Review by Mitch Haile

I installed the family edition tonight on two laptops, a MacBook and MacBook Pro. It is immediately obvious the new Finder is worth the price of admission alone. Finder windows open and close quickly, there’s no annoying pauses and hangs. File copies are dramatically faster; no more need for power users to use a third party tool or drop into Terminal to copy files quickly. Time Machine backups are indeed faster, my old applications still work fine. When I opened a PowerPC app that needed Rosetta, Snow Leopard went to the Internet to download Rosetta–no need to dig out a DVD.

My primary applications–Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, OmniGraffle Pro, PowerPoint 2008, Word 2008, Flex Builder, Eclipse, FireFox, VMware Fusion–all seem to work just fine.

So I see no reason not to upgrade: The speed improvements, the painless installation, and most significantly, the much-improved Finder make this a bargain of an upgrade.

And that’s ignoring all the cool technologies under the hood (discussed in other reviews) and the small details that have been added (signal strength icons of wireless networks in the AirPort menu, for example).