Reviews for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

I work in a busy design production studio and have just upgraded to 10.6.3 from 10.5.8. It not only feels faster but after timing a cold startup, I can confirm that it was 1min 20secs compared to a minimum of 2mins under Leopard. I also got back 16GB of hard drive space (a nice unexpected bonus!)

Opening and saving large files from Photoshop has improved so much :) that I may not get any more breaks :(

Oh yeah, and the installation took less than an hour on an encumbered Mac mini and 25mins on a relatively fresh MacBook. No problems to report in either case.

43 of 51 people found this useful

The battery of my MacBook Pro was perfectly fine before upgrading to Snow Leopard. After I installed it, within a mere month the battery got destroyed. Now a full charge can only last less than 30 minutes!

Heard lots of similar feedback... So disappointed!

42 of 59 people found this useful

I got my first mac in 2008 (a black 13" MacBook upgraded to 4GB RAM), and rather enjoyed the switch from PC. I use both regularly and prefer Mac. After finally getting my dream computer 2 weeks ago (27" quad-core iMac) and having no issue with compatibility, I upgraded the MacBook to 10.6.3 as well. There are neat small tweaks, but the biggest difference is the speed. It does any and every process more quickly, with no issues of compatibility, and at a noticeably lower resting temperature. Easily worth a $30 upgrade, but mind that it IS computer software. It's not perfect and it's not the guaranteed end-all solution.

38 of 54 people found this useful

I've been using OS X for years now, starting with Tiger and then with Leopard. I was reluctant to upgrade for fear of bugs and kinks that would need to be worked out, but Snow Leopard has made my Mac run faster, Exposé is made much better (and I already thought it was pretty perfect), scrollable stacks are great, and this version of Quicktime kicks the heck out of the weak QT versions of the past, running fast without a clunky window and playing more file formats, including AVI. Your Mac will start up and shut down quicker, and all the native applications are tweaked and maxed out. You'll love Snow Leopard!

44 of 64 people found this useful

background: rabid mac user and evangelist for more than fifteen years.

Snow Leopard: really, it's just terrible. it took the rock-solid, unbeatably stable mac I've been using for almost 2 yrs and made it as frustrating and hard to use as (dare I say it?) .... a PC! I upgraded using the Family Pack, which upgraded to Snow Leopard, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and all the rest. Since then:

- overall system speed slower
- Firefox takes > 30 sec to load
- Google Chrome browser essentially unusable: locks & freezes frequently
- iPod shuffle frequently doesn't mount into iTunes or Finder at all (though nano and iPhone mount just fine)
- external Firewire 800 drive for Time Machine unmounts every time the machine wakes from sleep (have to turn off & re-start)
- "Save As" command causes EVERY application trying to use it to freeze, about once a week. This includes Safari, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Word, Excel, Power Point, Firefox, Chrome. This includes the "Save As PDF" command from the print menu. I do a large volume of 'save as' work-- everything is PDF'ed these days!

I update software weekly and re-start regularly. Still one of the Mac faithful, but Snow Leopard is just _amazingly_ buggy and unstable. PLEASE come out with the next upgrade (and make it as stable and reliable as pre-10.6 OSes) so I can get out of this prison!!

3199 of 5242 people found this useful

Can't live without it.

37 of 99 people found this useful

I have experience using both Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 I read a lot of reviews and listened many good opinions about Mac and Mac OS X and decided to give it a shot and ended up buying iMac 24'' 4GB w/ Mac OS 10.6. I never had so painful user experience, starting with a hard to use apple mini keyboard and magic mouse (forget about ergonomics) and ending up with using Mac OS - which didn't change sine 90's when I used it last time. I mean, seriously, it’s 2010 and you can still only resize a window from one little corner? You can't close an application using X button so they will stay your memory, if you used X button then you can't switch to this app anymore using Option+Tab (you will see only menu at the top - no windows left). The applications do not have main full window (e.g. Photoshop) so you desktop clogged with many windows which has nothing to do with an app you working with. Forget about using Parallels and/or Fusion (running Windows on Mac OS) - it is slow. It becomes very slow with multiple users (only me and my spouse use iMac - we are very active users) and I have to reboot the Mac OS X (which I would never expect from this OS) to be fast and responsive again. It is no faster anymore than Windows 7 in all aspects, it is no more stable either, I had it friezed last time during the software update. This is my personal experience and I hope it will be helpful for somebody deciding between Windows 7 and Mac OS 10.6

120 of 394 people found this useful

Upgraded from Leopard on my MacBook Pro, but thought long and hard as there were plenty of previous reviews advising against it (where did they go?). Anyway, under an hour to install and I got just over 20Gig of hard drive back. Simple to install; I just needed to tweak my mobile broadband settings in preferences and it's all good. All my exisitng applicaitons work fine, including Microsoft Office and PhotoShop. Not a noticable increase in speed that I can see as yet, and I usually just put it to sleep rather than shutting down, so no great advantage for me there. Overall, most of the improvements seem to be under the bonnet rather than on screen, but the Finder is slicker and Quicktime also improved. Also, and I didn't see this on any of the previous reviews, but the colours on my (matte) screen seem to be sharper and more vivid, so that's a bonus. For £25, it's a no-brain upgrade.

422 of 467 people found this useful