Hopefully developers will jump on the opportunity and make Services useful, rather than confusing. Snow Leopard will automatically check to see whether your printer drivers are up to date, and Services (a holdover going all the way back to Nextstep) are finally first-class citizens in Snow Leopard, accessible via contextual menus. Other Snow Leopard improvements: iChat can now push VGA-resolution video chat through connections with less bandwidth, and the Airport menu now shows signal strengths of nearby Wi-Fi networks (press Option for geeky details!). Snow Leopard’s protection feature is built into File Quarantine technology Apple introduced with Tiger: Snow Leopard will prevent known malware from running (and tell users to delete it), but there’s no way to trigger a scan or automatically remove malware. Macs have never experienced malware problems to anywhere near the degree Windows has (Apple’s current malware definitions list includes only two items), but as the Mac gets more popular it’s a question of when, not if, major malware will hit the Mac. The Dock’s contextual menus have been cleaned up, and they’re now visually distinct from other applications’ contextual menus.Īnother unsung but significant change: Snow Leopard includes rudimentary malware protection that can detect viruses, trojans, and other software that can damage a Mac. Apple does offer custom installation options: The installer will automatically disable some software known to be incompatible with Snow Leopard, and if the installation fails halfway through (perhaps due to a power outage) the underlying Mac OS X operating system remains untouched – just relaunch the Snow Leopard installer and start again. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard install screen: It doesn’t get much simpler than this. One area where Apple has clearly made progress is the Snow Leopard installer, omitting the perplexing “Archive & Install” options from earlier releases for a simplified click-and-be-done approach. While this covers Macs released in the last three years, it leaves owners of older systems based on PowerPC G4 and G5 CPUs out in the cold, just as Apple abandoned support for older Mac OS 9 applications in Leopard. Snow Leopard will run on any Macintosh with an Intel processor and 1GB of RAM. New Macs are already shipping with Snow Leopard folks who purchased a new Mac on or after June 8, 2009, can get Snow Leopard for $9.95. Officially, the Mac Box Set is the only upgrade path for users of Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, but the regular Snow Leopard installation disc seems to work just fine. A five-license family packs runs for $49.99, and Apple is also offering a Mac Box Set with Snow Leopard, iLife ’09, and iWork ’09 for $169, with some resellers already offering discounts. Snow Leopard’s pricing reflects the lack of glitzy new toys: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users can upgrade to Snow Leopard for just $29.99, which is a significantly lower price point than the $129 Apple normally charges for a new operating system. After using Snow Leopard, they seem clunky and slipshod, where Snow Leopard hums along and does things right. The enhancements in Snow Leopard become starkly apparent when one goes back to Leopard or Tiger. Improvements to the OS are highly visible in a few places, show up in a lot of little areas, and amount to an upgrade greater than the sum of its parts. Instead, Apple took a breath with Snow Leopard and focused on refining its Mac OS X operating system, taking the time to get lots of details right, improve performance, and make a bunch of under-the-hood changes that will benefit Macintosh users in the long run. However, unlike its “big cat” predecessors (like Leopard, Tiger, and Panther) Snow Leopard isn’t awash in splashy new features or new ideological paradigms meant to advance the computing experience – and knock Redmond back on its heels. The Macintosh faithful are all abuzz with the debut of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest and greatest operating system for Macintosh computers.
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