snow leopard

silverpaddy

is snow leopard worth waiting for in terms of buying a new mac now or wait until later when it comes preinstalled with better spec as standard on system?

Ham'nd'egger

silverpaddy wrote: »

is snow leopard worth waiting for in terms of buying a new mac now or wait until later when it comes preinstalled with better spec as standard on system?

Snow Leopard is likely to be a few months away so I'd not hold off buying a new Mac on it's strength alone. From what Apple are saying, it's going to be more reliant on inner tweaks than new softwares so any improvements will be speed or power based than feature based . Traditionally, if you buy a Mac within a month of a new Apple OS being launched, they will give you an upgrade option for free or a nominal fee.

By the way, I don't think it will be rolled out with any machine getting better specs on the day so buy now if you want a new machine.

silverpaddy

thanks, i am afraid that snow leopard will conincide with a total overhaul of the imac, ie new quad processors etc, i dont think it will make any odds for a home user like me though?

Sad Professor

Yeah, always base your decision to buy on the hardware not the software. iMacs were only updated last month so now is a good time to buy. This next update could be next year. So if you are going to wait, wait for the iMac, don't wait because of Snow Leopard. It's not worth waiting to buy a €1000+ machine for the sake of a 130 euro.

silverpaddy

bought the 2.93ghz version with upgraded graphics card, hopefully that will do me....!

silvine

Don't mean to hijack the thread but are people here plannning on upgrading to Snow Leopard?

Considering it's no real new features, and the recesssionary times we live in..., it's going to be a hard sell.

Kid Nothing

i'd be interested but not if it's costing crazy money!

In the past how long after purchase have Apple offered the "upgrade for a nominal fee"?

silverpaddy

id say thats one of the reasons the release date is so hazy....i was worried the snow leopard release would coincide with a total overhaul of the imac, but i think based on what i can find out they dont plan on putting quad processors into imac on fear it will kill sales of the powermac, although i think snow loepard will rely more on the quad chips? i went ahead and ordered a imac with 2.93ghz with ati radeon gpu, the way i figured whatever i buy will be outdated in a month anyway, and i need a new mac now as my old g5 has seen better days!

Sad Professor

I'm really looking forward to Snow Leopard actually. Screw new features! Leopard was nice and all but there's a fine line between new features and bloat and Leopard crossed it imo. Optimisation and bug-fixes ftw!

Hopefully those fixes will include a truly unified UI, which was supposed to be included with Leopard before Apple's main priority (making phones) got in the way and they abandoned it. It hasn't shown up in any of the developer builds yet though so I'm not holding my breath. But they might be holding back on it. I reckon a new improved UI might be essential for selling an under the hood update like this.

silverpaddy

id imagine the os would cost 150euro or an upgrade pack for 99 or something? so that alone wouldnt sway me, its more what would coincide with its launch in terms of hardware....

kevteljeur

My understanding is that on 64 bit processors (Core2Duo) that there will be a noticeable speed increase for some operations, but generally the system will be 'smaller' (by removing the need for G4 and G5 processor compatibility) and have a smaller memory footprint. And more stable, with various needed improvements to the core system, probably made possible by removing legacy support for older APIs. The sort of stuff that's been missing in OS development for a long time (Interestingly, after the Vista debacle, Windows 7 is following a similar path; I've been told by former MS people that Vista was a stop-gap until they could get Windows 7 out the door, which also is a faster, leaner, more stable system than it's predecessor).

I read that this came about as a result of the iPhone OS development, since it's basically a very cut-down and much more efficient version of the Mac OS. They've just applied what they've learnt from the desktop.

So with Snow Leopard you'll only be able to run one app at a time, which will shutdown at random intervals, have one signature for all your email accounts, and you'll have to reset your Mac every couple of days for no discernable reason. And you'll use it by poking your screen.


I think though, that anyone who installs a newly releases OS on their Mac/PC, especially if it's a work system, is utterly mad. I wait half a year to buy Leopard, and then another 3 months before I installed. Great system... After the 4th update, once the really serious bugs and oversights had been fixed. No new system is better than an older, bedded-in system.

silverpaddy

any thoughts on the current imac lineup kat??