Snow Leopard shouldn’t do that

by Jérôme ~ October 17, 2009

I’ve been a Mac addicted since late Tiger – when it was stable enough to work with. I have also been bias regarding some aspect of Mac OSes. Some people might say I have bad faith and bias all the time. I would say: not all the time. But when something is not right, I can go crazy on it. Most of the time Apple does a great job on the OS level, making it very well user oriented, and trying to correct issues, in a correct amount of time.

When I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, experience was great, smooth transaction; like a kid, I discovered new things in the OS, all my applications I relied on were compatible right away. Leopard was stable, well, starting to be stable after the third patch (10.5.3).

I can admit it now, all the craziness around the new OS in the Mac community convinced me. It’s just an OS update with no real new feature, new core, new wonderful under the hood improvement, 64bits means faster, etc. So, with full confidence, I upgraded to Snow Leopard.
At first, nothing new, nothing really sexy, nothing that will wake me up at night and stare at my desktop and play with new shortcuts; I already knew that. The upgrade took longer than expected, it was fine, week-end, friends, family, let the iMac work on his own. Then first indexing, slow the machine, I couldn’t see the “awesome” core improvement. Finally after a couple of hours, I had a brand new OS, so all exited like a 2 years old, I could play with my new toy.

Deception, were is the speed improvement, half of my applications is taking the same amount of time to load, and the other half is not compatible. So I waited, putting faith on the developers and Apple to correct that. A couple of updates after, either of the OS side and the applications side, I cannot see any improvement. Snow Leopard, is just Leopard, but with a extra annoyance: it freezes. I can believe that, I freezes. I have to hard reboot it at least twice a week. I’m getting tired of the spinning wheel, I almost have to be careful with which applications I open in the same time to avoid those constant freezes.

As of today, Snow Leopard is just Leopard with freezes and less working applications.

With all of this, why am I still using Mac? Because I know how Apple works: they release an OS to quickly polished for your eyes but buggy in the core, then release a first patch within the first weeks and the next the month after, and so on; I hope the 10.6.3 will be stable. Patience and let’s wait for the next two patches. I stay also because, at least, they fixed one annoyance in Leopard, the external drive I am using with Time Machine is not disconnecting all the time at least they did something right on this OS.

Snow Leopard could have been something great but it didn’t meet my expectation. Let see what will happen in the future and how Apple will improve their OS. A couple of people asked me if it is worst to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Just after my upgrade I said yes because it fixed the disconnecting issue I had and for a couple of GUI improvements. Today I would answer, yes but don’t expect too much of it, just do the update as if it was a usual Software Update patch to your OS.