Review by Lon J. Seidman

Having spent the better part of today with Apple’s latest operating system upgrade I can say that the transition to 10.6 was a much smoother process than the jump from Tiger to Leopard. Today’s upgrade installation took a little less than an hour on my 2009 Macbook Pro.

The result? Subtle changes that definitely don’t demand you do this upgrade immediately. Still, many little annoyances are fixed, and performance has been tuned to the point that this upgrade results in a noticeably ‘snappier’ operating system. So far I’ve encountered none of the catastrophic upgrade gotchyas I experienced when upgrading from Tiger to Leopard two years ago.

It’s important to note that there really aren’t any major user-facing upgrades with this release. When your system returns to your control after the upgrade process it will largely look the same – just polished. You will notice as you begin navigating through your newly refreshed system that things happen faster. Less beachballs, fewer pauses, and overall a much more pleasant user experience even with software written for earlier versions of the operating system (just make sure those apps are on the Snow Leopard compatibility list). The performance improvements are noticeable. Very noticeable at times.

The real power of this release is going to come later on this year and next as developers begin working with the very important under-the-hood changes that Mac OS X Snow Leopard brings to the Mac platform.

As we saw with Leopard it will take time for the ‘snow leopard only’ apps to start appearing. Those who use their Macs to bill by the hour may want to wait until their most important app becomes a 10.6 only version before upgrading. The snappier feel is great, but the real power of this OS upgrade is yet to come – and waiting a bit will undoubtedly fix bugs that will be found by us early adopters in the coming weeks. There are simply no ‘must-have’ user facing features that have been the hallmark of previous OS X releases. You can nitpick me on the details but let’s face it - your system will be pretty much the same after this installs itself over 10.5.

One other note before I turn this post over to the commenters: What makes the Mac so great are the users’ acceptance of upgrading hardware to meet new software demands. What ultimately makes Windows such a problem for us enlightened Mac owners is that Windows still needs to run code written 20-30 years ago! Macs are different. We’re used to buying new hardware to run the latest and greatest. To that end, those who have not yet jumped over to Intel-based processors are going to be left out in the cold on this release. It will only install on machines produced after the Intel transition in 2006.