![]() Printer driver installation is much smarter, installing drivers only for those printers you've used in the past and printers that appear on your local network. Rosetta is no longer installed by default, so if you're still rocking some legacy non-Universal apps you'll want to make sure and install it. Other installation notes: We were promised 6GB of storage savings with 10.6, and Apple more than delivered - we got anywhere from 10GB to a whopping 20GB back after installation. Fixing these problems didn't take much, but if your machine is already acting up don't expect everything to go perfectly. We didn't have any problems with the more pristine MacBook Pros in our fleet, but one of our production machines is a cranky older iMac that's been in constant use for over two years without a system rebuild, and when it restarted the desktop pictures were all set to the defaults, the System Preferences app wouldn't launch from the Apple Menu, our MobileMe sync states were a little confused and Spotlight began reindexing all the external drives. ![]() Installation itself took about 45 minutes on most of the machines we tried, although we did run into some snags once things were complete. We've been told it's now the default action behind the scenes, but the bottom line is that you have to trust the installer more than ever before - and while we didn't have any major problems, it would be nice if we could force a new install of the OS without having to wipe a disk. Of course, that made us a little uneasy, since we've always chosen Archive and Install to get a fresh OS, but you can't have cold feet here - that option's been removed. You don't even have to reboot off the DVD. Seriously, you just stick in the disc, open the installer, enter your password and go - that's it. Unlike Microsoft's subtle nudges towards clean reinstallation of Windows 7, Apple's quite proud of the new 10.6 installer, which upgrades in place, quarantines incompatible apps and plugins in an "Incompatible Software" folder, and boots you right back up with little to no user effort. Interestingly enough, installation is one of the few parts of Snow Leopard that's dramatically different than previous versions of OS X. So did Apple pull it off? Read on to find out! But in a way that means the pressure's on even more: Apple took the unusual and somewhat daring step of slowing feature creep in a major OS to focus on speed, reliability, and stability, and if Snow Leopard doesn't deliver on those fronts, it's not worth $30. So you won't notice much new when you first restart into 10.6 - apart from some minor visual tweaks here and there there's just not that much that stands out. And on top of all that, there's now Exchange support in Mail, iCal, and Address Book, making OS X finally play nice with corporate networks out of the box. There's a new version of QuickTime, which affects media playback on almost every level of the system. The Finder has been entirely re-written in Cocoa, which Mac fans have been clamoring for since 10.0. The entire OS is now 64-bit, meaning apps can address massive amounts of RAM and other tasks go much faster. Maybe that's why Apple's priced the 10.6 upgrade disc at just $29 - appearances and expectations matter, and there's simply not enough glitz on this kitty to warrant the usual $129.īut underneath the customary OS X fit and finish there's a lot of new plumbing at work here. Even the name seems to underpromise - it's the first "big cat" OS X codename to reference the previous version of the OS, and the list of big-ticket new features is seemingly pretty short for a version-number jump.
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