The most remarkable thing about Snow Leopard is simply that it can be installed on a Mac running Tiger. You do not need to pay the money to buy the boxed set to upgrade if you never upgraded to Leopard. This means that you can upgrade a Tiger computer to Leopard using this disk. It is up to the user to determine if they have an ethical problem with that; Apple certainly knew that this was possible when they released the software: they understand and use DRM effectively and always have. The fact it is missing here tells me that they are primarily concerned with getting Snow Leopard unto as many computers as possible as fast as possible. I am sure part of that is the desire to have Snow Leopard outperform Windows 7 which debuts in October.
So what do you get with Snow Leopard? The answer is largely performance boosts, although many of those are not really applicable (yet) since few (virtually none) third party applications use the performance gains offered by Snow Leopard. Similar to Windows 7s ability to load share between CPU and GPU, many of the changes in Snow Leopard will take several years for developers to really start to use and write programs for.
Relying on 64-bit architecture through the entire OS, Snow Leopard is essentially an upgrade for the future: as developers write programs that take advantage of the new, higher ceiling, end users like you and I will benefit. For now, most of the performance increases are only applicable to Apple's own software. However, that's not to say these aren't nice or useful, and in some cases very impressive:
1) Opening large photos is faster in preview mode
2) Quicktime uses significantly less CPU on all Macs regardless of generation. Older Macs benefit the most with as much as 40% performance gains.
3) Time Machine backups take about 20% less time
4) Snow Leopard itself installs faster than Leopard
5) Boot times are faster with Snow Leopard by 5-10%; Shut down times are slightly faster as well.
6) File compression is also faster by 10-15%
(These are somewhat simplified. If you want the exact numbers you can find them online: Google "Snow Leopard Performance")
Of all of these, the performance increases afforded to older first generation Macbooks are the most significant. Breathing new life into older hardware isn't easy, especially not significant improvements. Snow Leopard manages to do just that and make even slower 1.6ghz MacBooks that much more useful.
Installation itself is a SNAP (did I mention it takes less time than Leopard?). I've already upgraded a MacBook and MacBook Pro, and installation was simple, fast, and easy. I plan to install Snow Leopard on another older Macbook later in the week and will upgrade this review once I have.
The few new visual tweaks are nice, but not the reason to upgrade. Better stacks is useful, as is the quickness of Finder, but overall I don't find myself blown away by the upgrade. This isn't an entirely new OS with a fantastic array of improvements, aside from the welcome and useful performance increases. That said, if you are a power user or just observant, you WILL NOTICE the speed increase, especially in Finder.
Snow Leopard will grow in usefulness as time passes. As I said earlier, once third party applications start to be written to take advantage of advancements in the OS, the performance overhead will become more and more useful. Expect to wait 6-12 months for that to happen, but in the mean time at least you're enjoying speedier OS performance for an very inexpensive price!
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