Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MBA + Snow Leopard = ?
- Thread starter sychee
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
On a MacBook Air, you really wont notice to much of a speed increase due to the internal hardware of it. Also, it is a known issue where the fans of MacBook Air are extremely high in Snow Leopard, so I would wait it out and see what happens with 10.6.2.
Not yet... well shutdown is faster by a few seconds. Overall, I think Snow Leopard is a huge disappointment right now. In the long run, it should improve. Right now it's basically a mess. The 64-bit kernel doesn't even work on the MBA. It's a joke. It's worse than that... it's a BIG FAT LIE!
I haven't been this disappointed with Apple since the original MBA. It might be really ready by 10.6.5 or later. Right now it's a public BETA for $29.
I haven't been this disappointed with Apple since the original MBA. It might be really ready by 10.6.5 or later. Right now it's a public BETA for $29.
Snow Leopard on my MBA has been great - it is not about the big things that it does - but all of the little nuances that make Snow Leopard a nice upgrade - four finger gestures amongst my favorite - and with a 64GB SSD - those 10GBs are huge! - There have been no bugs or issues with Snow Leopard - perhaps you had your expectations set way too high - like imagining an operating system could turn your MBA into a speed demon overnight.
Just some food for thought - on a different perspective
Just some food for thought - on a different perspective
No, I am just about the biggest MBA fan there could be... and the truth is SL has been problematic and a joke for just about everyone. Too many fanbois won't admit to it, but I will.
Snow Leopard has a lot of potential in the long run, but as of right now its biggest benefit is returning some drive space... unfortunately most people think they magically recovered more space than they did because SL calculates the size of the drive differently. Everyone is going to get roughly 6 GB of space, but the bigger the drive the more space they "magically" recover.
Apple really hyped up SL and it might be a nice OS one day, but today Leopard runs better and is less problematic. And for those of you with an original MBA it actually runs a lot hotter with fans blowing all the time too.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#sixtyfourbit said:
Apple never said anything about enabling 64-bit kernel, only the applications.
The point is Apple is extremely misleading! It would have you believe it went ALL THE WAY, but it didn't. I am disappointed with Apple. I think Snow Leopard will be great, but right now the failures and misleading has me thinking bad thoughts about how Apple is marketing OS X Snow Leopard.
When there are apps taking advantage of OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch, and Apple has all of the problems in Snow Leopard fixed in maybe 10.6.4,5 then it will be great. For right now people are not happy with the level of problems with other apps not working and the simple things that worked fine in Leopard but don't in SL. It is a problem, and that's just me being honest. SL has made original MBAs even worse by causing higher temps and the need for full blowing fans.
The consumer Macs are seeing the worst of it.
If you want 64-bit kernel so much, why don't you try to enable it? There are ways...
I don't have an Air, just 1st gen Macbook, but I gotta say Snow has been great for me, I wasn't affected by the "Guest account" issue, I love the little nuances that have been added to the UI, barely noticed the file sizes in finder being calculated in multiples of 1000 instead of 1024...
Rock-solid. Beautiful as usual. Glad I upgraded. I can't speak for the MBA getting hotter under SL, but my Macbook seems to be about the same as before. No problems there.
Biggest problem I encountered was that for a while after the upgrade, when I rebooted the screen brightness and volume level would go back to some default value, until I deleted one pref then it was all fine.
Patrix.
Rock-solid. Beautiful as usual. Glad I upgraded. I can't speak for the MBA getting hotter under SL, but my Macbook seems to be about the same as before. No problems there.
Biggest problem I encountered was that for a while after the upgrade, when I rebooted the screen brightness and volume level would go back to some default value, until I deleted one pref then it was all fine.
Patrix.
Leopard to Snow Leopard overall has had way less less problems than Tiger - Leopard.
I'm sure by 10.6.9 they'll get the bugs worked out.
As others noted, the only real advantage I see is the space savings on my SSD.
I'm sure by 10.6.9 they'll get the bugs worked out.
As others noted, the only real advantage I see is the space savings on my SSD.
That's the thing, most people don't understand that they CANNOT boot 64-bit kernel on an MBA. Apple has axed it completely. There is a third-party EFI app that hard forces it but that could be truly problematic. I am just shocked at how Apple has touted 64-bit yet really mislead on a grand scale when consumer Macs cannot boot 64-bit kernel. It doesn't matter what the excuse is, there's NO excuse for this!
Just for the record, I upgraded to Snow Leopard on my Rev. A HDD MBA (didn't do clean install) and have found little to no difference. Fans aren't revving. Safari seems a little snappier. But otherwise pretty much the same--which is fine. I watch streamed video, mostly from Netflix, with no problem, but that was true before the upgrade, too.
I haven't tried every method I could find, but I assumed since there were claims it worked, it's possible. I didn't want to mess with my system too much.
There is no way of enabling 64-bit kernel on the MacBook Air. I even tried a EFI hack and even that failed.
Yeah you really just gotta wait for Apple to release an update for the EFI. It's a shame that my 2.2GHz C2D MBP 64 bit kernel is not enabled. My new MBA is not enabled, and my Mac Mini is not enabled. All 64 bit Procs, but not supported by Apple for 64 bit kernel. Very upsetting.
But, is SL worth it? For me, yes it was. I saw a huge performance increase on my Mac Mini and MBP. I just got my Air and I immediately installed SL on it, so I couldnt tell you. But, the MBA is killing my MBP because of the SSD. The thing is fast!! Opening documents, starting is less than 15 seconds, overall just really happy with it. The only problems with SL that I have are a lot of bugs, especially with Safari. Opening a new tab consumes 100% of my CPU for about 5 seconds. Lag, it's all there, but I hope it will be fixed with 6.2.
I get crappy OpenGL performance in SL. Can't play any of my games anymore in VMWare Fusion when I could back in Leopard.
I never played games in VMWare, but Xbench shows OpenGL performance dropped by half. I thought it was a problem with Xbench TBH... How did they manage to make it worse?
Isn't the main point of 64-bit to address more than 4gb of ram? Doesn't your MBA have 2gb of ram?
So what exactly did Apple promise for you MBA that they didn't deliver? Nothing. So you shouldn't have bought it. Are you really complaining that a product that wasn't meant to do anything for you, did nothing for you?
I agree. It's just the principle of bragging about 64-bit and then not really giving it to most is problematic and misleading.
Snow Leopard has the terrible OpenGL performance issue which shows up quite obviously in xBench. Snow Leopard shows as a 25 point DROP in xBench marks. That's sad. I have read where people say just don't measure the OpenGL by deselecting that, but that's the wrong way to look at it.
Just another "fix" we're waiting on for Snow Leopard.
I don't care if the MBA has 128 MBs of RAM, if Apple praises and pushes Snow Leopard as true 64-bit computing, they should qualify the statement with MUCH LEGAL COPY! What Apple normally complains about M$ and even made a commercial about it.
Snow Leopard was supposed to be great, but it really hasn't been. What would have been really SMART is if we all would have ignored Snow Leopard and insisted Apple "fix" it before buying it. The developers were stating it wasn't ready, and they were completely correct. What are we hopeful for 10.6.5? It's a long ways off from Leopard, and that is truly sad.
The only thing SL has done for me is made my MBA extrenely noisy and garnered many dirty looks from coworkers. And the Apple forums have been useless. Despite saying I tried resetting SMC several times, the suggestion I got from those geniuses is "did you do an SMC reset?"
on SL i noticed that my Rev C runs cooler, well with times it gets hot, however, it takes longer to get to that point.
otherwise i see no big difference.
otherwise i see no big difference.