Snow Leopard impressions
I was one of the nerds that went to church, er, the Apple Store, yesterday to pick up Snow Leopard, the OS X update. For $29, I think it's a pretty reasonable upgrade price (are you listening, Windows 7 pricing people?), considering it's an evolutionary upgrade and not feature heavy.
The first win was getting back 10 gigs of space from my hard drive. I thought it was supposed to be only 7, but I'll take what I can get. My Mac Pro's system drive is also where I put my iTunes library, and it's getting crowded.
Booting and shut down
is faster, as they said it would be. Time Machine backups are crazy
fast now, where it used to be that the icon would swirl for ages
without anything new to even backup. Everything in Finder seems
snappier, though it's hard to quantify it. The slider in Finder windows
for icon size is a welcome addition. Spotlight seems faster. Stack
navigation out of the dock is far, far better now that it scrolls.
I wonder if they haven't tweaked memory management. Parallels seems to be more responsive when I've also got Photoshop and/or Aperture open. Perhaps it's the CPU core management. It's all that under the hood stuff that's hard to measure.
Lots of little
tweaks that I've read about, but not encountered, are intriguing. That
it can figure out what time zone I'm in and adjust the clock is really
cool. Definitely a worthy and inexpensive upgrade. And did I mention
there are no install keys or other such nonsense?