Snow Leopard - Aug 28th - £25 each

[FN-GM]

Reinstall OS X and you will be good to go with it

[mac_shinobi]

Thanks to Apple's nasty hardware/vendor lock-in, you're now forced to upgrade hardware, which means giving them more money. Sucks

 

I guess its one buisness model to make more money - not sure how microsoft or any other company do it.

 

Microsoft used to do it with high prices to purchase the license for the OS - I remember seeing Microsoft XP Professional that used to cost around if not higher then the £200 mark where as OS X new in the box used to be about £90 but then most of the time people purchase the hardware and get the Full OS installation disc with the hardware

[mac_shinobi]

is it possible to do a full clean install with the snow leopard disc without the need of leopard being installed or if i want a smooth transition will i need to backup data, re install, update using software updater back to 10.5.8 using disk util to repair perms before and after each update and then upgrade to snow leopard ?

[jamesmay]

Its being reported that a clean install can be done with the £25 disk and this can even be done on the pre leopard intel systems. The box set just brings ilife and iwork up to date and makes them more compatible/streamlined with SL. Lets hope AD OD doesn't get broken and there is a cheap option to upgrade a whole rooms worth...

 

http://lifehacker.com/5345690/prep-your-mac-for-snow-leopard

[GrumbleDook]

It was a pain when Apple put the CPU speed restriction on the installer for Leopard so that you had to have a certain amount of processing power to run the OS ... but my iMac DVSE is still very happy with Leopard.

 

Not too bothered about snow leopard being Intel only ... it is one of those things that is down to a change in architecture ... and someone finally saying it is time to make a sacrifice on your old hardware. The fact that the old hardware also runs Linux fine too gives you other options as well as MacOS.

 

I've got a family pack to upgrade our home machines and planning a new work machine soon anyway so it will be tri-boot. I did have the email earlier today to sat it had shipped and due on Saturday.

[DMcCoy]

No so helpful for servers less than 4 years old though. They were happily selling G5 servers well into 2006. I had no choice as Intel ones didn't exist.

[torledo]

No so helpful for servers less than 4 years old though. They were happily selling G5 servers well into 2006. I had no choice as Intel ones didn't exist.

 

i agree. We've got an xserve G5, and does what it's supposed to do well enough. The idea of 'upgrading' to an intel xserve for several thousand pounds doesn't to me represent terrific value for money, not when there's as yet not a supported enterprise grade virtualization solution such as esx for the apple servers. Whether many xserve users really want that or actually prefer the idea of being able to do that i don't know, but i am loathed to upgrade from the G5 just to be able to run snow leopard

[jamin100]

Got my copy yesterday.

 

You can do a clean install on any hard drive with the DVD.

So in theory you dont need leopard to install the this.

 

The DVD will start to upgrade the OS but if you use disk utility you can erase the disk and do a clean install from the DVD.

 

Its running pretty well at the moment, Startup / shutdown seems faster. Stacks & Expose are much better and it takes up a lot less space.

 

Worth the upgrade ?

 

. . . . maybe, depends on what you do with your mac

[mac_shinobi]

Got my copy yesterday.

 

You can do a clean install on any hard drive with the DVD.

So in theory you dont need leopard to install the this.

 

The DVD will start to upgrade the OS but if you use disk utility you can erase the disk and do a clean install from the DVD.

 

Its running pretty well at the moment, Startup / shutdown seems faster. Stacks & Expose are much better and it takes up a lot less space.

 

Worth the upgrade ?

 

. . . . maybe, depends on what you do with your mac

 

still waiting for mine in the post - with regards to installing fresh / clean install do you just insert the snow leopard upgrade disc and boot from it and use the disk util to erase the main drive and then just install it or do you use the leopard disc to erase the hard drive and then swap the leopard disc for the snow leopard disc to install it fresh or what exactly ?

 

Also is quicktime just quicktime ( no pro version ) ??

 

Is there anyway of finding out what codecs were included in snow leopard ?

[markcuk]

im happy hard drive space went from 24gb to 46gb after installation very impressed with that:D

[jamin100]

You can do it all from the snow leopard dvd. Its basically the same process as the old leopard dvd.

 

Regards to quicktime I don't think its the pro version. But if you already have a key for pro then it will upgrade quicktime (or so I'm told)

[Sylv3r]

Shame its the bank holiday... I'll just have to wait that little bit longer for my pre-ordered copy to arrive

[GrumbleDook]

Got the family pack this morning and installed on 3 of our 4 macs that will take it (the iMac DVSE can't handle it as mentioned earlier) but leaving the final one as it my wife's desktop (Mac Mini) and there are reported issues with SMART Notebook, which she uses a heck of a lot.

 

Apple do have a list of software that has compatibilty problems but I would be interested to hear of any more edu apps or open source apps that may have issues.

[DanW]

Gonna nip down to Sheffield tomorrow and get 4 copies for the Macs in our office

 

Was going to go down today but been fixing server issues.

[Haptic]

makes interesting reading guys

 

Snow Leopard security - The good, the bad and the missing ? The Register

 

Snow Leopard arrives with meow, not a roar

[mac_shinobi]

makes interesting reading guys

 

Snow Leopard security - The good, the bad and the missing ? The Register

 

Snow Leopard arrives with meow, not a roar

 

Paragraph snippet taken from the 2nd link

 

And her son was the first person in the line, having arrived at 8:00am - 12-year-old Liam Stewart, Mac enthusiast, Java coder, and a fanboi who is an actual fan boy. "I have Vista in a partition on my Mac," he told us, "and I hate it. It crashes all the time, I get blue screens of death, and the start-up times are ridiculous."

 

Is that one of vista's ways of protecting it from viruses, it randomly keeps crashing so viruses don't have a chance to install or will give you ye old fashioned blue screen of death

 

Im guessing windows 7 is really vista release canidate 2 ?

 

Yes I do agree they could of included that - fingers crossed they release it as a software update once they are happy its working ( can but hope )

 

Also am a bit narked they didn't include ZFS support - maybe later on

[Michael]

It would be interesting to get some Snow Leopard and Windows 7 comparisons. Not quite sure how Apple can say it's the best OS in the world. The word 'Best' is such a generic term. Do they mean the available features, the stability, the price, the number of copies sold? Ok maybe not the latter, but still the competition is good.

 

I genuinely believe if Apple removed the restriction of Apple only hardware it would shift many more copies than it does today.

[DMcCoy]

Is that one of vista's ways of protecting it from viruses, it randomly keeps crashing so viruses don't have a chance to install or will give you ye old fashioned blue screen of death

 

Yes I do agree they could of included that - fingers crossed they release it as a software update once they are happy its working ( can but hope )

 

Also am a bit narked they didn't include ZFS support - maybe later on

 

Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 do not randomly crash. I have had blue screens from bad RAM, bad HDDs and occasionally the odd badly behaved driver. What people mean when they say it crashes all the time is that they have downloaded "things" from the internet and are unable to fix windows.

 

Apples crash, more than XP in my experience, despite having a tightly controlled hardware range and no issues with random drivers. Occasionally I even get to see the grey kernel panic screen.

 

As for the security, I wouldn't hold your breath. Apple just don't care about it. And ZFS is missing because it's not by Apple, and Apple don't like "not Apple" technology.

 

 

And while I do like some Apple stuff (I certainly have enough of it here), I do not like their upgrade policy. Those still on 10.5 (god forbid 10.4!) will be outcasts no longer getting any reasonable level of support or the latest release of applications. All this despite using an OS little more than 2 years old.

 

It's not as if each version is even very new, all it contains is a list of things that should have been fixed in one of the many point(less) releases of the last version. All Apple do is save them up and sell them to you again to fix something that wasn't working in the first place.

[kingswood]

Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 do not randomly crash. I have had blue screens from bad RAM, bad HDDs and occasionally the odd badly behaved driver. What people mean when they say it crashes all the time is that they have downloaded "things" from the internet and are unable to fix windows.

 

Apples crash, more than XP in my experience, despite having a tightly controlled hardware range and no issues with random drivers. Occasionally I even get to see the grey kernel panic screen.

 

As for the security, I wouldn't hold your breath. Apple just don't care about it. And ZFS is missing because it's not by Apple, and Apple don't like "not Apple" technology.

 

 

And while I do like some Apple stuff (I certainly have enough of it here), I do not like their upgrade policy. Those still on 10.5 (god forbid 10.4!) will be outcasts no longer getting any reasonable level of support or the latest release of applications. All this despite using an OS little more than 2 years old.

 

It's not as if each version is even very new, all it contains is a list of things that should have been fixed in one of the many point(less) releases of the last version. All Apple do is save them up and sell them to you again to fix something that wasn't working in the first place.

 

No problems with Windows 7 here either- it's a very good update to Vista.

 

Apple computers crashing more than Windows XP? You did say "in your experience" so that might be the case. But I wouldn't be able to count on one hand XP "crashing" (if by that you mean a BSOD) on one of my VMs, netbook or other PC at home in the last two years. And neither has OS X (I have had one kernel panic in that time, but that was my fault and quickly rectified). Operating systems across the board are getting pretty solid these days.

 

Apple don't care about security? I don't agree. It should be obvious that they do by even a cursory glance at their OS. They may not have the same security priorities as a Windows-based approach *right now*, but there are signs that things may change as the OS becomes more popular.

 

ZFS is *not* missing because it isn't made by Apple. There were issues with ZFS and builds of Snow Leopard that caused problems (disk utility being one of them). Google it and you will find the information.

 

Snow Leopard sets the stage for Apple's 64-bit kernel implementation by default some time in the future. In the meantime OS X can utilise 64-bit applications and SL has cleaned up and in many cases improved on Leopard's great foundation. That's not sales pitch- they don't pay me. The same as I think Windows 7 is Vista "done right". A very stable, fast, and effective implementation of Windows that will prove extremely popular. I like it and run Windows 7 on everything from VMs to a gaming system.

 

A lot of your post was highly subjective (just like mine) and at the end of the day people will buy whatever suits their career/gaming/personal/creative/whatever needs. And it's good to have so much choice!!

 

Paul

Edited August 31, 2009 by kingswood
typo

[DMcCoy]

Apple don't care about security? I don't agree. It should be obvious that they do by even a cursory glance at their OS. They may not have the same security priorities as a Windows-based approach *right now*, but there are signs that things may change as the OS becomes more popular.

 

Apple haven't designed security, they have simply inherited it due to pinching a unix base for it's kernel. Exactly how long was it for that Java patch to turn up?

[mac_shinobi]

Windows 7 is what microsoft should of released as Vista release Canidate 2 but microsoft still naffed up windows vista just like they did with windows millenium yet they are charging I think about £100 for it where as Snow Leopard is only £25 and although its an upgrade disc you can still do a full install using the upgrade disc which is what I did.

 

I was dis appointed about zfs not being released but am guessing that was down to stability of the OS when they tried to combine zfs with there OS so for the time being must of left it out.

 

Security wise I think both MS and apple are a bit slow with updates as I have seen a few programmers blogs where they have made modified versions of dll's and other windows items to combat security holes - thats not to say that now that apple is becoming more and more popular that its 100% effective against security holes but as per here

 

A lot of your post was highly subjective (just like mine) and at the end of the day people will buy whatever suits their career/gaming/personal/creative/whatever needs. And it's good to have so much choice!!

 

 

Apple computers crashing more than Windows XP? You did say "in your experience" so that might be the case. But I wouldn't be able to count on one hand XP "crashing" (if by that you mean a BSOD) on one of my VMs, netbook or other PC at home in the last two years. And neither has OS X (I have had one kernel panic in that time, but that was my fault and quickly rectified). Operating systems across the board are getting pretty solid these days.

 

 

On my old ( now sold ) PowerBook G4 that I had, I only had 2 kernel panics versus more then I can count on my fingers and toes that windows xp has had ( yes one on the powerbook was my fault and I fixed that easily enough and a couple on xp were my fault but again fixed easily enough )

 

There was an article that was posted on edugeek about how vista randomly loads the OS into different memory space where as OS X does not do that - am not sure if that makes it more secure or not.

Edited September 1, 2009 by mac_shinobi

[ZeroHour]

I hate to say it but for £25 you get NO NEW FEATURES (Apples own words) so you ARE buying a service pack people where as 7 is a new release WITH new features.

[mac_shinobi]

I hate to say it but for £25 you get NO NEW FEATURES (Apples own words) so you ARE buying a service pack people where as 7 is a new release WITH new features.

 

Service Pack I hear you say ?

 

Sorry but I don't recall apple or even Microsoft ( shock oh horror ) releasing a 64 bit version of there operating system as a service pack or even for free

 

If you had 32 bit version of windows 7 and wanted to go 64 bit you would either have to purchase an upgrade disc ( should one exist - not sure if it does or not ) or re purchase the full version of windows 7 that is 64 bit and last time I checked I'm sure it was still more then £25.

 

Before I purchased it I knew it wasn't about features it was about the inner workings ie going from 32 bit to 64 bit, yes they updated quicktime and added one or two minor things and ok the anti maleware thing wasn't brilliant as its only against 2 malwares

 

At the end of the day it was my money to spend that I earnt and I spent it on snow leopard and it wasnt exactly bank breaking.

 

Windows with new features ? I'm sure OS X has had the expose thing for a long time so maybe new for windows but not exactly new for OS X

 

Not starting a flame war but just the truth.

 

Windows 7 is still good in its own way and the expose thing that windows 7 does with web browser ( not sure if its just for internet explorer or if it works for firefox as well ) but allowing you to expose the tabbed windows is good.

Edited September 1, 2009 by mac_shinobi

[GrumbleDook]

It's an R2. Feature change is small, UI change is small, core code change is significant but more due to what it removes and tidies rather than what it adds in as extra. The cost is sort of about right for the improvements it gives but not cheap enough to say that it is worth *everyone* to go for it. There are still things that need addressing within the UI and within integration / interoperabilty ... and I can see more areas being dropped or locked out rather than opened up.

 

The next significant changes will be a cross between hardware changes and code to make us of it. You will find more 'add-on' hardware for devices that will be branded Apple over the coming years (control your TV / stereo / curtains / lights / etc). I am waiting for the first build of Windows 7 to make it to an AppleTV (hardware changes are required IIRC) and see how that goes.

 

The proposed tablet or other multi-touch device could be an interesting move too ... but it still needs the killer app to go with it. Even if we think of Minority Report style systems ... still not a real need yet.

[FN-GM]

I hate to say it but for £25 you get NO NEW FEATURES (Apples own words) so you ARE buying a service pack people where as 7 is a new release WITH new features.

 

He is right...