“The clue’s in the name; Snow Leopard is not as big an upgrade as past versions of Mac OS X – in fact at first glance it’s not that dissimilar to Leopard. But under the hood it’s been completely rewritten with a host of subtle, but powerful changes that vastly enhance user experience and productivity,” Hannah Bouckley reports for T3.
“Among the new technologies 64-bit support enables applications to access more RAM, so they run faster and more efficiently,” Bouckley reports. “Crucially it also means third-party software developers can start producing compatible 64-bit programs too.”
“Snow Leopard also support Open CL. Open CL utilizes the power in the computers graphics processor, so instead of just being uses for graphic intensive tasks, it’s idle power can also be allocated to every day tasks,” Bouckley reports. “The final technology, Grand Central Dispatch makes use of multiple cores simultaneously, so they run more efficiently.”
“The result of these developments is that Snow Leopard is extremely quick to use,” Bouckley reports. “At £25 [US$29] for a single license, Snow Leopard is an essential upgrade for any Leopard user. It’s almost cheap for the increase in speed in everyday use – and perhaps more importantly for the potential for future improvement. And coming in a whopping 7GB lighter than Leopard, it will actually free up disc space. How many upgrades do that?”
Full review here.
“”Snow Leopard is not as big an upgrade as past versions of Mac OS X …But under the hood it’s been completely rewritten with a host of subtle, but powerful changes that vastly enhance user experience and productivity,”
There’s an Oxymoron. I say this is the BIGGEST upgrade. They just didn’t add dancing icons or some nonsense.
Can Micro$ucks claim that any Winblows upgrade made existing hardware run faster?
<crickets>
@Cubert
Even better. Ahahahaha. Yeah, its a POS alright.
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/09/08/windows.7.returns.remote.bsod/
Has anyone upgraded and tried booting into 64 mode? Just wondering if it makes any difference.
mostly clueless article (in case you have not noticed it)
@Cubert,
Once, from the window sill to the sidewalk.
Has anyone else been having this problem: when I start snow leopard (on a macbook pro and a mac pro–same issue), the system runs really fast and is super responsive. After some time (minutes or hours), the computer begins accessing the HD excessively, as if it’s paging memory in and out a ton, and everything slows to a crawl. The CPU usage is registering nearly 0, but because of the HD access, the computer becomes unusable and I have to restart it completely…. at which point it all starts over again.
This is a truly annoying issue, and I’m guessing it’s due to a memory leak somewhere in the system or a major client app, but I haven’t heard of anyone else that’s having this trouble. Again, this is happening on 2 different machines, in 2 different locations.
Anyone having similar problems?
@John
It’s gotta be something you’re running. If Snow Leopard had a problem that major, it would be all over the net.
——RM
@John again:
Are you running anything under Rosetta? I had a minor problem with an image browser I use that’s PPC-only. It ran under Rosetta in Leopard with no difficulties, but under Snow Leopard there was a noticeable lag as I switched to each new image. In desperation, I searched and found that there had been one last update before the developer abandoned the app (still PPC-only). I upgraded, and the new version doesn’t seem to have the problems.
——RM
@John
Are your computers trying to synch to/via mobileme?
@LordRobin: nothing that I’m aware of. My office machine is pretty much running only mail, safari, ichat, and iTunes, which are all Apple software. My laptop runs more things, but those are the basics. And my office machine has this problem far worse than my laptop (it happens faster, at least). I did install the recent flash upgrade, and that helped some.
@CourtJester: yes, I sync all my computers (including my old PPc desktop computer at home, running leopard) via mobileme. Is there a known issue with this? I would SURELY hope Apple would have figured out if there was a problem with their own synching software, but I notice right this minute that the synch “wheel” is spinning and the HD is grinding away….
“Extremely quick”?
I have one word for Snow Leopard:
SSSSSSSLLLLLOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!!!!!!
10.6 is the OS X version of Vista. I’ve been waiting 15 minutes for Desktop & Screen Saver to just show me a folder of wallpapers. Quick? You gotta be shitin’ me Jobs!
It should be quicker! Consider Apple is preparing the OS to run on mobile devices such as future tablet or PDA-like products. There are many hints in SL that the OS is becoming mobile-friendly:
– auto location services using Wi-Fi to set time zones
– scalable virtual keyboard (Keyboard Viewer)
– rich graphics for app icons
– auto adjust screen setting to ambient lighting in Energy Saver previously in 10.5 has been removed and is now built-in to save battery (consistent with iPhone and iPod touch)
– others?
John, I am having exactly the same problem as you. I have two MACBOOKS, almost identical. A MacBook Pro 15″ 2009 model and a MacBook 13″ 2009 model.
On my pro, it is laggy as hell and the hard disk is continually grinding. On my Macbook it is running perfectly. Both have 98% the same install and programs.
The only major differences are i installed iLife on the Pro and not on the MacBook. Can we compare apps.
On Both systems….
Office 2008
I Work
Drop Box
Firefox
(I do not use Mail at all)
Synch’ing address book and Ical with Gmail via WebDav
Quicktime 7 (old version) and Flip4Mac (to play WMV files)
That’s it, nothing else at all.
On Pro only – iLife.
Both systems were NOT upgrades. I did 100% clean installs and them moved over my data files.
Thought anyone?
John, see my post above.
The problem seems to be due to Spotlight index. Not sure why. Make your root HD private in spotlight preferences and the HD grinding and lag in Snow Leapord seems to go away.
Not sure if this is 100% the cause of the problem, but it seems to be.
What I cant figure out is why it is happening on only one of my two systems.
Open Activity Monitor and watch the memory and cpu useage as well as hard disk activity. Shouldn’t be hard to track down.
No-one I know has this issue.