Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard

I upgraded my Leopard-equipped late 2006 Black MacBook to Snow Leopard. I had it on pre-order all week and delivered on release date. It doesn't boast a whole lot of new stuff to it, but I like the new features it does have, and I love the fact that it takes up so much less hard drive space on my MacBook (I gained an amazing 29 gigabytes of space). I also noticed a pretty good speed boost after upgrading.


I really love the new Dock Expose, and how I can look at just one particular application in Expose instead of all the open windows in any given space. It makes finding things a lot easier. I also like the fact that you can now resize your icons in the finder. Dock scrolling (with magnification) and cover flow have been smoothed out greatly which makes it that much more attractive. Quicktime X is a pretty good movie recorder and the interface looks a lot better than previous version of Quicktime. Some other refinements are pretty nice as well.

64-bit support is amazing and I can see a difference in the apps that are now running in 64-bit (see the Activity Monitor for the apps that are running in 64-bit). Things just run smoother and faster.

Now, as far as some drawbacks of the system, this first one is a major one: when redesigning Safari, they made Safari and its plugins and completely separate processes, supposedly to improve the stability of Safari. Perhaps it did this, but as a result, it eats up far more CPU power than the previous iteration. This can result in your system slowing down, and I'm running into serious issues with heating (when using Flash for example, it eats up almost 70% of the CPU and I'm running around 150F, which is somewhat dangerous). Also, there has been some lost backward compatibility with Snow Leopard, and for me, most notable with VMWare Fusion. I hope this is addressed soon.

So would I consider this a necessary upgrade? Not really. If an upgrade is considered, it should be more for the speed boost than for new features, as most users won't take advantage of many (if any) of the enhancements in the interface itself. However, the speed boost and freeing up of hard drive space are nice. Also, if you have programs that might have compatibility issues I'd probably recommend holding off and waiting for these to be resolved before upgrading. If you don't have these issues, go ahead and upgrade, however, I believe you should do so with caution, and keep a copy of your Leopard install disk handy in case you need to revert should you run into any of the issues mentioned.
Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard