What do you need to know… what do you need to do?
Some of us will have our hands on the new Mac OS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard, within a couple of days. I am going to install it immediately, but don’t necessarily recommend that you do. It’s a .0 version. Even though it’s similar in appearance to Leopard, under the hood it is very different. It may be buggy, and it may not play nice with some applications and peripherals.
Still, I gotta do it.
Here’s a few things to know about Snow Leopard, from here on out known here as SL.
The Good, the bad, and the ugly
Snow Leopard installation
To me this is a big bummer. If, a few months down the road, you have to do a system reinstall, it’s going to look like the bad old days of 10.2-3. You’ll have to install Leopard first, then do the SL upgrade. It’s not pretty. I’m not sure if purchasing the box set will provide a full install disk, but the $29 update certainly will not.
It’s possible that Apple will sell a full install disk later, but no promises.
If you are still using Tiger, it’s unlikely that the $29 upgrade will do you any good. The box set, which includes iLife and iWork, will install on a machine currently running Tiger… IF it is an Intel machine. PPC need not apply.
Peripheral support
Many drivers for printers, scanners and other 3rd party devices are included in Snow Leopard. Of course, if the manufacturer doesn’t provide full support, the devices may not be fully functional. Check with the manufacturer before upgrading to see if they’ve tested compatibility.
Scanners can use VueScan… it is already updated for 10.6. More often than not, VueScan is superior to the scanning software that came with the unit. I’ve been using it for years, very happily.
Apple supports Gutenprint and CUPS makes it likely that most printers will have some function. I don’t know if my 10+ year old GCC laser printer will make the transition. It’s been a tremendous workhorse for a long time, but nothing lasts forever. The OfficeJet 6500 better handle the change, tho. I’ve only had it for a couple of months!
64-Bit, OpenCL and H.264
If you have a relatively new Mac, with a 64-bit processor, you will have the ability to boot into the 64-bit kernel. If you don’t, you can still run 32-bit and 64-bit apps, and gain some performance improvement. You are not forced to update all your apps to run a single 64-bit app.
If you have a newish graphic processor, you can take advantage of OpenCL and H.264.
OpenCL allows the unused processing power of graphic processors (GPUs) to be used for computing tasks previously only utilizing the CPU (the chip that is the brains of your Mac) This can give significant speed boosts to apps that use intensive mathematic operations, and media apps can do intensive, complex operations on larger files. Games have the ability to be much more realistic.
Video operations using the H.264 codec will be accelerated on Macs with the right GPU.
Apple’s Snow Leopard technical specifications page lists the following compatible graphics processors:
Nvidia GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, GeForce GTX 285, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GS, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX5600, ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870. The GeForce 9400M is supported for H.264 accelleration, most likely using the onboard graphics processor only to implement it.
Nvidia and ATI, working with Apple may be able to create new drivers for older video cards. For now, the Radeo 2000, 3000 and 4000 series cards support H.264 hardware decoding. Other cards may well be supported in the future.
Will other graphics cards be able to utilize these features? Maybe, but not for now.
Is it really faster?
Yes. It is. PC World did a series of tests on a 20″ iMac Core 2 Duo/2.66GHz (2GB RAM), a 3GHz Xeon 5300 8-core Mac Pro (4GB RAM), and a 15″ MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo/2.8GHz (4GB RAM) using internal drives formatted into 2 equal sized partitions, one running Leopard (10.5.8) and Snow Leopard (10.5.6 on the other. More info on the tests can be found here.
They ran 16 tests, and half (8) were faster using SL than Leopard. The iMac generally showed the least boost, the Mac Pro the most.
Time Machine backups to an external drive was about 32% faster on average. Part of this is because Snow Leopard has a smaller hard drive footprint than Leopard’s.
Video encoding tests using H.264 showed improvements from 2-4.5%, not enormously quicker.
Zipping a 2 GB file in the finder was 6.5-11% faster.
Importing 150 photos into iPhoto showed 8-21% speed increases.
Shutting down took about half as long under Snow Leopard.
Scrolling thru a large PDF doc in Preview and opening a large Word doc in Pages were a little quicker… a few seconds.
Safari’s JavaScript was boosted by 33%, on average.
Little or no improvement
Startup time was mostly equivalent, the iMac 2 seconds faster.
Photoshop test suite times were the same with the iMac and Mac Pro, but 2 seconds faster using the MacBook Pro.
Leopard won out in the Finder duplication of a 1GB file… by 2-3 seconds.
Wake from sleep and connect to network took 1-3 seconds longer using Snow Leopard.
The last 4 tests showed mixed results. On any given test run, one or the other system might be faster, depending on the Mac used. They included zipping a compressed file in the finder, importing a camera archive into iMovie (both slower on the iMac with SL, faster on the MBP and the Mac Pro), Exporting a project from iMovie using the iTunes:Mobile preset (SL was faster in the iMac, slower on the MBP, the same on the Mac Pro) and converting 2 CDs worth of AAC-encoded song files to 256kbs MP3s in iTunes (considerably faster using SL on the iMac and MBP, slower on the Mac Pro)
Wait for it… more to come
There’s news all over the ‘net. I’ll be updating as I either read about or experience Snow Leopard, and may include an info section on my web site as I did following the introduction of Leopard. At least, I’ll continue to post more info here. Comments are welcome…
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