I installed Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard today and I’m actually quite the Mac fanboy, I worship Steve Jobs and cry when I see an iPhone being thrashed, but I must say one thing : Snow Leopard is indeed nothing more than a white Leopard.
I prepared Leopard for an upgrade and made some backups, these were useless to me since everything went flawlessly. After an hour long install, Snow Leopard booted with the same video as I saw when I first bought my MacBook. I tested a few things and indeed it’s a little bit faster, but Leopard was fast enough anyway and Safari 4 still acts like a turtle with a bag of concrete on its back. Snow Leopard do seems to have more vivant colors though.
I tested some other things like the new stacks and well, that’s one of the biggest mistakes I ever saw on a mac. The icons of the grid view look gigantic. Not the flair we are used from Apple, just a bunch of irritatingly giant icons in a grid with a scrollbar next to them.
One of the few things that I do see as an improvement are the new miniatures previews for video files and such. You can play a video from its icon, which is kinda cool but still not worth the €29.
Since I’m a developer and graphics artist I also checked some rumors that Xcode wouldn’t be working, it worked fine and would build iPhone OS 2.0 apps. Photoshop CS 3 worked fine as well, so no flaws there. I’m experiencing one annoying issue, most of my screensavers I installed in Leopard don’t work anymore.
Now about the new exposé. In my opinion, what can you change about something that works great? Ok, when you hold your mouse down on an icon, it displays all screens. But in return you have to take that the exposé you are used to now looks like crap. All exposé windows now have some blue shiny edge on hover, which is in my opinion overkill and just plain ugly.
So is Snow Leopard really the greatest OS release of the year? Certainly not. Many people are comparing Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, but you can’t compare them, Windows 7 is great and might even be worth the €200, but Snow Leopard isn’t even worth the €29. Luckily it provides me with 20Gb of extra free disk space, but 29€ for 20Gb is a little too much in my opinion.
So to see an actual new Mac OSX, we’ll have to wait for 10.7 is suppose.
EDIT : Apparently 64-bits mode doesn’t work either on most macs, you can enable it if you have one of the few chosen models, but most macs even intels, have an 64-bits EFI but do not support 64-bits in the bootloader. So if Apple says Snow Leopard brings 64-bits to the mac they are really selling air.
