It wasn’t mentioned on the 10 o’clock news. It barely got a mention in the newspapers. Many non-Apple interest web sites didn’t mention it. When I went to the flagship Apple Store in Regents Street on Friday lunch time, there weren’t queues round the block (though there were a few inside). It seems that Apple have managed to launch a new product without all the usual fuss.

However, I am sure that everyone who reads this article will know that Snow Leopard is the update to Mac OS X that was released last week. Obviously as a keen Mac user, I did go and buy it on the day it launched and I did install it on my MacBook over the weekend but was it worth the £25 I paid for it?

Before answering that question, what did I get for my £25? Apart from a DVD in a box not much to mention. Having spent an hour watching it installing I did notice a number of differences. Firstly, the upgrade liberated 9GB of space on my hard drive. In these days of terabyte hard drives that is not much – but to me with a MacBook Air with an 80GB hard drive that doubled my free space. Secondly, it does do various things more quickly. I did not use a stopwatch to do ‘before’ and ‘after’ timings but I have noticed that many of the standard applications are more responsive and the machine is quicker to wake from sleep. The Time Machine backup system does seem to be a lot faster. Thirdly there are a number of places where the interface has been tidied up. A few of the displays are neater and present information in a better way.

Some fuss has been made of changes ‘under the bonnet’. The main change that will get people chattering is that Snow Leopard is a 64-bit operating system – kind of. On every Mac (except for an Xserve), Snow Leopard boots a 32-bit kernel which can run 32 and 64-bit applications. If you want to boot your Mac into 64-bit mode then you can hold down the 6 and 4 keys at boot time to see what happens. If you have any third party drivers that are not 64-bit compatible then you may have some problems. Apple have shipped all but three of the standard applications as 64-bit versions but you will have to wait for other vendors to catch up. There does seem to be some speed advantages in running 64-bit applications – it is claimed that Safari is twice as fast in one benchmark – so may be some of the speed differences I have seen have come from 64-bit applications.

In terms of compatibility problems, I had one problem which was with the software for my Vodafone 3G dongle. Bizarrely I found the most recent software from Vodafone UK did not work but a slightly older version which was mentioned here did work. One other application (Chicken of the VNC) seems slightly more fragile than usual but everything else is fine.

Other changes such as Exchange support and improved QuickTime have not affected me as I don’t use Exchange at work (we use Google Apps) and the only time I use the QuickTime application is when someone says it has changed and I have a look at it. As such, I had a look at it this time and it has changed.

Snow Leopard really is a stepping stone from Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.7. All the internal changes for a 64-bit system are to tell everyone that the next version is going to be 64-bit only. Certain new APIs are only available to 64-bit applications and Apple has said strongly to developers with this version that ‘we have done it and therefore you should’.

So was it worth £25? Yes – for me the speed improvements and the freeing up of disk space. In Windows terminology it is more than a Service Pack (which are free upgrades) and more like an ‘R2′ release (like Windows Server 2003 R2) which are not free. For PC users, it is a bit of side show before the main event.

Update: 4th September 2009

I just thought I would add a quick update to this post. Firstly, I have had no problems with the upgrade over the last four days. There was other thing that did not work (the GPGMail plugin and the author has said he can’t fix it which is a shame).

Secondly, thanks for the comments. I do agree with most of them as they agree with me! On disk space, it turns out that some disk space was reclaimed by leaving out old PowerPC code — Snow Leopard is Intel only. As for the printer drivers, it has not affected me and I don’t understand the policy of the printer manufacturers. A very old LaserJet 5 in my office is supported and by the sound of it, a relatively new Deskjet is not — though it might be with drivers from 10.5. On the other hand, it seems it can be cheaper to buy a new ink jet printer than cartridges for an old one!

Thirdly there was a lot of tweaks I did not mention and some of them do grow on you. It is also worthy of note that apart from the Microsoft Exchange improvements there are better links to Google Apps for Address Book and Calendars.