TooMuchGreen

Obviously I was keen to upgrade to Snow Leopard this week (who wouldn’t be for €28.99) and was there in the queue at Gravis on Saturday morning. After a rather satisfying chocolate croissant in their cafe we went back in the apartment and an hour later it was up and running on the MacBook Air (Rev A 1.6ghz), OK, let’s see what we have…..

The first thing I noticed was instantly snappier performance, yes, MUCH snappier. It was true then, a genuine 64 bit operating system does indeed zip along nicely on matching 64 bit hardware (not that I doubted it wouldn’t, obviously), and what about that extra 6GB of disk space we’ve been promised? 6GB? Never mind that, I seem to have got an extra 9GB….how DOES it do that? Bonus.

OK, what about existing apps (I did an upgrade), is everything working? Seems I’d lost  “Coolbook” functionality, which to be honest is no real biggie now I’ve left the heated tropics of Costa Rica, especially as Snow Leopard apparently facilitates a cooler CPU anyway. Apart from Coolbook everything seemed quite happy and it was only the day after when I discovered MAMP functionality had taken a dive (I had the pukka stack installed) but again this was no real problem, I know I could get it going again but I’ve no real need now I’ve moved all server development onto the superb little Dell Mini 9 (These days I really do wonder how I ever managed without two laptops), the Air has been a real workhorse over the past year what with running VMWare instances and the like so it probably deserves a rest anyway.

Obviously the computing masses are making comparisons to Windows 7 with some giving Snow Leopard a real slagging for “apparently” being no more than a service pack for 10.5. I haven’t seen Windows 7 so can’t comment nor am I interested in doing so, I’m a Mac and Linux guy so why would I want to, however I do think the “service pack” tag is somewhat misguided. Snow Leopard both is and isn’t a new product, 10.5 is a fantastic operating system which delivers superbly across both PPC  & Intel Macs, 10.6 is an improved version designed to fully utilise the Intel 64 bit architecture, calm down people.

Cosmetic tweaks and touches are included here and there of course and although I haven’t discovered them all (the manual was in German) the ones I have noticed have made sense (like visible airport signal strength for available networks), the “big” change though has to be inclusion of O.O.T.B connectivity for MS Exchange, yes indeed, no more Entourage required (*cheer*). As the world runs on MS Exchange this is a most wise inclusion and brings Mac desktop email inline with the now ubiquitous iPhone.

Snow Leopard was never meant to be a huge cosmetic change from 10.5, it was designed to deliver a tailored performance hit  for newer machines and on that score (for me) it’s a total success, so much so I honestly feel like I’ve got a new laptop which isn’t a bad result for a €29 DVD and an hour of my time.

*UPDATE* – My battery life seems to have increased by 30 minutes, impressive.