Reviews for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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