• 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Very disappointing. Should have stuck with Leopard

    • Written by from Surbiton

    The Snow Leopard has been bitterly disappointing. In almost 1 year since I upgraded via the family pack, that's all the iApps 9.0, I may have been able to shut it down properly about 10 to 12 times. Every other time it has just hung on some application or the other and have to hard reset.
    iPhoto 9 hangs. Mail hangs. Firefox hangs. Safari 4.0 hangs. Force quite has been the most frequently used command. followed by a hard reset.
    Can't go back to Leopard now can I ? Waste of money and waste of time really.
    Wait for the Arctic Leopard or African leopard or whatever will be released next.

    134 of 163 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    DON'T DO IT

    • Written by from warrington

    Possibly the worst MacOs I can remember. Unless your mac is brand new or super charged, don't do it. We have a MacBook Pro and iMac and they are both significantly slower since the upgrade.

    89 of 102 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Very Disappointed

    • Written by from Pismo Beach

    I have been using Macs with my graphics business for over 15 years now and this is by far the worst experience I have had with an OS upgrade. My hand was forced by Apple to get the latest OS because of the Mobile Me iCal syncing and compatibility. I have had more problems (programs not responding, screen sharing issues, many inconvenient little quirks uncharacteristic of a Mac) with this upgrade over just a few days than I have had with all of my Mac computers combined in many years. I don't understand why this is the case. I feel like the Apple and Mac products are creeping ever closer to the inferior quality and lack of intuitiveness of PC's and the Windows OS. I really hope that these issues are taken care of.

    98 of 123 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Rainbow Beachball of Death?! STILL?!? Are you kidding me?

    • Written by from Pasadena

    I'm a huge Mac fan and I'd really like to give this OS the highest rating possible. It's so well-designed and efficient in practically every area, except one-- the mysterious Beachball of Death. It's been a constant horror for the past several OS X releases, and it's STILL there. This is what happens: Randomly, even during very basic tasks, a rainbow-striped spinning orb appears and your application is completely frozen. There's nothing you can do, except force-quit or wait until the beachball goes away. There's NO message-- NOTHING-- that tells you what it's doing, why, or how long it will take. In many cases, it easier to shut down/restart than to wait for the beachball to disappear. Apple doesn't comment on the problem, let alone fix it. It's frustrating.

    82 of 98 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    A bit of a let down

    • Written by from Douglas

    Hi, I thought I'd give a breakdown of the positives and negatives that 10.6 has given my MacKook pro
    Positives:
    Quicker shut down and start up
    I now have a few more GB of Memory
    The graphics update that comes with 10.6.4 means I can play left 4 dead 2
    A couple of nice little features (e.g. pressing space while in expose mode makes things bigger)

    Negatives:
    Battery time has gone down by a couple of hours
    And the big one, WEB BROWSERS DON"T WORK, every few minutes firefox and safari will loose connection with the server and I have to turn the airport of and on and refresh the page many times. This didn't happen with 10.5. A person that lives with me has the same problem and they use this years MackBook pro.

    To be honest I regret upgrading, 10.6 has made web browsing incredibly frustrating and long winded. I've actually paid £25 to make my mac worse.

    Note: If the next update fixes these issues then I'd happily change the 2 stars to 4, (still not 5 because it's not that much of an upgrade)

    80 of 95 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Underwhelmed with Snow Leopard

    • Written by from Danbury

    I installed it to get Ilife 11 which also was a bit disappointing. I really am not seeing what it has added. Now I see I need Snow Leopard to get Lion. I hope this isn't just a scheme to sell a product as a major upgrade when in fact it is a minor enhancement. Let's see how Lion works...so far my mac book worked fine before the upgrade and worked fine now but there is no value added for me.

    95 of 128 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Some irritating bugs

    • Written by from Calgary

    The Apple trackpad on my Macbook Air no longer recognizes the entire suite of 2 finger functions (one and 3+ finger functions work). It is still logic defying to try to move files to and from an iPad (ios5) or iPod. Still working out some printing issues and I also had to upgrade my MS office from 2004 to 2011.

    I would suggest unless you have to get the upgrade now, wait for later versions when the bugs are worked out.

    54 of 62 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Install ok but performance degraded and worst adobe printer lost

    • Written by from Boston

    I purchased the MAC OS Snow Leopard with full trust in Apple product as usual and I have to admit I am quite disappointed by this one. After several months of use, I am still disappointed...

    The install process went well but since I install I feel I lost significantly some performance: the startup is much longer, I actually have to reboot from time to time which I was not used with the previous OS, and it is overall slower...

    But the worst is the fact that it changes the functionality of the Adobe Suite, in particular the Adobe printer, that I basically cannot use anymore to transform into pdf a word document in publisher mode. As a results I have to use the PDF function form MAC which create much larger document that becomes useless...

    Too bad...

    57 of 69 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Crashes often and epic!

    • Written by from Allyn

    I have never worked on an OS that crashes as often as 10.6.4. The finder appears to be affected by every application that stops responding. Minutes go by watching the spinning color wheel of death after the most innocent keystroke or action. Even CMD OPT ESC doesn't bring up the force quit window leaving no apparent way to get the finder to snap out of it's funk. I have yet to see a single application crash that I've able to force quit and continue working on other applications. Whatever crashes eventually cascades to all other open applications until the only option is to perform a hard restart! This almost never happens in previous OS versions.

    57 of 70 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Disappointed in Snow Leopard

    • Written by from Toronto

    I had hoped that the advertising would be right and Snow Leopard would be an improvement. I have found it has made my mac sluggish, and I get the "spinning wheel of death" far more often. Am also having to force quit programs more than ever. Am disappointed in this OS.

    50 of 57 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Very Unhappy with Lost Wide Format Printers

    • Written by from Green Bay

    I am very unhappy with having lost total print capability with my Epson 5500, not even Gutenprint much less Color Management. In addition my wide format Epson 4000 doesn't print nearly as nice as previous OS using ColorSync. I will be switching back to Leopard.

    Let me also add that Safari has issues with drawing and is crashing regularly.

    65 of 88 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Worst time I've ever had with a Mac

    • Written by from Stratham

    Mac user since the first one, with almost never a problem I couldn't get out of on my own - until install of 10.6... miserable. After 3 mid-install freeze-ups I finally got it installed, only to find it had mangled my printer drivers and rendered my external backup drive unusable. Had to erase it to get it back. Then while simply opening iPhoto it invalidated my login password. Couldn't reinstall any software and knew if I lost power I wouldn't be able to get back in. Reset password from install disk utilities and had to reinstall iPhoto. Still finding things that won't run in 10.6, forcing me to buy upgrades of things that used to work. Wait for Lion.

    52 of 63 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Unimpressed

    • Written by from Chicago

    I bought Snow Lep a week ago just to make sure my security could be as updated as possible, and I more or less wish I hadn't. Despite alleging to make performance (Intel iMac) faster, I find most things lag worse than they used to. Applications I use that are for pre-Leopard Leopard incarnations are extremely jittery, and now, every time the iMac sleeps (for no matter how long) my wifi connection gets knocked off. The little changes (like when you click an hold on an item in the dock) have changed for the worse. I have nothing positive to say.

    As someone who doesn't use MobileMe, etc., this has been a useless upgrade. I basically just put $30 in the Man's pocket.

    67 of 96 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    3D artists must wait

    • Written by from camperdonw

    This review is specially for those who use Maya. There are some incompatibility between maya and snow leopard. 10.6.2 is the only version that apparently works, but maya is still unstable. I suggest to wait new generation of processors, graphic cards and software be launched and tested before you can upgrade your OS. There are also issues which affects other softwares such as adobe CS3 and CS4, but the new OS updates can fix them, however, if you update your system maya will not run properly.

    46 of 60 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Not Impressed

    • Written by from Bristow

    Snow Leopard brought some serious problems. Mail will chew up 50 to 75% of the processor just idling. Flashing video/screen on MacBook Pro 15" when on low power video card setting causes me to run all the time in high performance mode so it does not flash... and now my battery lasts for an hour and a half if I am lucky. (in part because of the processor overloading of Mail). This adds 2 lbs+ to the laptop because I must now carry two extra batteries (and I do).

    I spend a lot of time in Mail… and bugs like copying the email address and getting a bunch of extra garbage that needs to be trimmed after pasting is aggravating. Dock lockups, Browser lockups. Spinning beach ball of death with much greater frequency than normal Leopard. At points cascading chronic app crashing which is "cured" by rebooting the machine (a la Windows)

    Hope that Lion brings some relief. Snow Leopard has fleas.

    59 of 87 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Not Impressed

    • Written by from Gainesville

    Upgraded my late 2007 MAcBook Pro 15" from Leopard to Snow Leopard - wishing I had done a clean install now. System in incredibly sluggish; I am getting the spinning beach ball on average once every two minutes. Usually on simple things like scrolling through Safari, opening iTunes, navigating Finder. Feels like "cheetah" 10.0 version all over again. Also, it is really screwing up my external drive. Gives me the Finder error 10180, or forces me to relaunch Finder after being unresponsive. In the latter case, I have to unplug the external drive before Finder will restart. Overall, a downgrade from Leopard.

    48 of 65 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Not my favourite upgrade

    • Written by from NORTH WALSHAM

    There are one or two improvements on Snow Leopard but the touch and feel of this upgrade is very much the same. The biggest problem I have since implementing this upgrade is that my Mac no longer recognises by Canon EOS 60D as a remote disc so it's incredibly annoying when I'm trying to download photos and import them into Adobe Lightroom (I'm a semi professional photographer).

    On the plus side I like the Calander automatic upgrade between iCal on the iPad and Mac and visa versa.

    Perhaps they'll sort the recognition of a remote disc (on a camera) problem out soon - you can only hope - but until then a mere 2 stars I'm afraid as it worked fine before the upgrade.

    37 of 47 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Never Never Never

    • Written by from Elizabethtown

    I should never have installed it. I use FCP and ever since this has been installed I get the spinning color wheel all the time. It happened the second the new OS was running. Yes I did all the other checks like hardware and memory but it is Snow Leopard that has caused it.
    I was a PC person and this MAC issue brings back the old times with Windows. DO NOT USE IT!

    35 of 46 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Has become slow too fast

    • Written by from Bristol

    While I accept that the computer will grow slow over time due to different files clogging the mac down... but I did not expect it to happen so fast. I bought a macbook pro 13" in September 2010 and already the startup time has increase considerably -- 1 minute just to reach the login ! It used to load in less than 30 seconds with login.

    Spotlight, iPhoto and most other programs take ages to start. This was my first Mac experience and I feel cheated...

    29 of 35 people found this useful

  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Worse than previous OS

    • Written by from Galveston

    I never had problem with Mac OS before until now. It get stuck more often and especially iPhoto. Overall very slow OS. Also, what's the point of more desktop when all the programs and files are same in each desktop?

    25 of 31 people found this useful