Review by Jojoleb

Snow Leopard is the latest OS X version and is an excellent upgrade, given its bargain price. This is a revamped Leopard and not a totally new operating system, but succeeds at improving on already great features. There are software compatibility problems, so it may pay to wait a month or so before upgrading to avoid the annoyance of non-working software.

The installation couldn’t have been more smooth–you basically put in the DVD, hit install, and the OS installs itself. Unlike every other version of Microsoft Windows, the machine doesn’t have to reboot multiple times and Snow Leopard doesn’t require any user input until after it reboots into itself.

The OS offers a nice tweak on OS X’s usual features. There are also a lot of ‘under the hood’ improvements that take full advantage of 64 bit processing and others that make life easier for software developers. Apple’s description above tells you about most of the improvements, so I won’t reiterate that here. The ones that really shine for me in everyday use are the improved ‘stacks’ features in the dock, incredible improvements in Expose, expanded ‘Quick look’ capabilities,faster start up, faster backups with time machine, and Microsoft exchange capabilities in Mail. Overall, the computer seems to work faster. In particular, video processing in iMovie and iDVD seem to have gained some more speed. I have a lot of pictures on iPhoto and before Snow Leopard there was a lot of lag when starting iPhoto up. Now starting iPhoto is much snappier.

As many reviewers have pointed out, there’s no ‘killer’ application here and this is less of a new operating system and more of an upgrade on the existing system. But the price is right and the features really do make the most pleasant to use OS out there even better.

Alas, all is not wine and roses. There are now internet lists of compatibility problems with software. If you want to run older software, you have to install Rosetta (now a separate installation). My biggest annoyance was Microsoft Office 2008: once I upgraded, none of the components would load. Uncharacteristically for an Apple, the program just hung in the air and would not respond, necessitating a force quit. After a couple of days and no Microsoft patches in sight, I canvassed the net. This was a ‘font loading’ problem. What I had to do was verify all the fonts in fontbook and remove the offending ones. I then had to restore them so that Microsoft Office would print in something other than symbol fonts.

This was not an insurmountable problem, but was the first time in three years of owning a Mac that I had any problems whatsoever. Obviously, Microsoft Office is a third party program and you can’t fault Apple completely for compatibility issues. Even so, lack of Office if you rely on it can make your life miserable. (Kudos to NeoOffice/OpenOffice, their program worked without a hitch. So did iWork, for the record, but this is an Apple product.) My guess would be that this kind of problem will occur less and less as developers realize that such problems are occurring. Most problems can be preemptively solved by upgrading all your software before installing Leopard.

The folks at Mac most likely released this OS as a preemptive strike against the onslaught of Microsoft’s latest system, Windows 7. Having played with the Windows 7 release candidate, I don’t think that Apple has much to fear. Windows 7 is a vast improvement over Vista, in my opinion, but it won’t win over the OS X faithful. And given the economy, the vast majority of users and companies will stick to the more ubiquitous Windows systems rather than buying new hardware. (My guess is that Windows 7 will be competing more with other versions of itself rather than OS X or Linux for market share.) Even so, Apple probably wanted to keep its cutting-edge image alive.

Snow Leopard is well worth the price of admission. As above, I would recommend waiting a week or two before installing it so that the 3rd party vendors have time to eliminate the compatibility problems.