“Snow Leopard doesn’t sound exciting at all. If you’re using Outlook email still, you should have your head examined. Unless Snow Leopard can make Google Voice on the iPhone work as designed, or finally get an iPhone to have real-time blackberry-level email from gmail, who cares?”
While you may have legitimate complaints across Apple’s product line, counting them against Snow Leopard is a little far-fetched. Snow Leopard is not designed (nor should it be) to fix the alleged ailings of the iPhone platform.
“Roku is making Apple look stupid in the living room too.”
I agree with Apple TV’s failings, but again, Snow Leopard isn’t designed to fix Apple TV.
“Apple is no exception. Time Machine rots, and so does most of anything having to do with Apple wireless networking.”
Perhaps what will make Snow Leopard exciting is addressing these issues you raised. I do not know if they have fixes for them in Snow Leopard, but better infrastructure may lead to ironing out various bugs. For example, not having to support two processing architectures may lead to a whole host of improvements in Mac OS X in general as less resources are spent on legacy hardware.
I had installed Snow Leopard 10A432 on my MacBook Pro 2.33 for a few days and I found it very responsive and it doesn’t use much in the way of resources either. Memory usage is low and so is CPU percentage at idle.
It broke a couple of things. My favorite MenuMeters wouldn’t work. Apple Remote Desktop tried to update and gave some error that the OS was wrong and so it wouldn’t install. That hurt because I use it to monitor my other home computers. Parallels 4 did work but it ran slow when switching window modes. The only thing that really pissed me off was playing videos on Youtube. The processors were really taxed on that site. Man, playing those videos really ruin the computer experience. They ought to change the video format or something. If that’s Flash, I can understand why Apple doesn’t want to deal with it. It just sucks up resources.
I just wanted to see how well it would work and I’ll upgrade when the time comes. I went back to using Tiger 10.4.11 because everything works perfectly and I’m in no rush.
I’m just glad Snow Leopard seems very stable and doesn’t use up a lot of disk space. Right now I only have one Intel computer so I’m either using either Tiger or Leopard on my PPCs and I’ll be getting some new Macs early next year, so Snow Leopard be already installed on those machines.
I don’t use Time Machine because I prefer to use Carbon Copy Cloner which is perfect for my use.
Windows , Mac O/S , Linux when will the hurting stops.
when the latest version of Plan 9 is released
There are significant updates in Snow Leopard that make it more a new version than an update.
What your saying in effect is that only major GUI enhancements qualify as new major releases. Besides that being a superficial conclusion, it ignores the history of this industry. This is a technology field and as such we demand technological advancements for our money.
You can’t be so journalistically lazy as to ignore the major changes that have occurred in Snow Leopard. What we have here is a major core upgrade along with minor GUI enhancements. I welcome a cycle that trades major front end / back end enhancements.
Having use Windows 7 for the last 6 months, I find Leopard a little painful to use at times.
So oddly, the features I’m most excited about:
-Expose’ improved window arrangement.
-Aeropeek
-Exchange support.
I don’t know why people bag on Outlook so much. It doesn’t matter. We use Exchange and Entourage blows. I’m looking forward to native exchange support in mail so I don’t even have to install Office (just use iWork.)
Do you know it it’s possible to do a clean install of the operation system with an upgrade Snow Leopard DVD? or it’s necessary to have Leopard previously installed on the hard drive?
One more question: have you noticed any difference on iChat? I mean, will we be able to use it without iChax plugin or to do audio conversations recordings directly thru Quicktime?
Thanks a lot for any information.
10.6 does install onto a bare drive. The single 10.6 disk seems like all you need for the future. According to Mossberg you can go direct from 10.4 to 10.6, as much as Apple marketing would insist on you buying 10.5, I can’t see where this is enforced by the installer. So the headaches are simply not there for anyone except our friends in PPC land. Bless them but they are not really missing much.
iChax is gone on the upgrade. A few other extensions like that are not carried forward. Seems like some of this is required by the shift to 64 bits. Perhaps they will return when the developers catch up. Hopefully they are not locked out.
It’s NOT 5/6GB smaller, Apple just changed the way they see 1MB, now is 1000KB=1MB, 1000MB=1GB instead of the old 1024MB=1GB.
MMM not sure if you are right there. The OS is smaller. There is a lot of compression going on.
Gained more than 6 gb here.
Tim, you’re right that they have changed the way they see 1MB, but that doesn’t account for the smaller footprint.
Roz is correct to point out new levels of compression. Plus, Snow Leopard will only support Intel now, so no need for native applications to include the PowerPC components. This saves a lot of space.
The main reduction is from compression and the removal of large amounts of printer drivers. Which are now downloaded on the fly when a new printer is added.
(BTW, I love Time Machine. Brain dead simple backups. Protecting my precious, my precious, uh, files.)
I really think SL is a gem for Mac users. Finally, fix the rough edges of the OS, make the complicated stuff work better, etc.
My question is, how does Cocoa Finder work? Is it faster and more reliable?
Bot
Any sign of AVCHD support in the new QuickTime? (.mts, .m2ts, etc…)
no G5
Well, at least they didn’t use albinos to sell the Snow Leopard: iSnow™
What I don’t get with the GM release is if this is Intel only why do so many bundled Applications e.g. iCal, Front Row & Dashboard have PowerPC code still in the universal binaries?
Those applications can be bought and upgraded separately from the OS. So one can upgrade those applications on their Power PC and while continuing to use Leoppard.
I don’t think an OS update is necessary to run the iHome or iWork updates (yet.)
Do they in fact have PPC code in the packages? How do you tell? I looked but I only see one executable which I am assuming is normal. Actual ppc/intel apps had the same.
I know that just that they say Universal Binary on get info does not mean they have PPC support. It’s also used for carrying a 32 bit and 64 bit version of the app. I would expect all Apple apps to say Universal binary for some time to come even if they don’t have PPC support.
Yes, they definitely still have PowerPC code in them as well as i386 and x86_64 code. You can check yourself by running ‘file’ against them in Terminal on 10a432:
file /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/MacOS/iCal
The definition of Universal Binary is an app that runs on PPC **and** Intel. That’s the “universe.”
An app that’s Intel only is not a Universal Binary.
Seems your right, these apps that still include PowerPC code are labelled as ‘Application (Universal)’ in ‘Get Info’ whereas apps that include i386 and x86_64 code which effectively are still fat binaries because they include multiple processor version are simply labelled as ‘Application (Intel)’
Yeah, I stand corrected. the intel only ones are not universal – they are intel apps. Mail for example, bundled and Intel only, not Universal.
Not sure why iCal retains a PPC executable when Mail doesn’t.
File compression is a feature of 10.6. I’ve read about it in multiple places on the net. I do a lot of that since I’m an automated bot. That’s my function. AFAIK it won’t let you compress files, but system files are installed to your hard drive in a compressed state.
XSlimmer, a third party program, emailed me with news of a new version that is 10.6 aware *and* capable of compressing *any* files using the Snow Leopard compression scheme.
I don’t know how much one can trust or will be able to trust XSlimmer since I haven’t used it myself.
Bot
While I am plunking my $30 down gladly, my money is on Snow Leopard having some unannounced functionality that is important to the Tablet and/or new ways that Apple will better bridge the distinctions between MacOS and iPhoneOS computing models
The assumption here is that Apple wants/hopes/needs everyone to upgrade to take advantage of something unannounced, and are pricing the upgrade accordingly.
Here’s a post on my analysis:
Analysis: Apple June Quarter Earnings Call
http://bit.ly/vbi9q
Check it out if interested.
Mark
I question the purpose of the “smaller footprint.” Disk space is cheap. Why such a great effort to slim down the install?
This makes me believe that Apple is likely trying to get it to fit on a Tablet (or netbook which we know won’t ever happen) with limited OS disk space.
I have a $700 superfast 80GB SSD, disk space means a lot to me. :-) And with more people moving to SSDs I think it’s a good move. And the smaller footprint isn’t somethig they intentionally spent too much time on.. they removed all the PPC binaries and it just kinda got smaller that way IIRC (?).
That and disk compression of system files (as was mentioned earlier):
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/27/solving_the_mystery_of_snow_leopards_shrinking_apps.html