- Image by Watchcaddy via Flickr
At the behest of my art director, I ran out last Sunday and picked up Apple’s new operating system OSX 10.6—better known as Snow Leopard. Sure, I couldn’t figure out exactly what was being upgraded, but at $30, who was I to complain. Steve Jobs promised awesomeness, and dammit, I wanted to bask in it.
Apple is touting Snow Leopard for its behind-the-scenes improvements and admits that there aren’t too many forward-facing changes. Besides the new opaque tool bar and a couple of desktop photos of snow leopards, all the new bells and whistles are internal.Besides Exchange support (which I don’t need) and speedier processing (which I don’t notice), the biggest change is that hard drives now register the “real” drive space. Gone are the days of installing 500GB hard drives, just to discover that you only have 460GB of actual space. All hard drives attached to the system, including my DROBO and Time Machine, are registering the true drive size. Other than that, I can’t find much of a difference between OSX 10.5 and 10.6.
Except for the pain in that rump glitches that seem to accompany any OS upgrade. Here are the few big and little issues I’ve come across:
- Little Snitch disappeared all together, and I had to launch it manually to find out that there was an update available—easy fix.
- Lightscribe burned a coaster for me with a giant black box instead of my client’s name and info. I still can’t find an update for that—FAIL
- Rivet turned blue and started acting quirky. I found an update and it’s now working fine—easy fix.
- Parallels needed a major upgrade and for some reason I can’t get files on OSX to open up in Windows programs by just right clicking on them any more—FAIL
- MobileMe/iSync is my biggest problem. Since the upgrade all my files are just spinning aimlessly. I can’t sync my three Macs with the cloud, which means that I can’t get files to clients as easily as I used to. The problem seems to be effecting bigger files more than smaller ones, but one big file can back up everything. I have no idea what’s going on—EPIC FAIL
I tried rolling back to 10.5, but couldn’t figure out how. In the meantime, I’m just going to pray an update comes out soon. Applecare phone support blows, so I’m going to take my chances on figuring it out myself. Anyone else have any problems?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=16881f41-babd-4c06-b20f-2125fbc8b5a4)
3 comments
Not only is my recent copy of Parallels (less than one year old) now non-functional with the Snow Leopard upgrade but I also had printer problems – now solved. But, my biggest gripe is my copy of iWork does not work with this upgrade. Now all my documents made with Pages are inaccessible to me unless I copy them to to a machine running the earlier OS. Oddly enough, my much older copy of Appleworks (1999) DOES WORK in Snow Leopard. Go figure.
Of course I can always go out and buy a copy of the most recent iWork, but I now stubbornly refuse to do that – especially when there are several free apps out there which do nearly the same thing. Sure seems like Apple is going down the same path that Microsoft followed – making their own software obselete with their new operating systems. That’s a huge, huge mistake IMO. I for one won’t go for that – I am even thinking of going back to a PC. Shame on you Apple!
Well, IPhoto loads every startup because there is a compatibility glitch between Snow Leopard and IPhoto V 6.0.6. I spent about 2 hours on the phone with Applecare before the Senior Technical Advisor determined that was an issue (for something as common as this, why did it take 2 hours to figure it out). So far, today I have spent over an hour on the phone with Applecare because Safari is not working properly. If I just type in the name of the web site and press enter, after about 30 seconds it says that site could not be found. The only way it will find it is to type http://www.___.com (which has NEVER been the case). This and the Internet runs VERY slowly and it never did before. When I went from Tiger to Leopard it was AWEFUL. You would think I would have learned my lesson and waited, but nooooo, I had to put it in and deal with a horrible time AGAIN.
I am about to become a former Apple fan and return to my Dell laptop running Windows.
Snow Leopard has been a pain. The new OS is a step backward not forward. They have changed the access to your network serves, more steps. Then today, find out I can’t take a screen capture of video from a DVD. I need to do that for my job to make storyboards. Oh yeah, you can no longer use Adobe PDF printer in print dialogue box. I don’t understand why they have removed so much functionality. I have only had it for a week and wished I never upgraded. Snow Leopard is putting a bad taste in my mouth for Apple.