I’ve used Snow Leopard for almost 10 days now. Here are my impressions of the new, cooler cat.
Faster
The first and most important part for me is that my system is now much faster. The finder has gone from avarage to instant fast, starting up from sleep mode is instant, and booting is faster. Other built in software is also slightly faster, but not very noticeable as they were faster already.
iTunes 9 is also faster, but I think that is more because of the new iTunes, not Snow Leopard. I expect third party software to take more advantage of Snow Leopard to speed up in the future also. All in all, the system feels snappier and more effective to work with. Safari seems much faster too, but I use Firefox as my default browser so I don’t notice that on a daily basis.
Smaller
Snow Leopard gave me about 10GB hard drive space back. It helps a lot with my rather small 120GB HDD. The memory footprint is also slightly smaller, it seems.
Polished
If you had some tiny issues with some of Leopard’s features, chances are they have been fixed with Snow Leopard. You can now scroll in the stacks, you can trigger Exposé from the dock, and many features have new animations, showing exactly where files are going, for example. When you try to eject a disk, Snow Leopard tells you which programs use it if you can’t eject it. All of these little things make the experience just a bit more polished and pleasant.
Exchange support
If the IT administration of the Norwegian courts would bother to enable external Exchange connections and upgrade to Exchange 2007, I bet this would be feature #1 for me. They haven’t, so I haven’t tried this feature yet. But if it works as announced, and I bet it does, this is a great feature for anyone using Exchange for their mail and calendar. No more Entourage.
QuickTime X
I haven’t tried this much, but it seems like an important upgrade to QuickTime, bringing the aging media player up to date. They have rebuilt the framework the player is built on, giving it hardware acceleration support and more. The interface is also slicker, and contains built in video trimming and sharing.
Conclusion
All in all this is a great upgrade. They didn’t try to fix things that wasn’t broken, they just polished them. The system feels pretty much the same, except that almost all those little annoyances are gone. For $29 this is a no brainer.
I haven’t experienced any issues with this release, and all my programs still work. Still Apple seems determined to make this release as good as possible, already having released 10.6.1 with fixes to some of the specific issues some people have reported.
Pros:
- A highly polished OS for $29
- Many small annoyances fixed
- Exchange support
- Smaller
- QuickTime X, now with previous pro features for free
- Faster
Cons:
- Few entirely new features
Highly recommended!
