Reviews for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

I gave this 5 stars because of the price and for amount of performance increase. My macbook pro is already fast and I rarely have performance issues with it after the upgrade I expect it to be a bit faster. The upgrade process itself was very easy the only down side was I had to compile my ruby gems to be 64 bit compatible. But your average user will not have to do this. I appreciate the amount of effort apple and the apple developers put into their OS making it simple for the user and reliable. There is nothing worse then having a bad OS.

I am running Mac OS X 10.5.8 and I think it is unbelievable that in order for me to upgrade to the Lion (or now the Mountain Lion), I have to purchase all of the previous versions. I understand that it is definitely a lot cheaper than upgrading on a PC, but it's a waste of $29.99 (buying Snow Leopard to upgrade to Lion which is ANOTHER $29.99) or $59.98 (buying Snow Leopard AND Lion to upgrade to the Mountain Lion which is probably ANOTHER $29.99) as I won't even be using the versions I'm paying for other than downloading the next version. Pretty soon there will be softwares and programs that REQUIRE these higher versions, and I will pretty much be forced to upgrade. I don't understand why we are getting a new version every year. It just seems that once somebody gets used to one version, another comes out.

Before choosing to upgrade to snow leopard please look at the huge volume of posts to the net about the machines it has destroyed during the upgrade process.
Finder constalty crashes if you have external drives or network drives. see discussion 11550910 in support.

a whole variety of other issues. have a look at "10.6.3 issues" or snow leopard issues in google

It's completely stopped me developing or working for 3 days now trying to recover from the upgrade, I'm about to revert to 10.5 so I can get my life back.

I had Tiger 10.4 and was being left behind by software downloads that wouldn't run on it. I started stressing out and scouring YouTube videos to find out if and how to do the upgrade. The girl at my local Apple store tells me "You can't just get the Snow Leopard disc, you need THE FULL PACKAGE" Or the Mac Box Set I could only find on Amazon for $190 (ah, no). And this disc is going for $80 on Amazon, which is usually cheaper, right? Bottom Line: I bought this disc for $29. The install was simple, took about 45 minutes. Did some software updates. Did the (now available) Time Machine back-up to an external drive. And things are peachy so far. Bad Apple girl, bad! Systems specs: iMac purchased in May 2007, 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, RAM (expanded to) 2.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Where I think everybody is having issues is upgrading. Because it's a fundamental architecture change (32->64 bit) there are a lot of applications that aren't dealing with this well, including Apple's own.

I bought a mac with 10.6 pre-installed and transferred over my old system. If you notice the trend in reviews the people who have no problems are usually people who got it with a new computer or did a fresh install. The people who are having problems are people who are upgrading.

So I recommend that you do a fresh install and re-install your apps one-by-one. This will ensure that each application is installed properly and is executed in the environment it's expecting, not having it change after installation.

If you are doing a transfer from PowerPC to a new computer with Snow Leopard you are asking for trouble. A lot of applications had issues with the new platform because they were still expecting the old platform.

As always, the best way is to do a fresh install. You had to do it on your PC before anyways. Remember?

My only issue is Mail crashing. But then again I have 50,000 messages in Mail so that could be contributing to the problem. :)

Overall it's a good OS, but I'd highly recommend a fresh install.

After checking if my iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo processors and plenty of memory) was ok to upgrade and reading the review's I still stupidly went ahead and upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
Disc arrived very promptly and as always with Apple was well packaged. Snow Leopard didn't take too long to install and does look really good, but not much different from Leopard.
However I have now seen The Spinning Beach Ball of Doom more times in the last two weeks than in the previous THREE YEARS and FOUR MONTHS, since my IMac arrived on my doorstep.
Its slower, noisier, Safari crashes, and has completely frozen a couple of times.
I am very unimpressed. I might as well have a PC !
And my iPhone4 and iMac still won't talk to each other.

I did a CLEAN upgrade from Tiger 10.4.11 to Snow Leopard 10.6.5 without adding any third party applications and it WORKS....... just fine. The iLife that comes with Tiger, works with my current Snow Leopard. There is no need to buy the $150 package, unless you want to. However, the upgrade I did requires you to back-up every files-photos, docs, pics, etc before wiping the hard-drive clean and then reinstall Tiger again and then Snow Leopard. You must do you software update after each install.

I have an intel mac from '07, which was the joy of our family, always working flawlessly. I had upgraded it twice with no problems. Moving up to Snow Leopard was a huge mistake. Our beloved mac has gone haywire. Slow as molasses, constant trouble with internet browsers freezing, and poor playback for youtube and videos. Worst of all, the upgrade has played havoc with my iphoto library. Thousands of pix missing, and/or in a crazy mixed up jumble. My slideshows have lost all of their settings--the soundtracks, the timing, the effects, everything. Years of work, gone. I am literally heartsick over this. I took the mac to the apple store (I had them do the upgrade, btw) & the guy told me to put in a new hard drive and to double my ram. Hundreds of $, but that still won't bring back my iphoto library to what it was. If you have an older mac, like mine, think carefully before you make this change. If I could do it over, I would have left this mac at Leopard and saved up for a new one in another year with Lion. Our mac was perfect at Leopard...Snow Leopard was too far to go.

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.

Upgraded from Leopard 10.5.8 on my early 2009 24" iMac with 4G of memory. The upgrade installation took one hour and went very smooth. Ran software update immediately after the installation and updated all items. After all was done, I noticed a very noticeable speed increase and the machine is very snappy.

After two weeks of use, the machine remains very quick and the OS is very stable. One of my older Power PC programs does not work - while one Power PC program does work fine, using Rosetta. iWork and all other installed software performs very nicely.

I really like the new mail features and am very fond of the magic trackpad I purchased at the same time I purchased OS upgrade.

The latest version of Parallels Desktop for Mac performs well with this OS.

Even though I lost the use of one older software program, which was expected, I am very pleased with the upgrade and the added features I gained.