Original Review (9/1/2009)
So far, Snow Leopard is a great upgrade on my iMac (which has slightly less RAM than I probably should). Startup is faster, program launches are faster, the dock is vastly improved, with fantastic and much more contextual right-click menus that allow you to perform tasks without actually focusing on a program.

For example, in iTunes I can right-click and rate a song, change my repeat settings, even eject my iPhone, all from the dock. Sounds like a minor change, but anything that saves me a second or five, each time I interact with a frequently used application adds up over the course of the day.

There is one major issue with Snow Leopard (see below for an update), and frankly it's not really Apple's fault...or at least not directly. Since Snow Leopard is a re-arch of the whole OS, they promise that most applications will work perfectly fine if they functioned properly in Leopard, but encourage software developers to patch their applications for the upgrade. Major manufacturers have taken this $30 OS upgrade as an opportunity to push far more expensive upgrades of their own applications onto their customers.

For the most part everything has worked just fine, including applications that are selling an x.1 patch, but the one glaring exception is Adobe's CS3 (which is a $2000 product that's only just over a year old). I require this software suite to do my job. They've stated that they will only support CS4 on Snow Leopard, and CS3 is quite buggy & crashy so far.

Review Update (9/23/2009)
Adobe has pushed a patch and I'm happy to report that nothing has crashed since. In the future I'll probably wait a few weeks before upgrading the OS if its rumored to have such unanticipated productivity ramifications.

This is Adobe's bad decision, but it reflects poorly on Apple. It will hinder adoption of Snow Leopard in the same way that printer manufacturers' failure to support the original incarnation of OSX with drivers caused a lot of people to stay on the vastly inferior OS9 for far too long. They should incentivize major software publishers to support at least the last 2 generations of their product on a new OS.

Snow Leopard is possibly one of the cheapest operating system upgrades I have ever seen though it is not as major an upgrade as previous iterations of the OS X operating system. It takes approximately an hour to install, and it seems Apple have done nothing to improve their time estimations - I sat and watched it saying "Less than a minute" for almost 10 minutes and I'm sure it wasn't just me being impatient.

Upon restarting into Snow Leopard for the first time you'll be greeted with the usual Welcome video and a registration screen. When you're upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard it does seem pointless to have these yet again, but it doesn't really detract from the experience.

First thing I noticed after installing Snow Leopard was the change they'd made to the contextual menu's for the dock - if you right-click on them once you get a gorgeously styled contextual menu, and if you click and hold it will dim the rest of the screen and put focus on the active windows for that menu item and the contextual menu for it. The visual effect is kind of similar to having a lightbox open with a greyed out background like you see on many so-called "Web 2.0" websites. I think this new expose feature is particularly useful if you've got a lot of windows for the same application open and you're trying to find the right one. Along these same lines they've also tweaked the stacks interface.

I thought I'd see what performance differences there were and I decided the best choice for me was to try iMovie. Over the weekend I'd been editing some new video and I'd found that playing the "world map" animation at full screen would cause my Mac to jerk a little (don't laugh, it's a 1st Gen Intel). To my surprise after the update it was smooth which meant I could see what I was editing so much easier at a decent size. Another claimed speed improvement is the regeneration of PDF and JPEG thumbnail views for icons - I've not really noticed that as I don't remember them taking ages before. After the install I do notice them update as they take about a second to generate a thumbnail - and they seem to do this on every view.

Apple also claim that it's a big space saver, and that is true. After installing Snow Leopard it had freed up approximately 10Gb of space, though I've heard that it does is to remove unrequired temporary files and to remove PPC versions of the default applications. Time Machine backup is supposedly improved, however I don't have a time capsule to test this with (nor do I intend on getting one after the experience we had with these at work). I do know someone who has had issues in Leopard with time machine backups to an external HDD, but I'll have to see how they get on with it in Snow Leopard.

There is also a new version of Quicktime with Snow Leopard that finally includes the ability to edit your Quicktime movies from within the player. The editing interface where you highlight portions of video is very similar to the one you get in iMovie and on the iPhone so it should be easy for existing Mac users to get to grips with.

One of the features I've not been able to test is the new, improved connectivity with Microsoft Exchange Servers - I have no Exchange server available at home to test with so I've had to skip past this for now. I would imagine this feature will only interest you if you use you Mac at work in a primarily Windows environment though I guess it's possible there are exceptions to this. Another feature I've not yet been able to test is the automatic time zone setup as I've not yet gone to another time zone to see if it automatically adjusts the setting. There have also been improvements to iChat, however I don't use iChat so I can't fairly comment on them (I use Adium instead when I have to use IM).

What saddens me about this update is that my startup and shutdown times seem longer at 19 seconds and 16 seconds respectively. I'm not sure if it's got anything to do with what I have installed or the fact it's a 1st Gen Intel Macbook Pro, but it didn't seem as fast as Leopard which usually did it in around 10 seconds. Most people have reported that theirs has been quicker though so it could be mine is just an anomaly.

I've been quite fortunate in that most applications I've tested so far have worked (execpt BookSmart), but there are applications which are known to be buggy with Snow Leopard such as Photoshop CS3 and the CheckPoint Secure Client (which means I can install Snow Leopard on my work laptop yet).


Overall it does seem quite a nice upgrade and I'd say it does warrant the price tag even if it's just for the generally improved speed and the amount of HDD space that is saved. The additional features and the UI tweaks make it an even better deal.