By John Paczkowski
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the latest iteration of Apple’s operating system, arrived at market today--about a month earlier than originally anticipated. And while it doesn’t really deliver the GUI enhancements we’ve come to expect from Apple and some incompatibilities are riling people up, Snow Leopard’s under-the-hood improvements and price point appear to have struck a chord with critics. After the jump, a selection of early reviews. Read More »
Published on August 28, 2009
By Walter S. Mossberg
Apple's Snow Leopard operating system improves upon its predecessor, writes Walt Mossberg. But it isn't a big breakthrough for average users, and it isn't a typical Apple lust-provoking product. Read More »
Published on August 26, 2009
Apple has finally acknowledged that a bug in its new Snow Leopard operating system can, on rare occasions, result in a catastrophic loss of data. The glitch, which first surfaced in support forums in early September, is triggered by logging in and out of a guest account and wipes the main user account of all data. Clearly, this is not what Apple meant when it claimed the OS would free up as much as seven gigs of space upon installation.
Snow Leopard’s under-the-hood improvements and low price point are evidently making up for the operating system’s lack of new bells and whistles. Market research outfit NPD reports that the latest iteration of Apple’s Mac OS X is selling twice as fast as Leopard and almost four times faster than Tiger.
Apple has repeatedly characterized its forthcoming Snow Leopard operating system as an under-the-hood upgrade to the Mac OS, one that focuses on performance enhancements rather than new features.
The Apple Store went offline earlier this morning and when it returned, its homepage featured Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard. Available for preorder today, the next iteration of the Mac OS will ship Aug. 28 as a $29 upgrade.
“We’ve decided to build Microsoft Exchange support into Snow Leopard,” says Serlet to much applause. A quick demo of this new feature shows set-up is extraordinarily easy. Corporate Exchange accounts are auto-discovered and searchable via Leopard technologies — regardless of whether a user has Microsoft Office installed on their local machine. iCal and Address Book offers integrated views of Exchange events and contacts and local events and contacts. The integration seems very slick and easy. It also supports Exchange’s location and availability features.
Moving on now to Safari 4, which is shipping from Apple today for Leopard, Tiger, AND Windows … Safari 4 offers unsurpassed speed for HTML and Javascript. It’s also Acid3 compliant. Safari 4 is 100 percent compliant as opposed to IE, which is 21 percent compliant. Safari 4 is also more crash-resistant and 40 percent faster than its predecessors.
Apple (AAPL) is also updating the MacBook air. Two new configurations starting at 1.8 GHZ. “Great hardware deservers great software,” says Schiller. And with that he welcomes Bertrand Serlet to the stage to talk about OS X. Serlet immediately begins talking smack about Vista and Windows 7. “No end user should ever have to know about disc defragmentation,” he quips. Windows 7 is “fundamentally another version of Vista. “It’s the same old technology. This is so very different from OS X.”
Boy, Apple really sucked all the air out of the news cycle today, eh? First with the announcement of the iPhone 3G and the new features and applications that will accompany it, and now with a handful of details about OS X “Snow Leopard,” a forthcoming upgrade the Mac OS X.
News, reviews and analysis of Apple’s latest operating system upgrade, Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
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