What You DO Get In Mac OS X Snow Leopard

2:30AM June 10, 2009 | Gina Trapani

Mac owners can get Snow Leopard come September, and while an Australian price hasn’t been announced as of this writing, it seems fair to assume that, like the US, this update will be a lot cheaper than previous Mac OS updates. Why is that? Well, while Snow Leopard’s under-the-hood enhancements are plentiful, there aren’t a whole lot of new user-facing features.

And that’s what sells operating systems at a $100+ price point. Instead, this time bucks you get “enhancements and refinements” (Apple’s words).

Still, even though you might have to dig for them, it looks like a few nice tweaks are on the way with Snow Leopard. Here are the ones we’re most looking forward to.

Faster bootup and shutdown times, and half the disk footprint of Leopard, which will save you about six gigabytes of disk space.
Signal strength indicators in the Airport menu (so you can choose the Wi-Fi network with the best signal).
A split pane terminal, so you can run jobs side by side (like tail a log in one pane while running a script in another, so you can see what’s going on in each simultaneously).
Date in the menu bar.
Safari 4. While the beta was crashy (at least for Windows), it is leaner, meaner, and a bit more flashy than Firefox or Chrome.
Video editing and screen recording (for screencasts!) in Quicktime.
Microsoft Exchange support–good for all those (poor) folks using Exchange.
64-bit computing, which means you can get more memory into your system.

Here’s the full list of Snow Leopard “refinements and enhancements.”

What You DO Get in Mac OS X Snow Leopard [Smarterware]

Sam

June 10, 2009 at 8:28 AM

I’m still yet to find a source on what version of OpenGL it is shipping with. Anyone know?

JJJ

June 10, 2009 at 12:09 PM

In the feature list above, there’s nothing that’d convince me to upgrade immediately. I’ll wait till its 10.6.7 around September 2010 before upgrading. You guys go and beta test it, and I’ll come on board when it’s nice and stable.

I was one of the fools who upgraded to Leopard on the night of launch day. I got the launch day T-shirt, but also spent the next few days in terror at losing valuable photos and data because of bugs in Leopard. Never again. Now, Leopard at 10.5.7 is quite stable, so I’ll take that as my cue to upgrade to Snow Leopard when it has reached 10.6.7

Awesome-man

June 11, 2009 at 4:05 PM

Looks like mac is just catching up with things? :S

64-bit computing = beaten to the punch
Signal strength indicators = been in windows forever?
Date in the menubar (i’m taking this as it’s taskbar equivalent) = again, lolwut? a little slow

However performance is everything to a lot of people, so they’re advancing there :D

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