Apple Consulting and Managed Services

Snow Leopard upgrade advice

UPDATED: 04-14-10

Now that 10.6.3 is out I advise everyone to update to this… it’s pretty rock solid.

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Apple released Snow Leopard last Friday and it’s only a $29 upgrade but do you need it? I have to admit that as of now it’s not a “must have” upgrade if your main computing needs are email, web surfing, Microsoft Wurd, address book and iCal. There’s no wow factor to this upgrade. Also, G5 users are left behind. 🙁

It has refinements under the hood like OpenCL, Grand Central and it’s now a 64bitoperating system. For instance the Finder has finally been rewritten, but there are no mention worthy features. It’s the same old finder. Oh, right, it now has 512×512 icons. Ha ha.

There are nice things like hard drives now reflecting their real size, iCal has a floating inspector like it used to have in Tiger, your machine will wake and  shutdown faster, iChat has 640×480 video chats, there is Microsoft Exchange support (does anyone care about this?) and other little things you begin to notice as you use it more like opening the scanner from the Printer queue and a more informative Airport menu.

Bottom line… $29 is pretty inexpensive for this release (service pack) and I recommend installing it. Here is a list of all compatible software so make sure your software is compatible before upgrading.