Reviews for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

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 have now completed an extremely frustrating year with Snow Leopard. I started using it when I purchased a new iMac (i7 with 8GB of RAM). The problems began from day one due to font conflicts, a lot of digging around on the internet and the purchase of Fusion sorted that out. Next came the difficulties with Office 2008, which both Microsoft and Apple when asked said had no issues. From my experience this is not true. Sorting out the font issue helped MS Office to a degree, but all apps still fall over regularly. The same unfortunately was also true of all my Adobe CS4 apps (I have recently been advised that upgrading to CS5 will help sort this issue, so another expense!). The issues with software have become markedly worse in the last few weeks with the latest update to Leopard featuring the App store. Since installing this I have had 3 complete grey screen shut downs. I have two other machines still on Leopard and they are rock solid, no problems whatsoever. With over twenty years experience of using Macs I have to say I feel Apple have let their standards slip somewhat over the last couple of years. I've always loved the speed and productivity value of using Apple computers, but this has been seriously dented in 2010, I'm hopeful that 2011 will be better.

oh what a mistake - upgraded today, and my Mac is running like an old PC. The first time I've hated my apple gear. I'm running the lower end of the spec - i.e 2.4 ghz core 2 duo, but I don't expect to see web pages taking seconds to refresh - dashboard takes 15 seconds to load. What's going on? Only 18 months old and the macbook pro is basically not fit for purpose since the upgrade. Wish I'd been less influenced by the glowing reviews, and taken more notice of the cautionary tales. Seemed like a good idea to be able to sync my iPhone and iPad using cloud, but really really regretting this. As I said - this is what you expect from PC's that are 18 months old, not Apple products - aaargh...

Originally wanted to upgrade to Lion for my MBP Intel dual core machine.
First of all its frustration to have to buy Snow Leopard as a stepping stone to Lion.
I started the installation and it chugged along until the end where I was confronted with the message that the "Install has Failed" ....
Tried to install again and had the message that the disk could not be written to.
Tried rebooting the machine and found the Hard Disk could not be read and indeed could not even be seen as a Volume on the computer!
Tried Disk Utility to no avail and tried re-installing / re-booting. After about a dozen attempts I finally saw my Hard Disk in a Terminal Window and have copied everything to an external hard disk. I then had to zero my hard disk losing EVERYTHING. I ran the Snow Leopard installer again and it worked. I then got to the point where I could transfer my data from a different volume to the reformatted disk. I selected this and have now for the third time been waiting for several hours for the wheel to stop spinning on the transfer screen....
Looks like Ill be doing everything by hand for re-installing my data :-(
This is such a poor product by Apple and is very unbecoming. Apple should perhaps admit failure on Snow Leopard and provide a direct path to upgrade to Lion. Very Disappointed.

These are the words that appear when the system crashes, at a shockingly frequent rate on the Snow Leopard - generally whenever it has to deal with external hard drives or CDs. This has happened 3 times in the last 24 hours. I have had my iMac since September, and no amount of updates have improved the situation.
Aside from that, I have no other complaints about Snow Leopard, but this problem is really unacceptable. Customers pay a lot of money for the quality of the hardware and interface of an Apple mac, quality on which Apple prides itself, so we don't expect this sort of error. I have used Mac for several years, and have on the whole been pleased, but if standards keep slipping, I may consider other options.
The reason I am posting the message here is that the problem is well established, but despite numerous upgrades, Apple seems to be turning a blind eye to it. Maybe if future customers hear about it, something will get done.
Apple, fix this or lose custom!

Don't do it! Wish I had read the reviews first and seen the negative ones!

What should be a simple job, has turned into a nightmare! It crashed half way through installing the first time! 2nd time - it wouldn't mount the hard drive! A call to Apple support and they've deleted my hard drive!

Luckily I've got a Time machine back-up (FINGERS CROSSED) - and I now have to take my laptop into a repair centre!

This means down time with me unable to do my job!

It was working perfectly before trying to update 10.6.3.

Avoid!

I would have given this 5 stars as once I finally got the installer to run it went without a hitch, not a single piece of my old software failed to work (I was going from Leopard)

BUT why on earth are the installer disc's so bad? I had the dreaded "your disc is dirty or scratched" error on a perfect disc and so got a replacement from Apple, again perfect condition but still no joy. On looking on Google it would appear this is a very common problem with certain dvd drives and the faulty batch of discs. (My drive is fine with all other DVD's)

In the end I had to do a remote install from my laptop's drive which inexplicably worked flawlessly if very slowly.

Come on Apple not up to your usual standard.

I have used Snow Leopard since it was first released, I still use it on an old MacBook which cannot run Lion and I must say that it has been one of my favourite Mac OS X releases.
I would never upgrade an operating system (with the exception of Debian based GNU/Linux variants) as in most cases an upgrade installation leaves behind files which can conflict, this is true of the majority of computer operating systems. Although I may choose to replace an older version of Mac OS X rather that upgrade, saving your data is easy thanks to the 'Archive and Instal' option when you boot from the CD which makes a clean installation and optionally transfers your user data and applications.

So I have had a very productive time with Snow Leopard on a few computers with the family pack, however seeing as Apple still sell this product I think it would perhaps be reasonable for Apple to update it once in a while, why does this currently available product version 10.6.8 not work with iCloud?

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.

I have had Snow Leopard installed as an upgrade from its release. I have had no troubles whatsoever over that time. This is a solid platform which doesn't fall down and is quick and responsive. My only problem is that it just increases my frustrations at my workplace where our PCs are slow, glichy and constantly being subjected to security checks by our IT services because of their problems. Thanks to all at Apple.