Has someone tried Snow Leopard on the Air ? [Archive]

kastenbrust

Jan 8, 2009, 06:59 PM

So... did you ? The beta version flying around... any performance improvements ? Thanks for sharing :).

Its going to have performance improvements simply because its 64bit. Its also got open cl and grand central, the whole idea is to make it more efficient.

rdubya5

Jan 8, 2009, 07:01 PM

Has someone tried Snow Leopard on the Air? or
Did someone try Snow Leopard on the Air?

:)

leez

Jan 8, 2009, 07:07 PM

Has someone tried Snow Leopard on the Air? or
Did someone try Snow Leopard on the Air?

:)

:)

northernmunky

Jan 8, 2009, 08:35 PM

Has someone tried Snow Leopard on the Air? or
Did someone try Snow Leopard on the Air?

:)

I don't get it? The original sentence sounds just fine to me... in fact 'Did someone...' sounds wrong as it would imply I am thinking someone has indeed tried Snow Leopard on the Air and I want to know who it was?

andreab35

Jan 8, 2009, 08:37 PM

I'm actually kind of curious too.
If anyone has tried it, it'll be great to hear your experience! :D

Indydenny

Jan 8, 2009, 08:38 PM

I don't get it? The original sentence sounds just fine to me... in fact 'Did someone...' sounds wrong as it would imply I am thinking someone has indeed tried Snow Leopard on the Air and I want to know who it was?

Regardless of the title, I am interested in the answer or even the expected answer. I have heard (on this board) that the MBA would not be useable with Snow Leopard. I can hardly believe that is true. Is there a definitive answer?
Thanks

kloan

Jan 8, 2009, 09:10 PM

Its going to have performance improvements simply because its 64bit. Its also got open cl and grand central, the whole idea is to make it more efficient.

Leopard is already 64 bit.

fyrefly

Jan 8, 2009, 09:15 PM

Regardless of the title, I am interested in the answer or even the expected answer. I have heard (on this board) that the MBA would not be useable with Snow Leopard. I can hardly believe that is true. Is there a definitive answer?

Whoever said that to you was a doofus. If anything Snow Leopard will run BETTER on the MBA - Snow Leopard is an optimization release of Leopard - not many new features, mostly under the hood optimizations for Graphics Cards and multi-core CPUs. Plus they're rewriting Finder in Cocoa, etc...

Snow Leopard will most certainly be useable on a MBA (Rev A or B) and from what we know so far, it'll run faster/better or at least as well as Leopard does currently.

McGilli

Jan 8, 2009, 11:40 PM

What is the latest build available?

is it : Snow Leopard 10A190

And also - are they like M$ beta releases - meaning that the beta will expire after a certain amount of days?

pstoehr

Jan 9, 2009, 05:03 AM

Hi *,

maybe my english is not good enough to follow the discussion :D

Has someone already installed Snow Leopard on the MBA and is willing to give us some information about a speedup.

Thanks in advance
Peter

LinMac

Jan 9, 2009, 05:48 AM

Leopard is already 64 bit.

It is a bit more complex than that I'm afraid.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/28/road_to_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_64_bit_to_the_kernel.html will explain the messy details.

Snow Leopard's new kernel could improve performance. I am excited to see what it will be able to do on an early 2008 Macbook Air.

n0de

Jan 9, 2009, 08:40 AM

Don't forget the "dramatic" drop in executable sizes - at the least the additional free memory and lack of disk swapping should give a performance bump.

leez

Jan 9, 2009, 09:07 AM

Well, I'm looking forward for this release, because I believe it will dramatically increase the performance. And for the MBA it's necessary. I might even try it soon... But the real question is, will it take advantage of the graphic card used in Air and will it at least reduce the core shutdown problem ? (1.6 Rev A)

PS. About the topic, english isn't my first language, so I might do some mistakes here and there... anyway still learning and the topic was corrected.

kastenbrust

Jan 9, 2009, 10:51 AM

Leopard is already 64 bit.

Leopard is 32 bit, its just 64bit compatible.

andreab35

Jan 9, 2009, 03:53 PM

Regardless of the title, I am interested in the answer or even the expected answer. I have heard (on this board) that the MBA would not be useable with Snow Leopard. I can hardly believe that is true. Is there a definitive answer?
Thanks

The MBA would be able to run Snow Leopard, of course! I asked an Apple employee and he said most definitely Snow Leopard would run on the MBA.
If Snow Leopard couldn't run on the MBA, then I would think $1800+ spent on such a wonderful laptop would go down the drain by having Leopard stuck on it forever.

kloan

Jan 9, 2009, 04:07 PM

It is a bit more complex than that I'm afraid.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/28/road_to_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_64_bit_to_the_kernel.html will explain the messy details.

Snow Leopard's new kernel could improve performance. I am excited to see what it will be able to do on an early 2008 Macbook Air.

Thanks for the link. I guess Apple's explanation of Leopard being 64 bit is somewhat misleading, huh.

aaquib

Jan 9, 2009, 04:20 PM

The MBA would be able to run Snow Leopard, of course! I asked an Apple employee and he said most definitely Snow Leopard would run on the MBA.
If Snow Leopard couldn't run on the MBA, then I would think $1800+ spent on such a wonderful laptop would go down the drain by having Leopard stuck on it forever.

Well, of course Snow Leopard will! It'll run on any Intel machine. I think what people really want to know though, is whether or not it'll truly make a difference on a device like the MBA.

leez

Jan 9, 2009, 04:21 PM

Well, of course Snow Leopard will! It'll run on any Intel machine. I think what people really want to know though, is whether or not it'll truly make a difference on a device like the MBA.

...and if someone tried the beta version on the Air :).

BornAgainMac

Jan 9, 2009, 04:41 PM

Nobody is going to try the Beta on the Air and post anything. It is against the rules. Just on paper, it should be fast. If the Microsoft Office developers had to optimize Leopard then I would worry.

leez

Jan 9, 2009, 05:22 PM

Nobody is going to try the Beta on the Air and post anything. It is against the rules. Just on paper, it should be fast. If the Microsoft Office developers had to optimize Leopard then I would worry.

Didn't know that the beta testers can't say anything at all about the performance. That's a shame.... but, correct me if I'm wrong, some screens leaked a few weeks ago and as far as I can remember, it was described by the main Apple news websites/blogs...

Catfish_Man

Jan 9, 2009, 05:28 PM

Didn't know that the beta testers can't say anything at all about the performance. That's a shame.... but, correct me if I'm wrong, some screens leaked a few weeks ago and as far as I can remember, it was described by the main Apple news websites/blogs...

Nobody with Snow Leopard seed access is allowed to say anything that's not posted on Apple's public webpage about it.

AIRniloc

Jan 10, 2009, 01:09 AM

Nobody with Snow Leopard seed access is allowed to say anything that's not posted on Apple's public webpage about it.

it runs just fine on my mbair..

a little buggy (iSight stuff and so forth)...but noticeably quicker performance, even in finder..

i have the first build given out at WWDC last year..

Maven1975

Jan 12, 2009, 11:52 PM

It is not optimized for portables yet. From what I have seen/heard, 1 hour battery life is about par for the course. (Latest Build)

HLdan

Jan 13, 2009, 12:37 AM

Leopard is 32 bit, its just 64bit compatible.

You got it backwards. Leopard is 64 bit and compatible with 32 bit.

rdubya5

Jan 14, 2009, 12:49 AM

Catfish_Man

Jan 14, 2009, 01:13 AM

You got it backwards. Leopard is 64 bit and compatible with 32 bit.

It's more complex than that, actually. Unfortunately I don't fully understand the details, but the kernel is definitely still 32 bit or mostly 32 bit in Leopard.

The implications of this are not particularly interesting though; it mostly means that *the kernel itself* can't use lots of address space. Applications definitely can, and that's the biggest appeal of 64 bit.

This will start to be a bigger deal as graphics cards ship with more and more vram, since that needs to be mapped into the kernel's address space (so if you have a 1GB graphics card, the kernel effectively has 3GB to use).