Could Snow Leopard Be Apples Vista?

[jmpage2]

If Leopard wasn't Apple's Vista, then how could SL be Apple's Vista? It's just a refinement, 6.1 will come and it'll be fine. SL is just a minor upgrade to Leopard, it seems worse for some right now, because of the bugs, but with the updates to come we will start to see what SL can really do.

There's nothing minor about it (top is Leopard, bottom is Snow Leopard)??;

Leopard shipped with two 64 bit apps. In Snow Leopard there are only two apps that are not 64 bit (and hopefully iTunes will be 64 bit by year's end, leaving only one legacy app).

SL is a big big deal. Apparently though if you don't pile on the eye candy and put a cherry on top, people just don't get it.

 

[Mlobo01]

Im a beta tester...

I've had the opportunity to test SL before it went GM, I installed it on my external drive and have been safely testing it out from there, my testing began three iterations before 10A432 (GM) and I was surprised to see SL with a certain amount of stability, I have had some issues with it, certainly like the ones people are now experiencing, but most of the positive elements such as speed and start-up times etc are exactly as it has been advertised, I think Windows Vista has been less-than spectacular for the longest time,"SL is Mac's Vista?" as an ordinary question merits the answer to be no! Vista has proven itself unstable in many systems while SL is only unstable in some and if you do not proceed methodically and are unaware of possible glitches you may encounter in any upgrade then you are caught unprepared, for those that state that: "SL is an anti-climax" (another macrumors thread) I say its only an anticlimax in your machine, its a Mac "Vista" in your machine, its stable in mine and in the systems of those that are sticking to prudent steps to upgrading and troubleshooting. So lets start a thread asking how to properly upgrade and what to expect in the process? thanks

 

[glossywhite]

I don't know what is the matter with people; it is a dot 0 version of a revamped OS, so what, they expect 110% maturity & stabilty, across ALL Macs, within the first week?. Grow up, whiners, this is the best you're gonna get until the updates roll out!.

People's short sightedness, ignorance and naivety NEVER fail to astound and amuse me.

 

[Flyby1023]

FWIW I'll weigh in with my experience today.

I upgraded my MacPro and Air last night to SL. Did so for one reason, to test out Exchange hoping it would reduce my trips to Fusion/XP/Outlook. What I wound up with was no printers and the net dropping out every 10-20 minutes. Exchange worked though. I spent the entire day trying to get back to where I was last night.

My default printer is a < 1yr old Canon MX700 (networked), bought it from Apple, fully supported under SL, 10.6 drivers, etc. It flat-out disappeared from SL, worked fine with Fusion/XP. A new Brother laser I forgot I had showed up just fine, except I couldn't print to it. I know I wasn't alone with this problem.

The net-dropping started right away, had to power-down every 10-20 minutes (I was to spend the day tweaking a new ecomm site, that went well). Blogged around to find the New Location fix, things got better a few hours after that. Fired up a couple of Adobes, no major problems but no major advantages either.

Bottom line bitch is my issues were all-Apple. Apple made a hard-partner push with Canon (I got two), probably putting many thousands of these printers in the market in the last year or two. You would think they would want them to work right out of the SL box. Same with Airport Ex, where are they going to point to there, my Comcast modem?

These were really basic issues, the forums and blogs are filling up with them. My issues were not some five-year-old driver problem, outdated hardware, etc. This stuff is all less than a year old, totally up to date and has the best available software . . . and it takes two hours to install a printer under SL.

I have a 9:15 apt tomorrow at the Genius Bar to discuss how to downgrade.

 

[Airforcekid]

If you truly need a 100 percent stable OS you never upgrade within at least the first 6 months there are always too many variables apple could never test for. XP still feels buggy to me!

 

[soms]

Not sure I follow, SL has been great for me. Better memory management, and it seems to be snappier all around.

 

[glossywhite]

FWIW I'll weigh in with my experience today.

I upgraded my MacPro and Air last night to SL. Did so for one reason, to test out Exchange hoping it would reduce my trips to Fusion/XP/Outlook. What I wound up with was no printers and the net dropping out every 10-20 minutes. Exchange worked though. I spent the entire day trying to get back to where I was last night.

My default printer is a < 1yr old Canon MX700 (networked), bought it from Apple, fully supported under SL, 10.6 drivers, etc. It flat-out disappeared from SL, worked fine with Fusion/XP. A new Brother laser I forgot I had showed up just fine, except I couldn't print to it. I know I wasn't alone with this problem.

The net-dropping started right away, had to power-down every 10-20 minutes (I was to spend the day tweaking a new ecomm site, that went well). Blogged around to find the New Location fix, things got better a few hours after that. Fired up a couple of Adobes, no major problems but no major advantages either.

Bottom line bitch is my issues were all-Apple. Apple made a hard-partner push with Canon (I got two), probably putting many thousands of these printers in the market in the last year or two. You would think they would want them to work right out of the SL box. Same with Airport Ex, where are they going to point to there, my Comcast modem?

These were really basic issues, the forums and blogs are filling up with them. My issues were not some five-year-old driver problem, outdated hardware, etc. This stuff is all less than a year old, totally up to date and has the best available software . . . and it takes two hours to install a printer under SL.

I have a 9:15 apt tomorrow at the Genius Bar to discuss how to downgrade.

WHAT PART OF "IT IS A NEW VERSION OF MAC OS X, AND IMMATURE RIGHT NOW", DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?!!

Downgrading is simple - you don't need a genius to tell you that, surely?!. You should have made a backup Disk Image of your boot drive, and then you could have restored it back, when issues like this pop up. Did you not consider cloning your boot drive onto an external, and then upgrading THAT to SL, and testing both machines with it?.

Bottom line: you were itching to get upgraded to Snow Leopard, and didn't plan it out properly, or consider the consequences of using a VERY new OS. I sympathise, but you should have known it may cause you problems.

 

[Flyby1023]

glossy, what part of my post do you not understand?

This "immature" OS, as you put it, is just a .1 upgrade to what is touted as a super-stable OS. It's just that is doesn't support printers that are sitting in the Apple store right now. It’s also not playing very well with its’ own wireless router . . . which just went down again.

So figure this out, I’m typing this in Word, will post it in IE, which is running in XP, under Fusion, on a MacPro. The only reason I’m doing this is because Safari just lost the hook to the net again.

Thanks for your concerns for my backups but I’m OK. I run EMC on a Raid NAS so everything’s good. The only reason I’m seeing the genius is when they last replaced my Air, they did the cloning and made it almost impossible to reinstall Fusion. Don’t want to do that again. BTW, I don’t remember upgrading to Leopard filling up the blogs like this, do you?

I’ll be sure to come back here for your advice before the next upgrade so I can better understand the consequences. I don’t want to get involved in something immature.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

There's nothing minor about it (top is Leopard, bottom is Snow Leopard)??;

Leopard shipped with two 64 bit apps. In Snow Leopard there are only two apps that are not 64 bit (and hopefully iTunes will be 64 bit by year's end, leaving only one legacy app).

SL is a big big deal. Apparently though if you don't pile on the eye candy and put a cherry on top, people just don't get it.

But that picture is terribly misleading. Only the Xserves have 64bit kext, kernel and drivers. However, you can force your Mac to boot a 64 bit kernel, if it's compatible. Although you risk some incompatibility issues, if you do.

And there are more than just two 32 bit apps in OS X. There's DVD player, grapher, iTunes, etc.

And Aperture, Final Cut, Logic, and the iWork and iLife suites are still 32 bit (although I realize they aren't part of the OS, many do ship with the OS).

 

[glossywhite]

glossy, what part of my post do you not understand?

This "immature" OS, as you put it, is just a .1 upgrade to what is touted as a super-stable OS. It's just that is doesn't support printers that are sitting in the Apple store right now. It’s also not playing very well with its’ own wireless router . . . which just went down again.

So figure this out, I’m typing this in Word, will post it in IE, which is running in XP, under Fusion, on a MacPro. The only reason I’m doing this is because Safari just lost the hook to the net again.

Thanks for your concerns for my backups but I’m OK. I run EMC on a Raid NAS so everything’s good. The only reason I’m seeing the genius is when they last replaced my Air, they did the cloning and made it almost impossible to reinstall Fusion. Don’t want to do that again. BTW, I don’t remember upgrading to Leopard filling up the blogs like this, do you?

I’ll be sure to come back here for your advice before the next upgrade so I can better understand the consequences. I don’t want to get involved in something immature.

No, it is NOT a .1 *UPDATE* to Leopard, it is SNOW LEOPARD, a new OS with a new architechture underneath. How come people seem unable to absorb this?. Just because you can upgrade from Leopard TO Snow Leopard, doesn't mean that SL is a .1 update. You can upgrade from Tiger to Leopard or SL, but they're STILL NEW OS'!!.

 

[Gatteau]

Vista is unbeatable.


..
/sarcasm

 

[Warbrain]

Sounds like someone listened to yesterday's Buzz Out Loud.

No, it's far from Apple's Vista.

People are adopting 10.6. People avoided Vista.

Compatibility issues happen with OS updates. Many of these, I suspect, might be specific things that just those users are encountering. Some are widespread. I've encountered none.

 

[SwiftLives]

This "immature" OS, as you put it, is just a .1 upgrade to what is touted as a super-stable OS. It's just that is doesn't support printers that are sitting in the Apple store right now. It’s also not playing very well with its’ own wireless router . . . which just went down again.

OS X is the name of the Apple OS, not the version. The ".#" part of "OS X 10.#" is the version.

Upgrading from OS X 10.5 to OS X 10.6 is equivalent to upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7.

Upgrading from OS X 10.6.0 to OS X 10.6.1 is equivalent to upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

Apple's naming convention is one of their less intuitive marketing efforts. That's partially why you hear so much moaning about the traditional $129 upgrade from OS X 10.4 to OS X 10.5.

Yet no one bothers to mention the 8-10 free maintenance upgrades one receives for that price...

 

[jmpage2]

But that picture is terribly misleading. Only the Xserves have 64bit kext, kernel and drivers. However, you can force your Mac to boot a 64 bit kernel, if it's compatible. Although you risk some incompatibility issues, if you do.

And there are more than just two 32 bit apps in OS X. There's DVD player, grapher, iTunes, etc.

And Aperture, Final Cut, Logic, and the iWork and iLife suites are still 32 bit (although I realize they aren't part of the OS, many do ship with the OS).

I wouldn't call it terribly misleading at all. Apple has laid the framework for 64 bit kernel support. The only reason that boxes other than the Xserve don't boot up into it natively is that they don't have all of the drivers and kernel extensions ready for the other boxes. Something I'm sure that we will see before the end of the 10.6.x releases.

I would expect that all future Macs will also boot up into K64 natively.

The point is that it's a major reworking of the OS technology. The slides I showed just demonstrate the reworking of the OS guts. It doesn't even show the major architectural changes with GCD and OpenCL. Many of the native OS processes have been written to take advantage of GCD which is why (for most users) things feel 'snappier' under Snow Leopard, especially if you have a multi-core machine.

The problem with performance today is largely NOT one of not having a 'fast enough' CPU or not having enough RAM, it's being able to code for multi core effectively and making use of every transistor in the box.

Snow Leopard moves the bar far forward in resolving those issues for application developers. Certainly much farther than MS does with Windows 7 which is more of a service pack than SL is.

 

[macridah]

i have not complaints with snow leopard. upgrade was easy and I have no applications acting weird.

 

[Flyby1023]

My whole issue here is whether SL is a minor tweak, or ground-up rewrite, some really basic things (printers and internet connections) weren't fully vetted.

I've been through a few OS upgrades since my first Apple IIe so I know things don't always go smooth. But, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that current printers (that they sell) and routers (that they make) should work.

I just got back from the Apple store. According to the tech, printer drivers are up to the manufacturer (true) and Apple listed compatible printers ahead of time (mine was on the list). As for as the router dropping the internet connection, it's probably because my firmware is 7.3 instead of 7.4 and, also according to him, Apple only tests a new OS with the latest version of it's products. I think that was a similar argument MS made about Vista, upgrade everything.

I'll get past this (I'm on a Linksys router now) and go back to being a happy Apple user, until the next "new and improved" offering.

 

[numbersyx]

It is funny. I remember when Leopard was released the boards were as full of people complaining about how they wanted to go back to Tiger. Now they're praising Leopard as if it was the gold standard free of any faults and tainted by the new system.... It's an old cycle.

 

[glossywhite]

My whole issue here is whether SL is a minor tweak, or ground-up rewrite, some really basic things (printers and internet connections) weren't fully vetted.

I've been through a few OS upgrades since my first Apple IIe so I know things don't always go smooth. But, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that current printers (that they sell) and routers (that they make) should work.

I just got back from the Apple store. According to the tech, printer drivers are up to the manufacturer (true) and Apple listed compatible printers ahead of time (mine was on the list). As for as the router dropping the internet connection, it's probably because my firmware is 7.3 instead of 7.4 and, also according to him, Apple only tests a new OS with the latest version of it's products. I think that was a similar argument MS made about Vista, upgrade everything.

I'll get past this (I'm on a Linksys router now) and go back to being a happy Apple user, until the next "new and improved" offering.

So why not upgrade your Airport firmware?. Updates are there for a reason, and that reason, 9 times out of 10, is to improve stability and squash bugs. So why should Apple NOT bring out updates?. You are quite confusing.

It is funny. I remember when Leopard was released the boards were as full of people complaining about how they wanted to go back to Tiger. Now they're praising Leopard as if it was the gold standard free of any faults and tainted by the new system.... It's an old cycle.

Yeah I recall that very clearly, also!. It is because people are impatient, slightly stupid at times, and just want to throw the blame somewhere, to vent their frustrations. There is nothing as confusing and illogical as people, and I find it bizarre that some folk have forgotten the Leopard issues ALREADY!. I recall my MacBook had graphics tearing on the Dock, and it was the X3100 model; so annoying was it, that I swapped mine for a GMA950 model (and some cash ).

Bottom line is this, and this is FACT; Snow Leopard IS a new OS, and as such it will have a few teething problems. Moan all you like, but you're stupid and naive if you expect anything else, at this stage. Evidently the people who whine, aren't programmers, and have little clue about how much work goes into squashing bugs and re-writing source code, when and IF any said bug makes a first appearance, in order for it to be fixed.

Software has to in the public domain, and used by millions of people, before the majority of bugs come to light. You cannot blame Apple for a bug that they're not even aware of - that would be stupidity.

 

[Flyby1023]

Definitely going to update and put it back in service. The Linksys has been solid all day so that's my fallback. Hope it works because I may be able to help many other people in the same boat.

The tech told me this morning this is the first he or Apple have heard of this problem. I told him to check the forums, there are a lot of people with this issue, Well apparently the forums are "like bathroom walls, anybody can write what they want". So much for community support.

 

[NoSmokingBandit]

I don't know what is the matter with people; it is a dot 0 version of a revamped OS, so what, they expect 110% maturity & stabilty, across ALL Macs, within the first week?. Grow up, whiners, this is the best you're gonna get until the updates roll out!.

People's short sightedness, ignorance and naivety NEVER fail to astound and amuse me.

Actually, i always kinda expect apple to have their OS stable at launch, but i always expect to be let down. They only have a few computers to support, they should be able to have a fairly solid OS on Day 0.

 

[xIGmanIx]

i would say yes in that this issues are unavoidable and so our expectation should change on that. it has been pretty much proven that a new OS roll out is going to have issues, and most of the time those issues are 3rd party related as was vista's. Enough with the vista avoidance talk. both had growing pains and now its up to all vendors to ensure these issues get tightened up.

 

[jmpage2]

Actually, i always kinda expect apple to have their OS stable at launch, but i always expect to be let down. They only have a few computers to support, they should be able to have a fairly solid OS on Day 0.

There are something like 30 models that run the new OS and hundreds, no, thousands of applications, browser extensions, etc!

It is impossible that they will have tested all of it, if they did, it would never come out!

Besides, if you want to see a scary OS launch look at how MS does it. Releasing beta software at high prices to hapless customers who get to be the beta testers.

 

[LaDirection]

Everything I heard about Leopard was it was it's the best most stable OS ever made, and judging from alot of people this is apples Best OS.

And where on earth did you get that impression from??

Leopard was a mega fail Apple release, terrible in all respect. So lame that all of the OS team's efforts would go into fixing it as a "new OS" ("Snow" Leopard).

Tiger WAS the ultimate Apple OS and still is. 10.6 so far did not speed up any of my pro apps or give me any reason to think it's better than 10.5 It's very buggy but that's normal for a .0 release. You should NEVER upgrade your principal computer(s) until Apple release it's .2 version.

 

[Kristenn]

I do not think it is like Vista at all. My school uses Macs but. I did try Vista when it first came out on a computer at are library and it was really really bad! I tried it again a few weeks ago and it is much better now. But I have not had anything wrong with Snow Leopard yet so my answer would have to be no.

 

[paduck]

So the question goes could Snow Leopard become Apples version of VISTA?

I guess it would have to orphan just about everyone (only PPC users now) and be unstable, buggy and leave a bunch of legacy software behind. And charge you over $100 for the "privilege." Snow Leopard shows none of these possibilities and the low cost of the upgrade plus the fact that it works on most current hardware (Intel-based) creates very little barrier to entry. Two of the other problems with Vista was that it was very expensive and didn't function well on relatively current hardware.

I'm going with "No, Snow Leopard is not Apple's version of Vista."