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Why Is Snow Leopard's System Requirements Higher Than Leopard's If Snow Leopard Has A

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Pedro D

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 6, 2009
20
0
Lower Foot Print?"

How Come Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard's system requirements are higher than Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's if it has a lower footprint and makes everything run smoother? How come after every new Mac OS X the system requirements are higher than the previous version?
 
That's what happens with technology... it advances. Did you expect the system requirements to be lower after 2 years?

And the main reason for the smaller foot print is that there is no PowerPC support.
 
I don't get what you mean. The main spec relating to footprint is Hard Drive space and Snow Leopard requires just 5 GB Hard Drive space instead of 9 GBs. If you are talking about the RAM requirements, running Leopard on 512 MB isn't pretty, so 1 GB is perfectly reasonable. They've also excluded PPC, and Apple have said it'll run on EVERY Intel Mac, so nothing's changed on the Intel side of processor requirements.
 
I thought they meant EVERYTHING by "Smaller Footprint" like it would need less RAM to run not just less space required to install.

Thank you for clarifying that :)
 
But if Snow Leopard is suppose to make everything run better, why can't it use less resources?
 
Take your hand, place it on the back of the head, and slam your face into the keyboard repeatedly until you finally realize that ...

Snow Leopard at $29 + 1GB RAM from the $10-20 bargain bin is still cheap.

Or keep slamming your head into the keyboard until you skull breaks.

---

If you haven't upgraded you Intel Macs RAM to 2GB, then you are seriously slowing your machine down.
 
Pedro D said:
I don't have a Mac.
Click to expand...

What?! :eek: If you don't have a Mac, and are not planning on buying one, why does it matter? Are you trolling? Or maybe inquiring for a family member or friend? You can upgrade to 2 GB of RAM for less than the cost of Snow Leopard. Anyway, there are probably some of the enhancements that use more of the system memory to perform optimally. Running a computer these days with anything less than 1 GB of RAM is insane. Heck, most netbooks even have 1 GB standard.
 
Pedro D said:
Lower Foot Print?"

How Come Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard's system requirements are higher than Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's if it has a lower footprint and makes everything run smoother? How come after every new Mac OS X the system requirements are higher than the previous version?
Click to expand...

Have you tried 10.5 with 512 MB of RAM? Even with 1 GB it runs slow.
 
Pedro D said:
Lower Foot Print?"
How come after every new Mac OS X the system requirements are higher than the previous version?
Click to expand...
It's called the natural progression of technology. Every OS does this, including Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Have you ever noticed how every year, technology gets faster, cheaper, smaller and better? It used to be a luxury to have 1 GB of memory. Now it's an afterthought.

Naturally, Snow Leopard is being released nearly two years after Leopard. That's an eternity in the tech sector, and 2009 is vastly different from 2007, and thus it makes sense that the luxuries of 2007 are now standard in 2009, hence higher system requirements.

But if you have an Intel-based Mac, you will be able to run Snow Leopard; it's as simple as that. So don't even worry about the system requirements.
 
Skiniftz said:
An excellent question and curious answers from apologists that offer nothing.

Simple answer is that those 64bit versions of the built in apps will want lots more RAM to run around in to get the full benefit.

In theory it should run faster on the same (Intel) hardware, however it will need more RAM.

...and the reason you get a smaller footprint is I'm assuming they have stripped out the PPC code from all the apps.
Click to expand...
And RAM upgrades these days are dirt cheap, as long as you don't buy from Apple. You can get 4 GB upgrade kits for less than $50.
 
If a book was written in smaller font, and took up less pages, and was in text speak that you could understand -
It would have a smaller footprint (page numbers, book size), but similar content. You'd also have to think/strain to look more / get a better pair of glasses - hardware
 
MacManiac76 said:
What?! :eek: If you don't have a Mac, and are not planning on buying one, why does it matter? Are you trolling? Or maybe inquiring for a family member or friend?
Click to expand...

I"m only a kid its not like I have $1200. I'm just waiting patiently for it to appear in Christmas. And no I'm not trolling. Only depressed or lonely people do that. No I'm not inquiring for a family member or friend.
 
themoonisdown09 said:
<snip>
And the main reason for the smaller foot print is that there is no PowerPC support.
Click to expand...
Actually, that's not completely true. Yes, the elimination of PowerPC-specific code and kernel extensions did shrink the OS a fair amount. However, I highly doubt that that's all they did. The vast majority of Mac OS X applications these days are 90% or more resources, 10% or less code. Because of this, eliminating the PowerPC portion of the code doesn't save as much space as it otherwise would. However... there are plenty of other ways the size of applications can be reduced. The biggest size reducer is switching from TIFF or other uncompressed bitmap graphics formats to SVG or other vector graphics formats. Apple needs to do this anyway, to prepare for Resolution Independence's final implementation... and as a nice side effect the proportion of resources taken up by images shrinks drastically.

Here's an example: A 300x300 pixel 24-bit color BMP image takes up 263 KB of space, even if it's just solid yellow. That same image in SVG format: Only 2 KB (a 99.3% reduction in size).
 
Eliminating PPC cuts 1/3 of their testing matrix, making QA much easier. It's also another step towards eliminating the old objective-c runtime, which will allow for a bunch of changes to Cocoa for the better.
 
Catfish_Man said:
Eliminating PPC cuts 1/3 of their testing matrix, making QA much easier. It's also another step towards eliminating the old objective-c runtime, which will allow for a bunch of changes to Cocoa for the better.
Click to expand...
First part of this post is 100% true. However, I fail to see the logic behind how this will eliminate the old Objective-C runtime (1.0, I assume).
 
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