Review: Apple Snow Leopard

When Apple announced the impending release of the latest iteration of OS X many months ago, the company made it quite clear that there would be no new eye candy, bells or whistles. The intention was always to take what was already a rock solid foundation and rebuild it into a faster, leaner, more efficient operating system which would make better use of modern multi-core architecture.

Snow Leopard, or OS X 10.6 to give it its full title, has arrived almost a month early, and our initial investigations confirm that Apple has kept its promise by delivering a mature operating system with hundreds of minor tweaks, a handful of major behind-the-scenes breakthroughs, and at least one killer app that could see disgruntled Windows users leaving the Microsoft fold in droves.

Booting up
The first thing you'll notice on double clicking the 'install Mac OS X' icon is that the installer doesn't immediately restart your machine and boot the OS from the DVD, as has been the case in the past.

Like most things in Snow Leopard, the installer has been completely updated. Simplicity is the key here and, unless you want to dig deeper and do a custom install, you'll just need to click a couple of standard EULA agreement buttons and that's it.

A clean install to a recently formatted drive took 35 minutes. An update to an existing install of Leopard 10.5.4 took a little longer at 55 minutes, but that included checking and isolating out-of-date and incompatible software and installing Rosetta, which is required for certain legacy apps from the PowerPC era. This upgrade left pretty much everything intact, including user accounts and preferences, network connections and even desktop icons.

The installer also intelligently downloads only the printer drivers it thinks you require by checking which printers are installed on your network or have been used recently.

Hard drive savings
Apple reckons that Snow Leopard will save you at least 7GB of hard drive space once installed. Some users have reported as much as 20GB on older machines and we raked back 9GB. We suspect that a large chunk of this has been achieved simply by not installing thousands of useless printer drivers.

Once installed, the OS takes just 50 seconds to spring to life from a cold boot, and a little over a minute to restart. Initial impressions are that the Finder, which has been completely rewritten from the ground up in Cocoa, is snappier and more responsive than in Leopard, with windows containing hundreds of files and folders opening almost instantaneously.

Copying and moving files and folders between volumes also feels faster, even over a network connection. Many of the custom application icons have been updated and can be resized to gigantic proportions using the new slider button in icon view mode. They also look fantastic in CoverFlow mode, which will be familiar to iTunes and iPod users.

There have been a few minor interface tweaks including an addition to the Exposé system whereby clicking and holding on an application icon in the dock pops up all of that application's open files. Stacks from the dock now have an additional scroll bar allowing you to look through every item in a folder, rather than having to switch to the Finder. Quick Look has been updated so that items like Microsoft Office documents can be previewed even if you don't have the relevant application installed, and PDF documents can be viewed and manipulated without opening Acrobat or Preview.

The print dialogue box in some applications has been updated to include an on-the-fly indication of ink levels for installed printers, and Apple has also included a sneaky link to its own web site encouraging you to order new printer supplies, although it currently points to the US portal only.

Anti-malware
Much has been made of the fact that Apple hardware suffers less from malicious attacks than some other systems, but in the real world there will always be sordid individuals who want to mess with your computing experience. Because of this, Apple has taken the bold step of finally admitting that there could possibly be a problem by adding a level of anti-virus protection to Snow Leopard. File Quarantine sits in the background and addresses a regularly updated list of known internet black-spots, warning you that certain sites or downloadable files could potentially damage your system.

64-bit
While it is true that Snow Leopard seems at surface level to be a rather minor upgrade, there have been some major goings-on at system level, some of which will never be apparent to the end user. Just about every bit of the operating system has been pushed along into 64-bit territory, including all of the core Apple applications. Grand Central Dispatch quietly goes about its work of making sure your multi-core processors are working as hard as they possibly can by sharing out system resources, giving more threads to hard working applications.

If you want an indicator of how fast the new 64-bit applications are, just try opening Safari. We got out our trusty stopwatch and clicked on the application icon from the Dock, and it was from zero to Google in about a tenth of a second. A quick check in activity monitor soon quashed the notion that the OS must pre-load the application.

Microsoft Exchange Server support
For some existing and potential Apple users, the biggest bonus in Snow Leopard could well be the inclusion of Microsoft Exchange Server support straight out of the box, although it currently works only with the 2007 version. Windows users will, of course, point out that they have been able to keep their lives in order using Exchange for many years, but in order to use the mail, contacts and meetings tools you have to buy and install Microsoft Office. Snow Leopard users can now use full Exchange Server functionality through native applications like Mail, Contacts and iCal, all of which are installed as standard on every Mac.