The latest Macintosh operating system, 10.6 Snow Leopard is finally here and the question for our Mac readers is, should you upgrade. First, let’s talk about what Snow Leopard isn’t before we get into what it is. Snow Leopard is not a revolutionary upgrade to the exist 10.5 Leopard OS. In Windows terms, its much more (at first glance) like a major service pack release since visually there aren’t many changes. However, as you look under the hood, this is where significant changes have happened.

The Need For Speed

Much of the interface changes with Snow Leopard are minor at best and casual users may not even notice the changes with the exception of the Quicktime 10 player which does have a new distinct look.

Now I don’t have the fastest Mac in the world (Apple, if you read this, I will accept sponsorship from you), I am running on a 24″iMac 2.8ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4gb RAM which is probably a fairly typical machine for most people so I wouldn’t expect my experience with Snow Leopard to fit well with a lot of people.

Unlike pretty much every version of every operating system from every company since DOS 1.0, has added more and more features and more and more bloat to the system. With many of the optimizations made, and the removal of support for non-Intel based systems (yes, sorry PPC users, this is Intel-Inside only from now on) the footprint of the operating system has been REDUCED by 7GB!! While in today’s world of  terabyte drives, this sounds insignificant, it does allow for a lot of optimizations not possible when trying to support two completely different hardware platforms. Many of these subtle optimizations are found in the Apple system tools.

The most obvious speed improvement is in the Preview application.  I grabbed 32 high res jpeg files totaling about 263mb and opened with Preview, they were completely loaded in just a hair over 1 second.  This is about a 2x speed improvement in an app that many photographers use on a regular basis.

Another area that is a noticeable difference is in file compression. While not as dramatic as Preview, tests typically show a 30-40% speed increase.

What you are not going to see right away is a speed improvement in third-party applications until they are re-written to take advantage of some of the new programming tools. While an application like Photoshop may actually load a little faster, running actions or filters is not going to be any faster initially.

Gizmodo has some nice benchmarks on this that compares Leopard to Snow Leopard on a variety of tasks.

Another task that Gizmodo points out as an improvement is backups with Time Machine.

Macs for Business

At heart I am an IT guy and one of the most annoying things to deal with was your basic corporation running Microsoft Exchange and some yahoo wants to use a mac so they are stuck with substandard tools or the “lite” version of the web interface.  Since I do use Exchange for one of the businesses I am involved with, I wanted to see how well this worked. I loaded up the Mail application, put in my email address and password, and a few seconds later all of my Exchange email was on the Mac. Expanding the Inbox showed all of my folders and browsing through messages was extremely fast, significantly faster than Outlook 2007 on my quad-core Windows XP system. The Exchange functionality extends to iCal and Contacts as well.

To See Me Is To Love Me

Let’s just say I am not a big fan of video chatting. I crawl out of bed and sit down at my desk at 6:00am every day. This is NOT something you want to see until I take my lunch break around 10:30 or so and get “cleaned up”. So as long as you are calling someone else, you may be happy to know that iChat has been improved nicely. In previous versions of iChat, a 640×480 resolution chat would take 900kbps, pretty much killing most home broadband connections. With Snow Leopard, that same chat only needs 200kbps. So like some of the other Apple applications, smoother, faster, cleaner is the mantra with iChat as well.

Getting Your Google On

Normally I use GMail for my day-to-day business needs and Google calendars syncs with pretty much every device I have, and putting my wife over on GMail allows her to see my schedule so she can plan those amazing weekend getaways when I have nothing scheduled (well, thats the plan anyway, I just need weekends with nothing else scheduled). Syncing to the Mac from Google or Yahoo! is now supported in iCal. It’s always nice to have native support for something like Google Calendar without having to resort to hacks or third party tools.

Color Me Tickled Pink

Snow Leopard takes a step forward for graphic designers and photographers by supporting Gamma 2.2. Since Adobe RGB also supports Gamma 2.2, this should make it easier to do calibration across your devices and get the final result from looking different when printed than it does on your screen.

Gamma 2.2 is enabled by default on installation or upgrade so there is nothing you need to do to adjust this or turn it on. Not that Gamma 1.8 was a problem, but improving on something good doesn’t hurt.

Finders Keepers

A nice, much requested feature is adjustable thumbnail sizes per folder. A slider at the bottom of the window when you are in icon mode allows you to scale your thumbnails up to 512×512 pixels. This is great when previewing images since that size is big enough to check for basic focus issues.

Another little trick up the Finder’s sleeve is that if you have a video in the folder, a play button will allow you to play the video right from the thumbnail without launching the full Quicktime player.

To Sum It Up

So long as you are using an Intel-based Mac, I certainly see no reason not to jump on the Snow Leopard bandwagon. Just freeing up 7gb of disk space is awesome, especially for people on limited systems such as the Macbook Air. Having a faster user experience with the promise that as third-party apps take advantage of new programming tools, that we will see improvements in the other tools we use every day is well worth it. For most people, this upgrade is going to set you back a few cents under $30 ($25.00 plus free shipping via Amazon), and for machines bought since June, the upgrade is only $9.95.

While there are dozens of other new tweaks and enhancements, and there are lots of great sites with a plethora of stats, graphs, and benchmarks, I wanted to just see how Snow Leopard was going to affect my every day work, and even while some of the new features are minor, together they add up nicely.

To yourself a favor, make sure you have a good backup before installing a major upgrade like this. While everyone I know has had a great experience, there are some anecdotal comments around that have mentioned problems during the upgrade so just be safe with your data.

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Tags: 10.6, Apple, Mac, Macintosh, OSX, snow leopard, Software, Upgrade