So I've had 24 hours to use Snow Leopard on my iMac, and I have some thoughts. First, some background.

Though my original intent was to do a fresh install, I decided to go ahead and try an upgrade from Leopard instead. I have all of my data backed up but being that this week has been a busy one I didn't really have the time to restore it (especically because my iPhone is connected to the iMac). So, I went ahead and upgraded. It took about a half hour which is bit longer than expected, but not altogether bad.

Snow Leopard Installer

On the first boot of Snow Leopard I had two reactions:

  1. Oooooh, pretty wallpaper
  2. Okay, what else changed?

Snow Leopard has been getting more negative attention than a lot of people expected because the changes are so minute.  Sure there's dock expose, the 6-7GB of extra space after install, and scrolling stacks but most changes will go unnoticed.  For example the entire Finder has been rewritten, but it works 98.8% identically to how it did in previous versions.  It's a bit faster but other than that there are no noticeable changes.

To be honest, Snow Leopard does feel like sort of a service pack for Leopard.  In fact, to an average user, the changes might be completely non-existant.  Things are a bit snappier and most of the animations look a lot better but otherwise there isn't much to say.  Here are the few features I've noticed and liked so far:

  • Improved Text-To Speech - I use the mac's text-to-speech to alert me of the time every half hour.  The new version is noticeably less robotic and overall sounds much better.
  • Animations - When flipping between spaces or opening a stack the animation is much more fluid and cooler-looking
  • All New Stacks - Stacks basically work like they should have worked from the beginning.  You can scroll through stacks, and most importantly you can navigate folders in stacks without having to open up the Finder
  • Selectively Snappier - Though I haven't noticed much of a boost in speed in all-around computing I do notice that the Finder, Spaces and Stacks respond much snappier in Snow Leopard
  • New Wallpapers
  • More HD Space - Freed up about 6GB of space after my upgrade, kind of negligible on a 500GB hard drive but it's better than losing space I suppose

So is Snow Leopard worth it?  Honestly, maybe not.  The changes aren't all that impressive to me yet.  Maybe over the next couple weeks I'll really begin to appreciate the new upgrade but right now it's a slight improvement at best.  I think this weekend I'm going to go ahead and do a fresh install and if that improves the experience at all I'll make sure to do a follow-up post.