Mac OS X Snow Leopard is one fast cat
After a few weeks using Apple's newest OS, Mac OS 10.6 "Snow Leopard" I find myself surprised at just how much faster the OS is over its predecessor on the same hardware.
Having an OS upgrade speed up computer performance on a year-old computer may be unheard of in the PC world (excluding the forthcoming release of Windows 7, which is essentially a massive Vista service pack) but it is fairly common among Mac users.
What makes Snow Leopard stand out is how many small speed improvements, combined with some big ones, combine together to significantly improve the overall user experience.
Specifically, I've noticed speed improvements in the following areas:
- Boot times
- Wake from sleep
- Application load times
- Shut down times
- Dashboard, Spaces & Expose
While Apple focused mainly on polishing up Snow Leopard by working on technical areas and developing new technologies that will lead to significant speed enhancements down the road for multi-core machines, the Cupertino, California company also did a bit of polish work on some recent feature additions to Mac OS X.
Features which received some much needed attention include Expose, which is now more useful thanks to the ability to preview windows as well as stacks.Both of these improvements have lent more credence to rumours of a Mac tablet.
Overall, I'd highly recommend 10.6 as an upgrade to home users. For Enterprise users, I'd recommend checking with your IT department first. At my work, for example, Mac OS 10.6's early release on Aug. 28 instead of in September has caused some headaches with Novell networking support (Novell hopes to have this fixed in November - boo).
