Mac Os X 10.6 Snow Leopard Update Download Updated

April 12, 2022 Post a Comment

Mac Os X 10.6 Snow Leopard Update Download

Sneaking in a few days before its promised September release, the tune-up for Mac Bone X Leopard costs $29 for current Leopard users, and packs just enough punch to be worth your coin. Apple is conscientious to betoken out that Snow Leopard isn't a complete organisation overhaul, but rather a collection of hundreds of smaller refinements to make Leopard run more gracefully. Hidden among smaller tweaks are some technical improvements that upshot in a smoother, easier-to-use Leopard with plenty for Mac fans to exist excited about. The user interface and everyday tasks feel faster in general, although we didn't discover a substantive improvement in application performance.

Even if you're non a current Leopard user, the $169 package that includes Snowfall Leopard, iLife, and iWork is a steal for the system upgrade and 2 of Apple's major software suites, not to mention the long-pined-after inclusion of Microsoft Substitution compatibility. Finally you will be able to connect with Substitution Servers (without using Microsoft's Entourage), but only if your visitor is using Microsoft Exchange 2007; many nonetheless aren't. Snow Leopard is offered on a single install disk--there are no separate, tiered pricing structures to worry about--and you lot're getting every feature and technical enhancement bachelor in a single install. Unfortunately, for those on PowerPC systems, Snowfall Leopard just works with Intel Macs.

Installation
Installation of Snowfall Leopard is dead uncomplicated and (according to Apple) up to 45 pct faster than Leopard using a newly designed installer that asks just one question during the process. On our exam machine, the procedure took nearly an 60 minutes, including ii automatic restarts. The default setting installs Snow Leopard without tampering with any of your saved files, music, photos, or documents. By and large we had no problems, but on one exam machine we needed to reinstall the OS when it had problem rebooting. Fortunately the new installer is designed for safely reinstalling the Bone in the event you lot encounter any hiccups during your initial installation. On our second try, the Bone installed perfectly on our exam machine and no files were harmed. PowerPC Macs are no longer supported with Snowfall Leopard, yet; yous will need an Intel-based Mac to install the latest Mac OS.

Those who desire to practice a "Clean Install" (starting fresh by deleting everything for minimal conflicts) still tin, but unlike installations in previous versions of previous Mac OS X that offered the make clean install every bit a primary selection, y'all'll need to use Deejay Utility to first erase the volume, and then run the install. Apple explained to us that non everyone knows what a make clean install is and frequently chose it, not knowing that they would lose their files. We're happy with that respond, as long every bit people still go the option in some grade.

Apple tree also claims that Snow Leopard uses 7GB less infinite than Leopard because of better file compression paired with selective driver inclusion. According to Apple, Snow Leopard will locate any missing drivers on the Web for you. We had no demand of any special drivers during our tests.

New technologies
Apple says a few new technologies in Snowfall Leopard brand it worthy of the upgrade alone, with several features that Apple says will heave functioning. Because all new Macs come up with 64-fleck multicore processors, multiple GBs of RAM, and high-powered graphics processing units, all the major applications in Snow Leopard--including the Finder--accept been rewritten in 64-bit to take full reward of the hardware. (The 64-bit engineering science allows application developers to classify more memory to complete tasks so that the software runs faster and more smoothly.)

Apple has likewise added what it calls the Thou Central Dispatch that manages data sent to multicore processors in an effort to maximize operation; Apple says the GCD will speed upward whatever application task, from processing images in Photoshop to playing your favorite games. The add-on of the GCD also takes away the need for software developers to spend every bit much time managing multicore processors.

Some other new technology in Snow Leopard is OpenCL, which allows software developers to tap into the power of any onboard video cards (or GPUs, for graphics processing units) for general-purpose computing without the add-on of enormous amounts of code. Like the GCD, these are improvements that volition mainly affect software developers. But hopefully it will hateful more and better-performing software for users in the future.

To put some of these claims to the examination, we decided to pit Mac Bone 10 10.5.8 Leopard against Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to see how these new technologies affected overall performance.

In our anecdotal tests of functioning inside the Snow Leopard user interface (UI), the operating system seems faster and more responsive than with Leopard. Finder, Stacks, Expose, launching apps, and other everyday processes feel snappy. Nosotros didn't, nevertheless, notice any comeback in awarding operation.

Overall, we saw only a ii.5 percent slowdown in application functioning from Leopard to Snowfall Leopard on our more processor-intensive performance tests, including our multimedia multitasking exam, in which we mensurate the time for QuickTime to finish converting a short movie while iTunes is performing its ain conversion of MP3 into AAC format in the background simultaneously. As this falls within our typical margin of fault (5 pct), we saw no significant divergence with application performance when moving from Leopard to Snowfall Leopard. (See the lesser of this review for functioning charts.)

New features

Expose
Snowfall Leopard includes a number of user UI improvements intended to make working with Mac Bone X easier and more than efficient. Betrayal, Apple's system for visually finding the window y'all want on a chaotic desktop, used to exist relegated to the Office keys on your keyboard. Snow Leopard at present makes Expose accessible from the Dock; just click and concord on a Dock icon to see thumbnails of all the open up windows in that awarding. Hitting the Tab key lets y'all cycle through the preview thumbnails of each open awarding. Using Betrayal in the Dock is very natural and elegant, making us wonder why this wasn't already a feature in Leopard.

Click and hold on an application icon in the Dock to bring upwardly total thumbnails of open windows in an application.

The Dock
In improver to using Expose to detect the correct window, you now as well have the power to drag files from one application to another using the Dock. Permit's say y'all desire to add an prototype to an e-mail, merely your desktop is full of open windows. In Snow Leopard yous can go to the prototype, elevate it to the Post icon in the Dock, and your electronic mail window will spring-load, allowing you to drop the image into place. Though the ability to elevate and drop files in this mode is nice, we're not sure it's much easier than attaching an image past browsing through your folders. Yet, if you know the image is already on your desktop, it'south probably the faster method.

Stacks
Stacks got a much-needed upgrade besides. In Leopard, Stacks only listed a sure number of files and applications requiring you lot to get to a Finder window if your app wasn't listed. Similarly, if you tried to open a folder in Stacks, you were sent to the Finder. In Snow Leopard, Stacks comes with a scroll bar so icons are notwithstanding easy to read and anything tin can be launched out of the Dock. Folders are now accessible within Stacks too, so you'll exist able to navigate to files within folders all without leaving the Stacks Window. These changes brand Stacks much more than useful than before and probably should have been available when Stacks was introduced.

Now you lot can scroll through your applications and documents (and fifty-fifty open up folders in Stacks) without existence sent to the Finder.

The Finder
While the Finder itself saw fiddling in the way of interface tweaks, the manner files behave in the Finder makes it easier to use. A zoom slider has been added to the lower right of Finder windows and then yous tin can zoom in on icons. An enhanced icon view has been added, letting you preview multipage documents and fifty-fifty play QuickTime movies without ever leaving the Finder window.

Preview at present lets you preview almost any file, even if information technology was created with software you don't have on your difficult drive. This ways common file types from Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and even PDF files can all exist previewed without owning the programs they were created in. As an added bonus, Preview in Snowfall Leopard provides accurate text selection to multicolumn PDF files using artificial intelligence to infer the layout of each page. This ways that Preview recognizes that in that location are multiple columns in your document and then you can select the text you desire from any column.

You tin can now flip through the pages of multipage PDF documents using the arrows that announced over PDF docs when you mouse over.

Safari 4
Safari 4 has been widely available for some time, but it offers a couple of new features when running in Snowfall Leopard. Safari 4 already includes Superlative Sites for viewing all your favorite sites as thumbnails for easy access and full history search, which lets y'all view your history in a Comprehend Flow-like interface. Only in Snow Leopard, Safari is now crash resistant. This means that if a plug-in crashes, it won't crash the whole browser. Simply refresh the page to try to load the plug-in again. Also, Safari checks to see if a site you are visiting is known to exist fraudulent, is distributing malware, or is known to be a phishing site, so warns yous if it is.

Superlative Sites, which was already available in Safari 4, lets y'all navigate to your most viewed Web sites quickly.

QuickTime X
QuickTime X, Apple'due south media player, got some major tweaks in Snow Leopard. Now, when you play a movie and move your mouse outside the window, the interface fades away quickly to give yous a more immersive video-viewing experience. When watching a moving picture, you lot can click the new Share push to convert your movie for iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV, and QuickTime converts the video to work all-time on your chosen device. You as well can now tape video from your Webcam, audio, or only the activity on your screen with a few clicks. Those with the iPhone 3GS will recognize the new trimming characteristic in QuickTime X, letting you grab just the video content you want.

QuickTime 10 probably received the most interface tweaks in the Snowfall Leopard update. The cleaned-upwardly interface and autofade features await great (like most things Apple), but it's more of an aesthetic improvement than anything else. The recording features for video, sound, and screencast capturing are the big wins here and used to exist offered simply in QuickTime Pro. It'south adept to see these features will be able to exist used by a wider audience in Snow Leopard.

Trim your videos easily by clicking and dragging starting time and end points of the clip.

Substitution support
One of the main roadblocks for Mac users in a primarily Windows workplace was the disability to connect with Microsoft Exchange servers. Near Mac users used Microsoft Entourage or available open up-source options every bit a work-around, just it was never every bit smooth as connecting from a Windows machine with Microsoft Role. Snow Leopard now supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 out of the box then you tin can easily connect using Apple tree'southward Mail app, catch global address lists in the Address Book, and create meetings with contacts using iCal.

Apple did more than simply give you the ability to connect, still. Common tasks like creating meetings, for example, are incredibly easy with intuitive controls. iCal lets you view work events and personal activities all in the same window (with easy controls to include or not include the information you want). The Apple Address Volume works seamlessly beyond Post and iCal so you tin apace bring up global address lists, add people to a meeting (including predesigned groups), and invitations will automatically be sent to each attendee. As an added bonus, if some attendees accept scheduling conflicts with your proposed meeting time, iCal will automatically figure out the earliest available time that everyone is free. These are features already available in Microsoft's Outlook for Windows, but in Snow Leopard the process feels much more intuitive.

File Quarantine
Co-ordinate to Apple, File Quarantine has besides been refined in Snowfall Leopard. First introduced in Mac OS 10 10.four Tiger, File Quarantine checks for known malware signatures, and in Snow Leopard, will at present display an alarm dialog if it finds a known offender. The dialog volition tell users to move the offending file to the Trash. For example, a bogus version of iWork circulated on the Spider web a few months agone that independent malware. That item malware is now automatically detected past File Quarantine in Snowfall Leopard.

Apple says that File Quarantine will be automatically updated via Mac Bone X'southward software update as new malware signatures are establish in the wild. We had no mode to examination these features, but we are happy to see that Apple is taking strides to defend against malware every bit more than people switch to Macs and the danger of new malware becomes more than prevalent.

Universal admission
Beginning with Mac Os X x.iv Tiger, Apple included VoiceOver to help people who are blind or with impaired vision to better understand and interact with what is happening onscreen. Apple continues to help visually dumb users in Snow Leopard by adding gesture support on multitouch trackpads with easy-to-learn gestures to perform specific functions. We had mixed results with these features depending on the Spider web page we visited, but more often than not nosotros establish the features to exist useful. The trackpad acts equally the viewable area on the current window so you tin tap to have Window elements explained to you lot or swipe to movement on to the next item in the window, for example. New features in Snow Leopard are particularly helpful when Web browsing, with options like Web page summaries to explain the various elements on a Web folio yous haven't visited before, making it easier to get the information you want.

More 40 dissimilar Braille displays (including wireless Bluetooth displays) are supported in Snow Leopard right out of the box, assuasive visually impaired users to plug in and kickoff computing immediately.

Other refinements
Some of the smaller refinements in Snow Leopard are worthy of note, affecting many of Apple'south core apps. iChat is now uniform with more than routers, making video conversation accessible to a wider range of users, and iChat Theater at present offers 640x480 resolution, using only one-tertiary the bandwidth it used before. New Chinese graphic symbol input via the trackpad predicts which characters you're creating and offers likely subsequent characters to speed up the procedure. A new text commutation characteristic in applications like iChat, Postal service, and TextEdit lets you lot create shortcuts for phrases y'all use oftentimes. The Services menu in Snow Leopard has been rewritten to include only the services relevant to the application or content y'all're viewing. Core Location engineering locates nearby Wi-Fi hot spots to notice your location and automatically resets your time zone so wherever you are in the world, your Mac volition be set to the correct time. While all of these are small refinements, each make your Mac easier to employ with smart features not constitute in other operating systems.

Conclusions
Mac Bone X 10.half dozen Snow Leopard is not a complete system overhaul and is instead a refinement of the current Leopard Bone--some have gone so far as to call it a "service pack." Nosotros call back the interface tweaks to Betrayal, Stacks, the Finder, Mail service, and iCal brand Snow Leopard more than than just a service pack and worthy of the $29 upgrade price. We don't like that PowerPC users are unable to use Snowfall Leopard, but we understand that after three years with Intel, Apple is making a determination to go on moving forward with this technology.

The largest of the feature enhancements are probably reason enough for Intel Mac users to spend the money on Snow Leopard. Added enhancements such every bit video, audio, and screen recording in QuickTime X were once only available to those who purchased QuickTime Pro (which was virtually $30--the same every bit this system upgrade). Just the killer characteristic addition for Snow Leopard might be Exchange back up out of the box--not fifty-fifty Windows seven comes with Microsoft Exchange support without buying Microsoft Office.

Overall, we think that Snow Leopard did near everything Apple tree says it set out to practice: it refined and enhanced Leopard to make information technology easier to utilize. Though the system performs well in everyday utilize, many of our tests point it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more intensive application processes. Nonetheless, we highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Substitution support.

iTunes encoding (in seconds)
(Shorter bars signal better operation)

Photoshop (in seconds)
(Shorter bars point better performance)

QuickTime multimedia multitasking test (QT7 on 10.5.8 and QTX on ten.vi) (in seconds)
(Shorter confined indicate better operation)

iTunes multimedia multitasking test (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Cinebench
(Longer bars indicate amend operation)

System configurations:

Unibody Apple Macbook Pro / Core 2 Duo 15.4-inch
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; 320GB Hitachi 5,400rpm

Apple MacBook Pro / Core Duo xv.4-inch
Intel Core Duo ii.0GHz; 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB ATI Radion 1600, 100GB Toshiba v,400rpm