Posted on by Terry White

Snow Leopard is Coming this Friday! Well……?

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Apple has announced that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is shipping this Friday! As you might have guessed, I’ve already got my copy on order. While I’m sure I could go ahead and install a developer release GM copy right now. I kinda like to wait for the real deal disc. Also in this case I’m really not in any real hurry.

 

Snow Leopard is a different kind of upgrade

Each full version of Mac OS X is usually packed with hundreds of new features and enhancements. However, this time around Apple chose to basically make what was already good about Mac OS X, better with the much needed under the hood improvements to give us great 64 bit support and speed. This is also reflected in the upgrade price. If you’re a Leopard user the cost of upgrading (for the OS) is only $29 ($49 for the Family Pack) this time around. I am looking forward to one major new thing and that is the native support for MS Exchange 2007. We use Exchange servers at work for email, calendar, etc. and currently I have to use MS Entourage for work stuff. I’d love to be able to ditch Entourage and just use Mail, iCal and Address Book for everything. Looks like that day will come soon. So I’m very excited about that and of course who can complain about things working faster?

 

Stuff will break

My friends usually wait for me to give the official thumbs up on what works and what doesn’t. I will take the same approach to upgrading that I told you about when Leopard came out and that is to make a clone copy of my hard drive and install the new OS. If anything really bad happens I can just go back to my old setup via the clone. With ANY new OS there is something that will not work! Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will be NO DIFFERENT in that regard. Sure there aren’t as many new features, but there will be hundreds if not thousands of little tweaks under the hood that could potentially break your third party stuff.

Here’s a good site on Snow Leopard compatibility of 3rd party apps. Thanks Phyl!

 

What about my Adobe Products?

OK, I knew that you really were just wanting me to comment on this. Well this time I’m ready for you. Adobe has put together this official Adobe Snow Leopard FAQ. So you can check it out ahead of time and get an idea if you need to upgrade or not.

 

Is there a complete list of these "refinements"?

Yep, there sure is. You can check it out here. Thanks Jack.

 

My official review will come

Once I’ve got Snow Leopard installed and had some time to play, I’ll be posting my official review. Most likely this won’t come before Monday at the earliest and possibly later in the week as I’ll be on vacation 🙂

 

Upgrading

Snow Leopard $29 (only $24.99 here), Snow Leopard Family Pack $49 (only $43.99 here), Snow Leopard Box Set for Tiger Users (includes ILife ’09/iWork ’09) $169 (only $149.99 here).

System Requirements.

 

26 Replies to “Snow Leopard is Coming this Friday! Well……?”

      2. Terry:

        I am also a Super Duper User. (I guess I am "anal retentive" so I do regular Time Machine and SuperDuper Backups daily on a partitioned 2TB hard disk. I also do a weekly SuperDuper backup on an OWC portable disk, so I am always ready for daily backups on the road.)

        i have checked the ShirtPocket site and they give no indication of SuperDuper’s readiness for Snow Leopard. Do you have any insight about this>

  3. You mention upgrading to Snow Leopard, but the packs you show are full versions. There are upgrade-only versions that are less expensive, if someone wants to go that route.

    1. To the best of my knowledge, Apple doesn’t sell “upgrades”. You buy the retail package. However, if you bought a Mac within the Snow Leopard announcement window, then you can use their “up-to-date” program to get Snow Leopard for $9.99.

    2. Terry mentioned all paths to Snow Leopard. If you are already using 10.5 on your Intel Mac, you only need the $29 (or $49 for the Family Pack edition) box. Should you still be using 10.4 on your Intel Mac your only upgrade path is $169 for the “Box set” edition which gives you 10.6, iLife 09 and iWork 09 for a very attractive price. Those of us who still have a G4 or G5 are completely out of luck. But we probably have been eyeing a new Mac anyway 😉

  4. Terry,

    I am a vista user (32 bit) using a quad core, with 3 meg ram…..
    I bought my first apple in 1986…I had to change to the IBM thing because of the company I worked for.

    I hear all the pros and cons about changing systems, performance,etc. I know you are a Mac user.

    Other than your own preference for Mac, I keep thinking I want to take the plunge, knowing I got of fort out a lot of cash to be on an equal playing field with what I have now.

    Do you think it will “pay off” more in the long run if I switched. I know adobe will let me to an equal exchange, I own two different suites of Abobe.

    I see so many cool apps for mac that vista does not support……I do want performance, my graphics files are 30 to 40 megs.

    Ken

    1. Ken,
      All I can say is that having used both OS’s for years, I still prefer the Mac! Also now that Macs can also run Windows natively (either via Boot Camp or Parallels, etc.) I see no reason (other than personal preference) to go with a PC. Again, this is my opinion and others will tell you the exact opposite (which of course will be their opinion). This debate has raged on for years. Best thing you can do is weigh the pros and cons for yourself and then make your decision. I’ve been happy with my Macs for over 20 years. I’ve had Dell’s and other computers and their just isn’t any comparison in my book. To each his own.

      1. I made the Mac plunge in June with a 24″ 4GB iMac. I am running Windows XP using VMWare Fusion, works great! It’s $80, but it is really solid program, I have XP running in a 1GB partition, with 3GB for the Mac “side.”

        -Price

        1. Terry and Eric,

          Thank you all for taking the time to help. I think I will go MAC……But going to save some bucks first…..

          PS< Will a IMac pro laptop do the trick if I bounce up the power specs?

  5. Hey Terry, I see your Adobe FAQ talks a lot about the CS4 family of products. DOes that include Lightroom? Do you know of any problems or issues with running this on Snow Leopard?

  6. One way in which you can protect your self from the things that break in Snow Leopard is to partition your disk.

    What that means is to take the last 15 Gb of your disk, which is probably unused, and put your current operating system in it. If something doesn’t work in Snow Leopard then you can always boot back into 10.5.8. It’s a no big deal to do in Disk Utility. Of course, it wipes out the disk, so backup your data first.

    At a mere $29, Snow Leopard is a worthy upgrade to be able to get at the new 64 bit software which will be coming down the pipe line. 64 bit applications will run 25 to 50% faster than 32 bit code, because it better utilizes the extra registers in the Core 2 processor chips. Any Cocoa application which was compiled in XCode 2.0 for the move to Intel processors will be upgraded to both 32 and 64 bit versions upon recompile in XCode 3.0.

    I’ve order Snow Leopard, but it will take 10 to 15 days to get it with Super Saver free shipping. I’m not going to upgrade until I’ve backed up everything, created that partition and 10.6.1 is out. That is the Suspenders AND Belt approach.

  7. Do you know if it is going to allow you to disable font smoothing system wide. I am a Mac switcher and my eyes even after months of use have not gotten used to the rounded fonts and start to hurt after an hour or two. However, i can grab my IBM T400 and go for 8+ hours and never get any eyestrain.

    I am hoping Snow Leopard give me some options……

    HUnter

  8. Will Photoshop Elements 6 work with OS 10.6? You mentioned that the upgraded Lightroom 2 will.
    Thanks, Paul

  9. Great blog, Terry. I check it out every day.

    I’m a new Mac user who’s recently switched from XP within the past 15 to 18 months. I held off on upgrading from Tiger to Leopard until the Adobe software stabilized and then just never got around to the upgrade. So I’m still on Tiger and looking forward to Snow Leopard.

    I’m thinking about installing 10.6 on a new drive. Could someone point me to a guide to the process and how best to move my data over?

    Also, does anyone think there is any hope of another upgrade path from Tiger? I’m not really interested in the iLife and iWork packages that much.

    Thanks!

  10. Hi Terry,

    What difference will the change in the default gamma from 1.8 to 2.2 make, are you using 1.8 at the moment?

    Thanks

  11. been running the GM of 10.6 for the better part of a week now and have been happy with it.
    there may be some changes from the GM to the retail version, but everything has been working swimmingly so far OTHER than Juniper VPN clients, which haven’t updated their software yet.

  12. Terry:

    Great blog!!
    I have a question for you. Did you order the family pack version of Snow Leopard of the Single user version? I have 3 Macs at home, do I need to buy the Family Pack?

    Thanks.
    Aaron

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