Snow Leopard reviews - Mossberg, Engadget, Gizmodo & more

[t0mat0]

Snow Leopard reviews Titles are links to the review - feel free to add to thread and I'll update this post.

Andy Ihnatko/Chicago Sun-Times summary
@Ihnatkoand Macbreak Weekly - A speedy no-brainer upgrade

Apple did indeed promise that Snow Leopard, as its name implied, was merely an enhanced edition of Leopard; an evolution, rather than a revolution.

The pricing tends to bear that out. Normally, an Apple OS update costs $129. Snow Leopard will cost existing Leopard users all of $29. Got a family? Great: buy a five-pack for $49.

Folks using 10.4 or earlier will need to buy the Mac Box Set. It’ll run you $169. But! You also get full-retail copies of iLife and iWork ‘09, which normally cost $79 apiece.

That’s an aggressively cheap upgrade. It seems as though Apple’s using the occasion of Snow Leopard to make sure that all of the random stragglers among their user base catch up to the bus and bring everything up to date.

Snow Leopard is a very egalitarian release, too. Any Intel Mac will benefit from Snow Leopard’s performance enhancements. This OS isn’t just for Fotheringay Q. Yachtowner, who sets fire to their current hardware every three weeks and buys whatever’s hot off the dock.

(Yes, I am now arching an eyebrow at Microsoft. When you visit their Windows 7 page, it’s much easier to find links to new PCs you can buy with 7 pre-installed than it is to locate the upgrade packages.)

The other upside, I suppose, is that the price represents perhaps the most emphatic middle finger that Apple’s ever extended towards Microsoft’s general direction. In the past five years, Microsoft has done far less with Windows than Apple has done with the Mac OS.

Windows 7, due in October, is a big leap forward but hardly revolutionary. There are three editions and even the cheapest copy currently available for pre-order (Windows Home Premium) costs $119 as an upgrade and $199 as a clean install. Even before you scroll down the feature lists and figure out whether it’s more fair to compare Snow Leopard to Windows 7 Ultimate ($219 upgrade), you can see that Apple clearly thinks it’s making enough dough off of their other products to worry about pricing Snow Leopard ambitiously.

In truth, it’s likely that Apple chose the most palatable price. Most of Snow Leopard’s best features are fairly abstract and I imagine that the average user would find other things that they could spend $49 on.

But just $29? To make your Mac this much faster? It’s a gimme

PCWorld - Ugh, 17 pages? Bleugh.



CNET summary

Overall, we think that Snow Leopard did almost everything Apple says it set out to do: it refined and enhanced Leopard to make it easier to use. Though the system performs well in everyday use, many of our tests indicate it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more intensive application processes. Still, we highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Exchange support.

Engadget summary - $30!

Here's the thing about Snow Leopard, the single inescapable fact that hung over our heads as we ran our tests and took our screenshots and made our graphs: it's $30. $30! If you're a Leopard user you have virtually no reason to skip over 10.6, unless you've somehow built a mission-critical production workflow around an InputManager hack (in which case, well, have fun with 10.5 for the rest of your life). Sure, maybe wait a few weeks for things like Growl and MenuMeters to be updated, and if your livelihood depends on QuickTime we'd definitely hold off, but for everyone else the sheer amount of little tweaks and added functionality in 10.6 more than justifies skipping that last round of drinks at the bar -- hell, we're guessing Exchange support alone has made the sale for a lot of people. If you're still on Tiger, well, you'll have to decide whether or not you want to drop $130 on what's essentially a spit-shined Leopard, but if you do decide to spend the cash you'll find that the experience of using a Mac has changed dramatically for the better since you last upgraded.

Guardian

PC Mag

Snow Leopard gets more things right than any other operating system, and it throws in striking good looks as a bonus.

Gizmodo summary - Lightened and Enlightened

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you're looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard's biggest feature is that it doesn't have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

Pogue/NYTimes -Apple’s Sleek Upgrade

Either way, the big story here isn’t really Snow Leopard. It’s the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster and better — instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint.

Walt Mossberg/ WSJ summary

Apple already had the best computer operating system in Leopard, and Snow Leopard makes it a little better. But it isn’t a big breakthrough for average users, and, even at $29, it isn’t a typical Apple lust-provoking product.

MacWorld summary

Macworld’s buying advice
Snow Leopard is Apple’s lowest-priced OS update in eight years. Granted, it’s a collection of feature tweaks and upgrades, as well as under-the-hood modifications that might not pay off for users immediately. But the price of upgrading is so low that I’ve really got to recommend it for all but the most casual, low-impact Mac users. If you’ve got a 32-bit Intel Mac (that is, one powered by a Core Solo or Core Duo processor), the benefit of this upgrade will be a little less. But for most Mac users, especially the kind of person who reads a Web site devoted to the subject, the assorted benefits of Snow Leopard outweigh the price tag. I’d pay $30 just for the improved volume ejection, the ability to create services with Automator, and the improvements to the Dock and Exposé—though I admit I’d pay slightly more to not have the misguided QuickTime Player X as a part of the package. If you’re a user who connects to an Exchange server every day, upgrading to Snow Leopard really is a no-brainer. For everyone else, maybe it’s not quite a no-brainer—but it’s awfully close. Snow Leopard is a great value, and any serious Mac user should upgrade now.

USA Today (Ed Baig)

In my experience, Mac OS X was already a superior operating system to Windows. With Exchange and other technologies, Snow Leopard adds bite, especially for business. But as upgrades go, this one is relatively tame.

Wired

This upgrade won’t deliver any radical interface changes to blow you away (not that we would want it to), but the $30 price is more than fair for the number of performance improvements Snow Leopard delivers. Stay tuned for Wired.com’s full review of Snow Leopard as we continue to test it over the week.

An AP writer

For most Mac users, Snow Leopard will likely be a no-brainer upgrade, given the low price. But early upgraders often face minor bugs and installation problems, so unless you're dying for one of the new features, waiting a month or so is a safer course.

Linkbait of the week?
PC Worl's piece - Snow Leopard Is a Pale Imitation of Windows 7."get all the details from an ad ridden slideshow? Purlease.



MacWorld extra
11 major new Snow Leopard features
Gauging Snow Leopard's speed boosts
Inside Snow Leopard's hidden malware protection
Inside Snow Leopard's under-the-hood additions
All about Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard's smaller changes

 

[t0mat0]

Paul Thurrott weighs in. It's going to worth tuning into LIve.twit.tv 6:50pm BST.

Sure enough, Snow Leopard, like Leopard before it, is a fine OS, a rock-solid and capable computing foundation. It's just that when compared to what's happening on the Windows side, Snow Leopard is sort of a letdown. There's just not much going on from an end-user perspective.
Had Microsoft released such an update for Windows, they would have called it a service pack and delivered it gratis.
A cryptic Setup routine taking 2-3x as long as Windows 7.
Snow Leopard picks up multicore functionality that Windows has had for years
Finder, has been also brought into the 21st century
Snow Leopard takes another page from the Windows 7 playbook with a new feature of the Exposé window management tool.
Three levels of document viewing? Really? (Icon Preview, Quick look and normal view)
Mail, iCal, and Address Book have been updated with Exchange Server support, which is a big feature, sure, but none of them can do automatic configuration, so you'll need a slew of server information, which isn't the case in, say, Outlook on Windows.
Overall, Snow Leopard is a better Leopard than Leopard. But it certainly doesn't offer any added incentive to make the switch from the Windows side.
Bottom line: Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" is a nice refinement to an already solid OS offering. But it's almost too evolutionary to get excited about.


"Compared head-to-head with Windows 7, it's clear that Microsoft's is the most substantial offering, as it provides the same kinds of internal updates as Snow Leopard but also offers major updates to the user experience. Looked at a different way, maybe Windows needed more fixes to begin with. That's certainly what a Mac user would tell you. They may have a point."

Some questions -
Isn't Windows 7 Vista's Service Pack - why isn't it free or at least only $30
You can go form Tiger to Snow Leopard. Can you go from XP to Windows 7?
Is Outlook default on a Windows Machine? Or do you have to pay for Exchange integration?

To misquote Paul:

"Snow Leopard" is a nice refinement to an already solid OS offering...a fine OS, a rock-solid and capable computing foundation...updated with Exchange Server support, which is a big feature...a better Leopard than Leopard...Compared head-to-head with Windows 7...Windows needed more fixes to begin with.

On the other hand, QuickTime X continues Apple's hypocritical waltz into inconsistency, as this application bears absolutely no resemblance at all to any other Snow Leopard applications.

This is what Andy Ihnatko's hinting at with his Tablet rumor article - the jarring non-Apple things being crept in. Tablet = Updated Front Row/QT/ATV...


10.6's size. Could, and can fit on an SSD. Swapping DVD for SSD. What's happened to ATV - why is QTX a change from other parts in 10.6? Why still have ATV when you've got the Mini? Why was the mini mothballed for so long? Explain Location Services. What does OpenCL and GCD bring? What's happening about the Chip development APple's kept under wraps?

10.6 allows, with the right hardware, Apple to pull off some audacious new software tricks. I disagree with him on

But it’s possible that they’re setting the stage for the speculative Something Big and want to make sure that as many Mac users as possible have the right processing muscle to use that new feature or service.

The big thing is inevitable. It's a tech vacuum. And Big Thing Nature abhors that. What's Voice Control doing on the iPhones? Is it a sleeper function? The State of the Union change of name. The iPhone side helps the Mac side. 10.6 allows cheap low voltage CPUs, GPUs to punch above their normal weight. It allows new hardcore CPU/GPUs to become giants - "full desktop-level power and performance … out of a mobile CPU"

Apple making a new device that runs some flavor of the latest Mac OS. It uses lower-capacity solid-state storage instead of a hard drive. It’s mobile enough that it needs to know its precise location. It needs a more full-screen-ish, consumer-electronic-ey way of slickly playing media, to the extend of needing to run the actual desktop app. And it needs to tease as much power as possible from a low-power, perhaps mobile-ish … processor …