Why? For many reasons: it's cheap, it's cool, it's fast. Let's start with the cheap. If you already have Leopard, Snow Leopard will cost you just $29 retail. A family pack for 5 Macs is just $49. If you still are using Tiger, you can get the Mac Box Set with Snow Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09 for $169, and a family pack for $229. Check the online retailers for deals.
It's cool; there's a Snow Leopard on the packaging. What more do you need?
It's fast. In a way, this is the biggest reason to get Snow Leopard. If you won't purchase software just because it is more stable, and is faster, then there *are* new features, just not major ones.
Apple is touting a number of things making Snow Leopard a better operating system. The Finder has been completely rewritten on Cocoa. This means the Finder will be faster and will work better. Also, Time Machine back ups are up to 80% faster. Your Mac will now wake up and shut down twice as fast. Installations are faster and more reliable. The System folder is half as big as the old folder.
An all new version of QuickTime will be faster and better in many ways, including a cleaner look, smoother video playback, and direct uploading to YouTube and more. The Services Menu has been redesigned to actually be useful; you don't know what the Services Menu is? You will now. Software Updates will now include printer drivers, so you will always have the latest software installed for your printer.
There are many more refinements, but the real changes in Snow Leopard are "under the hood." One of these changes is 64-bit support throughout the operating system. Until now, the 64-bit support has not been complete, and it's one of the pieces helping Snow Leopard operate faster.
Another piece of the faster puzzle is OpenCL. Apple designed this open standard to allow the graphics card to support the main CPU in heavy computing loads, including movie encoding. This requires graphics cards such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M or ATI Radeon 4850 or better.
Another piece of the puzzle is Grand Central Dispatch. Until now, OS X didn't do a great job of using CPU chips with multiple cores, such as the Core 2 Duo. Multiple cores, means multiple CPUs in one chip. So, if you don't use both cores, you are wasting power. And, Apple is now shipping Macs with 4 cores and 8 cores. So, taking advantage of multiple cores is becoming very important.
With Grand Central Dispatch, the system itself will use multiple cores better than in Leopard, and applications will be spread over the multiple cores. Programmers can take better advantage of the multiple cores within their programs. All of this means speed, speed, speed.
And I think there is more they are not telling us. I believe they have started integrating ZFS into the volume manager. ZFS is a new file system/volume manager allowing better use of hard drives, solid state drives, and other storage devices. There also appears to be some anti-virus or anti-malware features built into Snow Leopard Apple has yet to officially mention.
So, Snow Leopard is a solid foundation for future advances in OS X. And there are tons of new and improved features too numerous to mention.
You may be wondering if you can run Snow Leopard without problems. Well if you have an Intel powered Mac, you should be fine. If you want to check on the compatibility of your applications, a new list will help. To see this list, go to
As a final note, it has been suggested the $29 version of Snow Leopard is just an upgrade, and you must reinstall Leopard first. Not true. Run the installer from the DVD and it installs over your current copy of Leopard. Boot from the Snow Leopard DVD and you can get a fresh install of the entire system.
A few more Snow Leopad links:
BootCamp http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3777
Gamma settings http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3712
Battery menu bar http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3782
Snow Leopard enhancements http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/enhancements-refinements.html
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