My pre-ordered copy of OSX Snow Leopard arrived on Monday, so Monday evening was “upgrade evening”.
I’d love to be able to say something deep and meaningful about the upgrade process, but there’s very little to be said.
The process is painless.
I put the DVD into the Macbook Pro which I keep at home (or for when I’m travelling). A couple of of seconds later I doubleclicked on the installer icon, agreed to the license, and that was it.
About an hour later the upgrade was complete.
How boring!
But that is not a negative comment by any means. Over the last 10 years or so I’ve installed and upgraded desktops and laptops using multiple operating systems and variants. To be able to simply shove a DVD in, click once or twice and let the software do its business (without my intervention) is a lovely experience.
The only thing that was mildly annoying is Apple use time instead of percentages. So you get a dialog on screen telling you that you have X minutes left. The very last phase of the install showed “less than one minute” for at least 5 minutes. Not that it’s a serious complaint, but if they’d used percentages I wouldn’t have been left wondering if Apple’s concept of time and mine were at odds with each other!
As I didn’t check how much disk space I was using prior to the upgrade I’ve no way of knowing if the new version of OSX uses less space or not.
In terms of functionality, pretty much everything I had been using prior to the upgrade with the exception of Neo Office is working fine. The loss of Neo Office isn’t a “big deal” for me, as I can probably put a copy of Office (legally) on the MacBook Pro anyway (it was on my todo list).
What I had been looking forward to was the new functionality in Mail. Snow Leopard promised much better support for Microsoft Exchange and it seems to have delivered. While I had tried to use Microsoft’s Entourage on my deskop my experiences were anything but positive and I’ve always liked the performance of Mail. (Make your Windows based colleagues jealous when you can find an email in seconds!) Unfortunately for me my Exchange box is over 6 gigs in size, so syncing it down to the laptop the first time wasn’t exactly instant on my home DSL line.
I don’t use a very wide range of applications on my MacBook, so it will probably take me a while to discover the new features that Apple have been talking about, but so far I’m happy with the upgrade. No data was lost. This makes me happy!
My experience was entirely similar.
The most noticeable thing for me was the new version of QuickTime.
I didn’t do a disk-space check either, but I believe that Snow Leopard has a smaller disk-space footprint than the previous versions. Then again, what’s a couple of gigabytes here or there…
I’m a big mac user and always interested in the new upgrades, but hesitant of the first release. Would rather wait 6 to 9 months before upgrading while they work on the bugs.
It sounds like a winner, we’ll see.
Thank you for the review. Please keep us updated.
I installed it too, on three machines (a MBP, an iMac and a Mac Mini) and had no problems either. And so much faster and smother than an XP install.
I never trust the “about an hour…” dialog but I don’t like the percentage ones either, as they don;t really give you a time estimate – they can spend an hour doing the first 10% and 20 minutes doing the last 80%.
Just a note on free space – Snow Leopard now says 1kb = 1000bytes instead of 1024bytes, so it will seem like you have more space purely on how it’s measuring GBs etc.