If you’re upgrading from the previous Apple operating system then it just costs you £25, so it’s got to be worth a gamble! There’s been a lot in the press recently about it, so what’s it really like?

I always tell myself that I won’t be an early adopter of technology. I should wait until a new software package or operating system has been out for a couple of months and let all the other impatient idiots discover all the bugs. Of course after a couple of days I just can’t wait any longer and order the new product, and the new Apple operating system (OSX 10.6 – Snow Leopard) has been no exception.

Apple like to name their operating systems after big cats. We’ve had Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and now Snow Leopard. The similarity in name of the new operating system to the previous incarnation is no co-incidence. The new Snow Leopard operating system boasts very few new features, and once installed looks incredibly similar to Leopard, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The bulk of the changes are all ‘under the hood’. It seems that Apple have made a decision – that rather than add new features and applications to appeal to the mass market they would rather simply improve the way it works and maximise it’s efficiency when used on modern hardware.

The biggest change has been to the main kernel. This is the central part of the main operating system, and it’s been changed considerably to work better with the new multicore processors available today. There are pleny of web articles out there which go into great detail about this so I’m not going to go there, but I will give a few comments of my experience in real life with the new system. At the end of the day this is what is important.

Installation was a breeze and required no input from me once it had started. It took around 40 minutes, and when the new system restarted just about everything worked straight away. No problems with the Adobe Creative Suite application, and of course all the Apple programs were fine. It was the most pain free upgrade I’ve ever done.

There are a few subtle interface improvements but nothing major, but the clincher for me has to be the improvement in performance. The Macs we’re running here are no slouches. We’ve got quad core Mac Pro machines with fast Intel chips and around 10GB of RAM, so they were fast to start with. Snow Leopard really does take this to the next level though, and I’ve found that there is a noticeable increase in speed. This is especially evident in the Apple applications like Time Machine and Aperture.

I estimate that Time Machine runs around 30% faster, and Aperture (my photo editing package of choice) runs like a rocket. From a standing start it opens a vault file of 15,000 images in around eight seconds, which is around two thirds the time taken under the previous system. Safari is so quick that you don’t even realise it’s done what you asked, and the new Mail application zooms along nicely too.

I haven’t noticed much difference in the Adobe Creative Suite, but I believe that when CS5 comes out it will be written to take advantage of the new operating system so we’ll hopefully see real benefits then.

But we’re just talking seconds here and seconds there aren’t we? This is true, but if you consider that Apple will charge you a couple of hundred quid to upgrade a processor by .3GHz and you can get a similar increase in performance with this £25 upgrade then it’s got to be a good thing.

Overall the OSX operating system is maturing very nicely, and is without question in my opinion the best on the market. It’s fast, reliable, stable, in fact it just works, which is all that most users want from their machines in the first place.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.