Been a week since its released. Anybody got it yet?

I got mine last Friday, all installed and working well

anyone who has recently bought a Mac can upgrade for £7-95. Just visit the apple store and follow the instructions, ordered mine for £7-95 and should arrive today, I've just bought a Mac Book Pro

Cut my teeth on Windows XP in 2005 so to speak, then 2 years later 2007 went iMac 'Tiger' and using boot-camp, had Windows XP installed.

Moving from 'Tiger' to 'Leopard' was smooth, got son-in-law to install for me.LOL

Now I see 'Snow Leopard' not crystal clear advantages I would benefit so will save the £25 upgrade cost and wait for next generation.

I find navigating the iMac difficult as compared to Windows XP, even flipping through photos asking for one preview after another just fills screen up, then I have to delete one at a time.

I know this will cause a stir (not intentional) Apple versus Windows!! but add Apple needs Windows for countless programs it hasn't got of it's own, sorry.

Ian. 04/09/2009. :confused:

I've ordered mine, will collect it tuesday. Lots of reviews out there about how much better it is. Faster , less space needed(about 7 GB), full 64 bit, all sorts of behind the scenes upgrades (this is where most of the work has been done) which is why it's more of an upgrade than a new operating system per say. As for reviewing photos or any other file for that matter, quick look works very well, all you do is tap the space bar and up pops your file or picture.

How did you upgraded yours? Directly "on top" of the current Leopard or? Back up? Did all of your installed programs had to be reinstalled?

Its an in-place upgrade or a clean install

Entirely up to you

Non of my installed progs had to be re-installed

Carl:thumbup:

I took the upgrade route which worked ok, put the disk in and let it do its thing. I use Time Machine so I had a fall back if needed, only issue so far was printer drivers but I've sorted that now.

Now I see 'Snow Leopard' not crystal clear advantages I would benefit so will save the £25 upgrade cost and wait for next generation.

The upgrade makes your Mac faster, securer & more reliable.

If you are prepared to 'pay the extra' (arguable, but let's not bother eh ) to get the benefits of a Mac & paid £90+ to move from Tiger to Leopard, then it's a no brainer to pay £25 for this upgrade.

I love the fact that they have put all this effort into making a system that superficially looks the same but actually works better. So many companies, systems, shops, services etc could do with taking a leaf out of Apple's book here.

The upgrade makes your Mac faster, securer & more reliable.

If you are prepared to 'pay the extra' (arguable, but let's not bother eh ) to get the benefits of a Mac & paid £90+ to move from Tiger to Leopard, then it's a no brainer to pay £25 for this upgrade.

I love the fact that they have put all this effort into making a system that superficially looks the same but actually works better. So many companies, systems, shops, services etc could do with taking a leaf out of Apple's book here.

Yes and I'm guessing most of those companies you're talking about would call this a service pack and it would be free

Yes and I'm guessing most of those companies you're talking about would call this a service pack and it would be free

You've got completely the wrong end of the stick re: my comment (& possibly as regards what 'Snow Leopard' is.)

The 0.0.1 updates are Apples 'service packs'. They appear regularly as free downloads.

10.5 -> 10.6 is a major update. It doesn't add any features but improves performance. Think of it as paying for a 'remap' & it makes more sense.

My comment had nothing to do with computers really but I was more aiming at all sorts of manufacturers & service providers who regularly add features to sell their products but never really close the circle & make them work properly. I would often rather pay more to have something work better than get an additional, often useless 'feature' that I probably didn't want & that also doesn't work properly! I could even extend this to dropping 2p from the price of a box of cereal rather than offering me chance to win a holiday for example.

Disclaimer: I'm a fan of Apple products but I'm not blind to their failings as a company. I'm not after an Apple is Brilliant/Crap argument. I just like the 'concept' behind the Snow Leopard update.

You've got completely the wrong end of the stick re: my comment (& possibly as regards what 'Snow Leopard' is.)

The 0.0.1 updates are Apples 'service packs'. They appear regularly as free downloads.

The rest of the world calls this regular patches and updates.

10.5 -> 10.6 is a major update. It doesn't add any features but improves performance. Think of it as paying for a 'remap' & it makes more sense.

What in the same way as vista to vista SP1 and the not too long now SP2 is?

I recently had to reinstall my OS, and the speed difference between the non SP and the SP version was huge.

My comment had nothing to do with computers really but I was more aiming at all sorts of manufacturers & service providers who regularly add features to sell their products but never really close the circle & make them work properly. I would often rather pay more to have something work better than get an additional, often useless 'feature' that I probably didn't want & that also doesn't work properly! I could even extend this to dropping 2p from the price of a box of cereal rather than offering me chance to win a holiday for example.

Disclaimer: I'm a fan of Apple products but I'm not blind to their failings as a company. I'm not after an Apple is Brilliant/Crap argument. I just like the 'concept' behind the Snow Leopard update.

I appreciate where you're coming from, but IMHO the update is really something I'd expect for free.

Consider the fact that thay have taken away a large chunk of functionality (PPC support). I'd actually guess a lot of the speed increases could have come from not having to do everything in a totally endian safe way, as the architecture is now big endian only and everything can be optimised for this. Most of that is just normal maintenance and going for just a single architecture actually reduces ongoing costs.

Sure £25 isn't much, but for the paid for Linux and Windows world this would IMHO not be a paid for update.

In actual fact this is all rather clever marketing. Think about it, you own a fairly powerful G5 machine and all of a sudden you download an update that renders your machine completely useless. That cannot happen so the update is put onto a disk, given a catchy name and you are charged £25 for the pleasure.

But whats in a name? Snow Leopard.. sounds alot like plain old Leopard to me, why not a whole new big cat and a new X logo instead of a cute pussy covered in snow. I think its to soften the blow slightly to those poor people with G5's, makes it seem like much less of a major update than it really is.

Then the price, £25.. Not free so G5 owners dont feel like they have missed out on free goodies, but then not enough to make them think its a big update.

Nothing Apple does it by mistake

Now that I can totally agree with, a marketing ploy with obvious intent.

In actual fact this is all rather clever marketing.

Now that I can totally agree with, a marketing ploy with obvious intent.

Eggxackerly!

Apple uses software to sell it's hardware. Hence no 'PPC' version of Snow Leopard. It's to entice people to switch or upgrade to the latest Apple hardware.

To be fair to Apple though the last PPC (G5 Tower) was discontinued in August of 2006. The last PPC iMac was discontinued in January 2006 & the last PPC laptop was discontinued in May 2006. These machines were all supplied with OS X 10.4 'Tiger' but were all supported, along with many earlier machines, when 10.5 'Leopard' came out (source: everymac.com). Did Vista support 3 yr old machines when it was launched?

The other reason I say this is not just a 'Service Pack' is that to my mind, service packs fix problems & Leopard works just fine on PPC & Intel. Snow Leopard works better. It's like the difference between a recall & a remap.

To go back to your comments though, I totally agree. Funny how Snow Leopard arrived just prior to Windows 7. Apple does nothing accidentally & Snow Leopard will have been launched, priced & marketed in such a way as to maximise the subsequent sales of Apple hardware.

Did Vista support 3 yr old machines when it was launched?

Yes

How did I miss this thread?

I used to work in the Regent Street store (when people still came to see "the apple store")... I saw the launch of the 1st Nano and the HUGE demand for mini's that followed, as well as the transition to Intel 1st hand, so to speak. but back on topic..

I have the lowest spec, oldest G5 model they made, my trusty 1.6ghz power mac! Snow Leopard is a HUGE pass-wader for me to get a new system. My system is ok for what I need but the increasing availability of HD content is really starting to grate, as.. my little 1.6 can't play it back! On top of that I'm now "dropped" from any future development and don't be fooled into think Adobe, Digidesign etc will keep the PowerPC dream alive either!

Snow Lepoard almost is an early warning sign that if your hardware is G5, You need to start saving!

Personally, after playing on a Mac Mini last weekend and watching it play back HD trailers and BBCi player HD content almost perfectly seamlessly, I'll be investing in a Mac Mini... when the next ones come out They pee all over my G5 as it is!

We have one of those 1.6 G5's as our mail server, it struggled with leopard server so i think its probably time to get rid :P

How did I miss this thread?

I used to work in the Regent Street store (when people still came to see "the apple store")... I saw the launch of the 1st Nano and the HUGE demand for mini's that followed, as well as the transition to Intel 1st hand, so to speak. but back on topic..

I have the lowest spec, oldest G5 model they made, my trusty 1.6ghz power mac! Snow Leopard is a HUGE pass-wader for me to get a new system. My system is ok for what I need but the increasing availability of HD content is really starting to grate, as.. my little 1.6 can't play it back! On top of that I'm now "dropped" from any future development and don't be fooled into think Adobe, Digidesign etc will keep the PowerPC dream alive either!

Snow Lepoard almost is an early warning sign that if your hardware is G5, You need to start saving!

Personally, after playing on a Mac Mini last weekend and watching it play back HD trailers and BBCi player HD content almost perfectly seamlessly, I'll be investing in a Mac Mini... when the next ones come out They pee all over my G5 as it is!

It's odd as I've been doing some work which has involved some work with a broadcaster. We found a dual quad core i7 Mac Pro, with a lot of RAM and a couple of fast hard discs appeared to be unable to cope with pulling 1080p HD (Not compressed so much it looks cr*p) over a high speed network and playing it back. FWIW no the network and the storage were not a problem.

To me this suggests that things are not going to be all sunshine trying to do that on any Mac (or PC for that matter)

ars technica have a good in-depth review of Snow Leopard here. It seems to get right down to the nuts & bolts of the differences between Leopard & Snow Leopard & makes some informed guesses as to why certain things have been changed.

To be honest a lot of it is going over my head (I'm at page 6 of 23 so far) but John Siracusa is a good writer & explains things well + ars technica is not a fan site, so you seem to get nicely balanced, unbiased reviews there.

My fave quote so far:

"Still, I must unenthusiastically predict that most normal people (i.e., the ones who will not read this entire article) will either find these added visual touches delightful, or (much more likely) not notice them at all."

Looks like my G5 will be coming to the end of its life then! Not sure I want to replace with a new tower model, might be tempted down the 24inch imac route then i can get all the wizzy new software

One month and one day after typing the above my G5 decided to join the big computer scrap heap in the sky and meltdown on me. Ho hum, as predicted a lovely 24inch imac is sat here now in its place, and thanks to the brilliant Time Machine, all my client work and programmes copied over with minimal fuss! New mac came with Snow Leopard but so far haven't noticed anything particularly different about it.