Hybrid Fire

I haven’t done a review in a long time so I thought I’d start with this.

I got my Macbook Pro 15″ in late June 2009, so I was eligible for the $10 Snow Leopard upgrade. I ordered it the same day.

However, my friend ordered it 2 days before Snow Leopard shipped, yet somehow he received his copy of it on release day while I waited until 4 days later. That, my friends, is bull, but what can you do.

This Macbook Pro is my first Mac after being a long time PC user (like 10 years). I’m not sure how to go through this review so I decided to go on the Apple page for Snow Leopard and just go down the list.

But first, you have to know this: I upgraded from Leopard when I first got it and then after a few days, decided to clean install because I felt it would be faster if I clean installed, so I backed up what I could and have not migrated anything yet for the purposes of this review.

Expose

It’s pretty much the same thing except that the windows are positioned in a more grid-like form.

I’m not sure if this is new but when you push the spacebar when hovering over a window, it will become almost full-sized, useful if some windows look pretty much the same.

Stacks

You can see the scrollbar on the side

The little arrow in the upper left corner lets you go back to the previous folder

Stacks are now scrollable and will let you open folders inside the stack so you don’t have to load up a Finder window, which I think is a lot more useful then before.

Time Machine

Apple says that Time Machine is up to 80% faster but, since I don’t have an external at the moment (mine broke), I’ll just have to trust Apple on this. Besides, who doesn’t like faster backups?

Startup / Shutdown Times

Apple says that shut down times are twice as fast and I’ll believe it since I have noticed it is a lot faster but the start up times are much more important. While they say wake up times are twice as fast, I actually have not noticed any speed increase.

Installation

Apple says that installation will be 50% faster, but I don’t think that’s true. My Macbook Pro took about 1 hour to upgrade from Leopard and 45 minutes to clean install. I’ve installed Hackintoshes that were faster than that so I think that the install times are a bit sketchy.

Quicktime X

It looks insanely good now but has lost a lot of functionality. I personally don’t use the functions that other people talk about so no difference to me. Apple talked about improved codec support but, I still needed Perian to watch my anime.

Conclusion

Those are the main new things with Snow Leopard. People have stated that they believe this is more of a service pack than a whole new OS and for the end user, us consumers, that is pretty much on target. I am a end user, and definitely not a Mac power user..yet, but from what I’ve seen on the other reviews, this version of Mac OS X is all about the developers and not so much us. It is only $30 dollars so why not, it’s not crazy expensive like a lot of other Apple products.

Related posts:

1. Review: Mozilla Minefield Like to be on the “bleeding edge” of technology? Well...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.