I say almost, because there was still some noticeable frame dropping. But still, I could actually watch HD flash video (windowed and full-screen) without it stuttering like a slideshow. One issue with YouTube: the CPU pretty much went into overload once the video was playing, and on the third viewing I had to Force Quit Firefox to wrestle back control.

But this is good news for hackintoshes, and netbooks in general. This is not hardware GPU acceleration (limited to Windows right now), it just seems to be better CPU usage. Earlier today I also posted about AnandTech's Flash 10.1 CPU-utilization tests: they still noticed improvements under OS X, too. If you've given Flash 10.1 a try, post a comment here so other readers can see what sort of netbook you have, and if it's worth trying.

For the record, my MSI Wind U100 has 2GB of memory, a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, and integrated Intel 945 graphics. (Pic above is of the Dell Mini 9).

All of Psystar's motions for summary judgment were denied, while all of Apple's were granted. That means that Apple got exactly what they wanted, while Psystar got exactly what they didn't want.

Don't worry, there will be a trial. According to Groklaw, the court still needs to determine (*deep breath*):

Apple's allegations of breach of contract; induced breach of contract, trademark infringement; trademark dilution; trade dress infringement; and state unfair competition under California Business and Professions Code § 17200; and common law unfair competition.

Phew! So yeah, at this point it's looking less like a trial to determine Psystar's legitimacy, more like a trial to decide how much they owe Apple.

Now, I'm no lawyer, but from where I'm standing this case is looking pretty grim for Psystar. I'll leave it to you legal eagles to explain exactly what all this means in the comments, because all I know is that it can't be good. [Groklaw via 9 to 5 Mac, image via walknboston]

A post on the Windows Blog entitled " How we really designed the look and feel of Windows 7" renounces Simon's quotes with a curt, yet harsh line:

I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed.

Youch. That's gonna be a fun day at work tomorrow for ya, Simon. [Windows Blog]

Update: There appears to be some confusion regarding which sort of Hackintosh set up is affected by 10.6.2. If you are running something other than an Intel Atom-based netbook, you should be just fine, it's those relying on Atom-support who are in trouble with this one. [OS X Daily]

The video above shows what happens if you try to boot the latest 10.6.2 developer build on a Hackintosh. As you can see, not much. So if you're running OS X on Atom hardware, hold off on any updates until this whole mess gets sorted out. [OS X Daily]

The hidden tweaks are a mix of features that didn't quite make the final cut or were deemed too slight to deserve their own tick-box, and deep system changes that normally call for terrifying terminal commands. And they don't stop at Snow Leopard: Secrets, which has been around in one form or another for a while now, has collected a huge library of "gray" settings for other apps too, from Apple's various software suites to civilian apps like Skype and NetNewsWire. The app is free, and installs as a PrefPane. [Secrets via TUAW]

You can download the Orb application right here. You'll have to look for porn to stream on your own. [Orb via Engadget]

While CrunchGear was able to get Rebel EFI working, it is important to point out that we tried several times get the software up and running with no success on the same exact computer. Then we got this email from a frustrated reader:

2 weeks ago, I purchased Psystar's RebelEFI software. While I own several Macs, I also have a fairly new PC with a Core 2 Duo and Intel motherboard that I thought would be a perfect specimen.

Before I purchased the software, I downloaded the trial version of RebelEFI. Sure enough, I was able to boot and install OS X 10.6. I installed the RebelEFI utility in OS X and because it was a trial, the hardware compatibility feature was disabled. (Why this feature would be disabled in a trial version?) I called Psystar with several questions and asked what would happen if some of my hardware was not compatible? The sales person told me that they would be able to access the software's hardware compatibility list and be able to supply me with drivers for the incompatible hardware.

I purchased the software and ran the hardware compatibility test. It showed me lack of compatibility for my video, audio and USB 2.0, however there was no way to send them the results of this test. When I questioned this, I sent Psystar a tech support ticket through the software's Customer Support feature. I was told in a reply that I would have to fill out a DCR form. I asked what a DCR form is and where I could find it. (They assumed I would automatically know this information).

After not hearing anything for a week, I tried calling Customer Support and was greeted with a message that support is only handled via email. I again asked the same question via email and 3 days later I received a PDF file in response. It basically says I have to send Psystar my computer for them to make it completely compatible. WHAT???? At no point during the purchase was I told I may have to send them my computer. I am now in the process of trying to get my money back.

Mac OS X on any computer? FAIL

Send your computer to a shady hackintosh company that refuses to accept any responsibility for devices shipped to their lab? Yeah...I don't think so. But here's the proof (click and select "Full Size" to enlarge):

As the days have worn on, Psystar's response to this customer's issue has deteriorated to the point that they are no longer responding to his attempts to email for a refund. In fact, they stopped taking customer-support calls entirely, and have switched to a far less personal (and helpful) email-based help program.

In other words, a $50 solution to run OS X on a PC sounded too good to be true, and it looks like it is. So, I'm inclined to go with a flat out DO NOT BUY on this one. However, let me put the question to you—have you purchased this software? Did you experience a similar problem? [Thanks Brian!]

Like Fusion, Parallels supports OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0 for the full Aero 3D interface and 7x better graphics performance than before. It also has a migration tool to move a PC's info to your virtual machine. Overall performance-wise, it's three times faster than before, supports 8 virtual CPUs and automatically pauses the virtual machine whenever no Windows apps are running. Update: The Parallels guys point out that Fusion supports OpenGL 2.1 just in XP, but only 1.4 in Vista and Windows 7, while Parallels supports 2.1 in every version, which they say means games will run better in Parallels. We'll definitely be checking that out.

The new Crystal mode promises to make "Windows completely disappear" so apps run feel completely native, with full support for multitouch trackpad gestures and the Apple Remote, with a persistent Windows apps folder in the Dock. Parallels 5 is out today for $80 for the full version or $50 for the upgrade, though we don't blame you if you can't tell it apart from Fusion 3, so we'll be checking them out head to head soon. [Parallels]

The current recommendation is to stick with 10.6.1 if you're running Snow Leopard, or 10.5.8 if your Hackintosh has Leopard. You could also try upgrading to 10.6.2 using an older or modified kernel.

If this is a conscious strike by Apple, it's likely the Hackintosh community will find a work around, but it's definitely something to watch before your next update. [OS X Daily]

Before you answer the poll, keep this in mind: work machines don't count. Presumably, you made a personal choice between a Mac or a PC for your private computer—and that is the one we want to know about.

It now supports OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0, giving you some more graphics powah in Windows, so you can run Windows' Aero interface with Flip3D (and play games, if you're daring). The more integrated Windows apps respond to commands like cmd+q and yes, work with Dock Expose. It's $80 for a fresh copy or $40 for an upgrade. [VMWare via AppleInsider]

A message on MacOS Forge tersely states,

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

There have been multiple explanations as to why Apple dropped ZFS support in Snow Leopard, and now there's more speculation to add into the mix. This time the story goes that when Oracle bought Sun, Oracle didn't want continue development on ZFS because they already had their own filesystem (BTRFS) in the oven.

ZFS was also apparently facing patent suits at the time. It all sounds like a complicated legal and political mess, which is probably why Apple just dropped it.

Whatever the true causes behind ZFS' sudden fall from grace may be, it's disappointing that we'll have to wait longer for a true filesystem upgrade in OS X. [AppleInsider]

You can actually download a trial version yourself before you hand over your $50. Keep in mind that you'll need to have a machine with one of these processors in order for this to work: Intel Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, i7 or Xeon Nehalem. We haven't tested Rebel EFI, so we can't say how well it works. Let us know if you've had luck with it. [Psystar via LoopInSight]

Among other disclosures, an operating system presents one or more advertisements to a user and disables one or more functions while the advertisement is being presented. At the end of the advertisement, the operating system again enables the function(s). The advertisement can be visual or audible. The presentation of the advertisement(s) can be made as part of an approach where the user obtains a good or service, such as the operating system, for free or at reduced cost.

The advertisement could appear as:
- a pane on top of any other pane in a user interface of the device
- in a designated area of a background of the user interface
- in a window for an application program
- inserted in content from an application program
- through an audio output of the device; and combinations thereof.

Microsoft Office Starter 2010 aside, ad-supported software has pretty much gone out of fashion. However, it does show that Apple, too, has at least contemplated the idea. [USPTO via MacRumors]

There's all kinds of new hotness in Snow Leopard and Windows 7, but what's old and busted is when stuff crashes, even on the newest OSes. This is how that happens, and why it's thankfully happening less and less.

There are about a bajllion ways for a computer to crash, from hardware to software, so we're going to start with the little crashes and work our way towards kernel panics and BSODs.

Application Crashes

Broadly speaking, the two most common causes of crashes, according to Microsoft's Chris Flores, a director on the Windows team, are programs not following the rules, and programmers not anticipating a certain condition (so the program flips out). The most obvious example of the former is a memory error. Basically, an operating system gives a program a certain amount of memory to use, and it's up to the program to stay inside the boundaries. If a program makes a grab for memory that doesn't belong to it, it's corrupting another program's—or even the OS's—memory. So the OS makes the program crash, to protect everything else.

In the other case, unexpected conditions can make a program crash if it wasn't designed with good exception handling. Flores' "oversimplified" example is this: Suppose you have a data field, like for a credit card number. A good programmer would make sure you type just numbers, or provide a way for the program to deal with you typing symbols or letters. But if the program expects one type of data and gets another, and it's not designed to handle something it doesn't expect, it can crash.

A completely frozen application is one that has crashed, even though it stays on your screen, staring at you. It's just up to you to reach for the Force Quit and tell the computer to put it out of its misery. Sometimes, obviously, the computer kills it for you.

Crashes, as you probably experience almost daily, are limited to programs. Firefox probably crashes on you all the time. Or iTunes (oh God, iTunes). But with today's operating systems, if you hit an omega-level, take-down-your-whole-system crashes, something's likely gone funky down at the kernel level.

System Crashes

The kernel is the gooey core of the operating system. If you think of an operating system as a Tootsie pop with layers of sugary shell, it's down at the lowest level managing the basic things that the OS needs to work, and takes more than a few licks to get to.

More than likely, your computer completely crashes out way less than it used to—or at least, way less than Windows 95. There's a few reasons for that. A major reason, says Maximum PC Editor Maximus Will Smith, is that Apple and Microsoft have spent a lot of time moving stuff that used to run at really low level, deep in the guts of the OS, up a few layers into the user space, so an application error that would've crashed a whole system by borking something at the kernel level just results in an annoying program-level hang up. More simply put, OSes have been getting better at isolating and containing problems, so a bad app commits suicide, rather than suicide bombing your whole computer.

This is part of the reason drivers—the software that lets a piece of hardware, like a video card talk to your OS and other programs—are a bigger source of full-on crashes than standard apps nowadays when it comes to modern operating systems. By their nature, drivers have pretty deep access, and the kernel sits smack in the middle of that, says Flores. So if something goes wrong with a driver, it can result in some bigtime ka-blooey. Theoretically, signed (i.e., vetted) drivers help avoid some of the problems, but take graphics drivers, which were a huge problem with Vista crashes at launch: Flores says that "some of the most complex programming in the world is done by graphics device driver software writers," and when Microsoft changed to a new driver model with Vista, it was a whole new set of rules to play by. (Obviously, stuff got screwed up.)

Another reason things crash less now is that Apple and Microsoft have metric tons of data about what causes crashes with more advanced telemetry—information the OS sends home, like system configurations, what a program was doing, the state of memory, and other in-depth details about a crash—than ever. With that information, they can do more to prevent crashes, obviously, so don't be (too) afraid to click "send" on that error message.

In Windows 7, for instance, there's a new fault tolerance heap—basically, a heap's a special area of memory that's fairly low-level—which could get corrupted easily in past versions of Windows. In Windows 7, it can tell when a crash in the heap is about to happen and take steps to isolate an application from everything else.

Future Crashes

Of course, there are other reasons stuff can crash: Actual hardware problems, like a memory failure, or motherboard component failures. Hard drive issues. Hell, Will Smith tells us that a new problem with high-performance super-computing clusters are crashes caused by cosmic rays. A few alpha particles fly through a machine and boom, crash. They weren't a problem 30 years ago.

Granted, you don't have to worry about that too much. What you might worry about in the future, says Smith, with the explosion of processor cores and multi-threaded programs trying to take advantage of them, are the classic problems of parallel processing, like race conditions, where two processes are trying to do something with the same piece of data, and the order of events gets screwed up, ending in a crash. Obviously, developers would very much prefer if the next 5 years of computing didn't result the Windows 95 days, and programming techniques are always growing more sophisticated, so there's probably not a huge danger there. But as long as humans, who make mistakes, write programs, there will be crashes, so they're not going away, either.

Thanks to Maximum PC's Will Smith! Blue Screen of Death photo by Sean Galbraith originally posted on Gizmodo here.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about crashes, blueberry pie or popcorn kernels to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

As a result of the individual motions by both companies, two hearings have been set for November 12 to determine whether there'll be a January trial. I'm not-so-secretly hoping that Judge William Alsup will look at the "user license agreements for both Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6," arguments about Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the whole disc protection circumvention mess and make Apple and Psystar duke it out in court. Hell, I'll volunteer to transcribe the case for everyone's entertainment, stupid argument by stupid argument. Just make it happen. [AppleInsider via Crunch Gear]

Table of Contents

Intro

What It All Means: Snow Leopard Review
So much of what's going on with Snow Leopard is almost invisible—especially until developers can take advantage of it—so what does all that really add up to?

Chapter 1

The Real Cost of Upgrading to Snow Leopard
Sure the box price is $29—if you meet the right conditions, like running Leopard on an Intel-powered Mac. But what if you don't? Find out what it'll really cost you.

Chapter 2

Getting Ready for Snow Leopard
For most people, Snow Leopard might be the easiest upgrade ever, but to make sure it's really as painless as possible, there's a few things you should to do to get ready, from better-safe-than-sorry sister site Lifehacker. (Backup! Backup! Backup!)

Chapter 3

Hey, There's Actually a Buncha New Features Here
While Snow Leopard isn't pack the Leopard-like explosion of 300 new features, there's actually a decent bit of new stuff going on: QuickTime X is a whole new QuickTime, there's built-in text substitution, and the wireless networking interface is actually useful now.

Also check out the Buncha New Stuff, Express Edition, a condensed version of what's new and noteworthy with 15 tricks you can actually see and play with.

Chapter 4

Grand Central Dispatch, or Snow Leopard's Embracing Multicore Awesomeness
One of the most key under-the-hood technologies in Snow Leopard, Grand Central Dispatch is Apple's solution to the tricky problem of coding apps to take full advantage of the mostly untapped power of the multicore processors inside today's computers.

Chapter 5

GPGPU Computing Is Going to Make It a Little Toasty for Snow Kitties
The other major leap toward harnessing all of the power a modern computer truly offers is Snow Leopard's inclusion of OpenCL 1.0, a framework that lets programmers easily use the tons of cores inside your graphics card for a whole lot more than gaming.

Bonus Content

• The Snow Leopard Incompatibility List
• How to Build a Hackintosh With Snow Leopard
• What the Snow Leopard Box Should've Looked Like
• Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7
• 10 Takes on Snow Leopard

Is there something missing, a discussion you were hoping to have but aren't seeing here? We want to be thorough, so let's have it. Go ahead and hit us up, either in direct emails or to our tips line, with the subject "Snow Leopard Guide."

The 10.6.1 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes for:

* compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems
* an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly
* some printer compatibility drivers not appearing properly in the add printer browser
* an issue that might make it difficult to remove an item from the Dock
* instances where automatic account setup in Mail might not work
* an issue where pressing cmd-opt-t in Mail brings up the special characters menu instead of moving a message
* Motion 4 becoming unresponsive

MacRumors Forums have also included some unofficial notes on the update:

- Network Diagnostics now offers to remove manually-entered DNS values for DHCP configurations
- Software Update for printer drivers of Bonjour/USB printers
- HICocoaView double-redraw during live resize
- Bluetooth connection to nearby printers on startup
- libdispatch object use after deallocation
- Sending of messages with Mail where the SMTP server response has no text
- Upgraded email accounts and SMTP servers that require authentication on port 587 but not port 25
- Printer custom keywords added/edited by auto setup tool are now migrated after software update
- Generic drivers are now visible in printer driver list
- WWAN devices that use the AppleWWANSupport2 component
- Updated to Flash 10.0.32.18

[World of Apple and MacRumors Forums]

First Place

Second Place

Third Place

Gallery haters take note, clicking here will take you to a giant list of the tips.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

Sync Contacts with Gmail and Yahoo: No longer just for syncing with the iPhone and Mobile Me, the Contacts app can now talk to your Yahoo and Gmail address books, and pull down your contact info. It's as simple as going into Contacts preferences and hitting the Accounts tab.

Show Date In Menu Bar: If, like me, you're too lazy to click on the clock, or launch widgets, or just make use of your God-gifted memory, you can now set the clock to display full date in the Menu Bar, just go into Date and Time Preferences and adjust.

Smart Text Formatting and Correcting on the Fly: Snow Leopard has a number of text-based enhancement for apps like Text Edit, iChat and Mail including spelling auto-correct, and text substitution, which lets you use shorter macros in place of longer words and phrases. The spell corrector is limited to commonly misspelled words, but the text substitution is yours to define. Just control-click in the text entry field for any of the aforementioned apps to toggle the features on or off, and visit the Text section of the Language & Text system pref for tweaking.

Password Log-In Delay: If you have password protection enabled for when your computer goes to sleep, you can now choose how long your computer snoozes before the password requirement actually kicks in. This means you can more easily have the privacy of a darkened monitor without the pain of having to key in your password every time you step away. These settings are under the Security preference pane.

Google and Yahoo Support in iCal: iCal is now much easier to add calendars from Google and Yahoo. No hacks or third-party software necessary. You just add a new account under preferences and select your service of choice. (Suit-wearers take note: Exchange support is here as well.)

Edit Videos in QuickTime X: QuickTime Pro users have long been able to edit and convert videos without launching the heavier movie apps. With QuickTime X, Apple has done away with that nasty fee. Yep, Pro is dead. Now everyone can trim and save, with a visual navigation timeline for easy edits, not to mention that other pro perk, viewing movies in full-screen.

Upload to YouTube From QuickTime X: Now you can upload directly to YouTube from QuickTime X. Just open any video file then go up to the menu bar and click Share. That same menu lets you upload movies directly to MobileMe, and convert movies to iProduct-friendly formats to send to iTunes.

QuickTime X Video Capture: How much do we love QuickTime X? It now also has video capture direct from the iSight camera, any FireWire video camera or any audio input. Better still, it can record the action happening on your screen, and save that as a movie too. A riveting one, to be sure.

Smarter Drive Eject: Half bug fix, half user enhancement, Snow Leopard now tells you exactly why it can't eject a drive that's in use. Instead of saying it's just busy, it tells you what app is using it. Apple also promises ejecting in general is just "more reliable."

Recover Trashed Files: If you accidentally sent an item to the trash that you want to replace, you don't have to go in and then drag it to wherever you had it before (if you even remember). Now you just control-click on the trashed item and select "Put Back." Problem solved.

Airport Signal Strength: Windows users have long been accustomed to this, but when you're looking for free wi-fi to steal and wanna get an idea of what's most reliable, you can now get an idea before you connect. It really took Apple this long to add this?

Automatic Time-Zone Detection: If you're jet setting around the world with regularity, you can allow Snow Leopard to detect your location using Wi-Fi hotspots, and adjust the time zone—and clock's time—accordingly.

Preview a File Inside Its Icon: If hitting the space bar for a "quick look" is too much for you, try the in-icon previews. Just roll your cursor over a video or audio file and a play button will appear. PDFs show arrows, letting you leaf through their pages. In most folders, there's a slider that lets you scale icons up to a massive 512x512 pixels, presumably to make this file preview seem in any way rational.

Annotate This!: The increasingly useful Preview now has a bar at the bottom of the window full of various annotation tools, such as shapes, highlighter, memos, underline, strikeout and hyperlink. Useful for the bookworms out there who are deal with texts in digital formats. Perhaps it also hints at the Apple Tablet's Preview app, because a device that goes up against a Kindle would need something like this (along with, you know, a five-day battery life).

Chinese Character Input: This isn't really a feature the majority of us will use, but rather a demo of what's possible with Apple input technology. You can use the trackpad to write Chinese characters and have them appear as computer text, just hit Ctrl-Shift-Space Bar. Pretty neat idea, and perhaps something else that might come in handy with a tablet.

There are, of course, even more tricks and new features. If you have any good ones you want to share, you know how to do it.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

On Twitter we noticed that everybody seemed to get back more space from Snow Leopard than the guy before him: "I got back 9GB, wow!" "Hey, I got back 12GB, jeez." "Holy mother, I got back 20 gigs, whoooooa!" So by now, some of you should've gotten back like a terabyte—on your 250GB hard drive. We got back around 6GB, what Apple advertised.

Battery-wise haven't noticed much of a difference compared to Leopard, but if you have, let us know and what kind of machine you're using.

[Giz's Snow Leopard Coverage]

There are minor issues with software compatibility, bugs and a virus or two. Some even reported that they lost their data during the upgrade process.

Well, how worried are you? Enough to delay the upgrade for a few weeks? Or are you going to do it the second you get home with the disc this weekend? Or somewhere in between?

NYTimes
"...the haters online deride Snow Leopard as a "service pack" - nothing more than a bug-fix/security-patch update like the ones Microsoft periodically releases for Windows. That's a pretty uninformed wisecrack."

Chicago Sun-Times
"OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch are features that will speed up every existing app to a certain degree, by virtue of the fact that apps rely on OS routines; naturally, Snow Leopard itself takes full advantage of both technologies. But expect to see more serious performance gains as developers begin to fine-tune their apps for 10.6."

Macworld
"System Preferences is also where you'll see the ugliest evidence of Apple's conversion to 64-bit applications throughout the system...if you click on a third-party preference pane that hasn't yet been upgraded to a 64-bit version, System Preferences will tell you that it has to quit and reopen itself in 32-bit mode in order to open that preference pane...it gets frustrating..."

Wall Street Journal
"Commonly used third-party programs, like the Mac versions of Microsoft Office, the Firefox browser, and Adobe Reader, all worked fine in my tests after the upgrade. But a few things didn't. Apple admitted I had found a few bugs..."

Engadget
We were promised 6GB of storage savings with 10.6, and Apple more than delivered — we got anywhere from 10GB to a whopping 20GB back after installation.

Wired
"The most significant refinement to built-in software occurs in QuickTime, now dubbed QuickTime Player X. The player interface gets a makeover - a gray-and-black gradient (see screenshot at right). Other than that, there are new tools including movie recording from your webcam, audio recording from your microphone, and screencasting."

PCMag
"Among dozens of improvements to Snow Leopard's interface, one major standout is the enhanced Exposé feature. Exposé...Snow Leopard shows them in a better-organized grid-style layout, and adds a feature that displays reduced images of the windows open in only a single application instead of across every open application."

CNET
"Preview now lets you preview almost any file, even if it was created with software you don't have on your hard drive. This means common file types from Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and even PDF files can all be previewed without owning the programs they were created in. As an added bonus, Preview in Snow Leopard provides accurate text selection to multicolumn PDF files using artificial intelligence to infer the layout of each page."

PCWorld
"...with the release of iPhone 2.0 and now Snow Leopard, my views on Exchange have taken a 180-degree turn. If our IT department wants to move us to Exchange, I now say bring it on."

Gizmodo
"...speed optimizations are deep, reminding me of when a master martial artist puts the entirety of his weight behind a strike (while a neophyte would flails his limbs like a henchman in a Bruce Lee movie). The little UI tweaks are no different than when a great sculptor's chisel works to remove everything non-essential during the final steps on a statue. Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible."

Applications that won't open in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• Aperture ver. 2.1.1 and earlier
• Keynote ver. 2.0.2 and earlier
• AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow ver. 4.2.5
• Parallels Desktop ver. 3.0
• VirusBarrier X4 ver. 10.4.4 and earlier
• SPSS 17 ver. 17.1
• Director MX 2004 ver. 10.2
• EyeTV ver. 3.0.0 to 3.1.0
• Ratatouille ver. 1.1

Applications moved to an "Incompatible Software" folder during the installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• Parallels Desktop, ver. 2.5 and earlier
• McAfee VirusScan, ver. 8.6
• Norton AntiVirus ver. 11.0
• Internet Cleanup 5 ver. 5.0.4
• Application Enhancer ver. 2.0.1 and earlier
• Unsanity
• AT&T Laptop Connect Card ver. 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.10.0
• launch2net ver, 2.13.0
• iWOW plug-in for iTunes ver. 2.0
• Missing Sync for Palm Sony CLIE Driver ver. 6.0.4
• TonePort UX8 Driver ver. 4.1.0
• ioHD Driver ver. 6.0.3
• Silicon Image SiI3132 Drivers ver. 1.5.16.0

[Apple via Apple Insider]

Send your best redos of the box art to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Snow Leopard Box in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it! [Sexy snow leopard image from Gebenus.com]

Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. The new operating system takes the same old boring, every day tasks like opening files, for example, and makes them happen subtly faster. But that performance is not being utilized by any third-party programs right now. And there are practically no new first-party programs by Apple. Nope, mostly just rewritten old ones and dozens of little interface tweaks. Some fanboys will ask, incredulously, "This is a new operating system?!" Those people are missing the point.

On deeper inspection, Snow Leopard's inconspicuous aspects—performance squeezed from underused CPU multicores/GPUs and basic UI tweaks—are found to be the kind of refinement generally reserved for virtuosity. These speed optimizations are deep, reminding me of when a master martial artist puts the entirety of his weight behind a strike (while a neophyte would flails his limbs like a henchman in a Bruce Lee movie). The little UI tweaks are no different than when a great sculptor's chisel works to remove everything non-essential during the final steps on a statue. Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible.

And if you think that's bullshit, well, I can't say you're completely out of your mind, but there's always the consolation that this OS upgrade costs about the same as a used Xbox game.

Performance

After some benching on a first-generation MacBook Air, an older MacBook Pro 15 and a pair of current-gen 13-inch MacBook Pros, it's clear that Snow Leopard is faster—sometimes drastically—but almost never in third-party applications. Some people like charts. If you feel like skipping them, here's a summary:

• In preview, where opening six 35MB 20,000-pixel-wide images of Tokyo's cityscape each took half the time in Snow.
• Safari's javascript processing, using Snow's specific tech, is about 40% faster—useful for all those Ajax-heavy websites we all use now.
• Time Machine backed up a 1GB dataset nearly 40% faster than on Leopard.
• There was no discernible improvement in non-optimized 32-bit programs: Photoshop testing and Handbrake DVD ripping times were identical. High-def playback on QuickTime 7 (not the new QuickTime 10 version) was identical in CPU usage, too.
• Synthetic benchmark results were interesting: The aging Xbench app, which tests everything from graphics to disks to memory, took a slight performance dip, implying older software may, too. Geekbench, a multicore optimized, newer benchmark available in both 32- and 64-bit saw a lift on Snow. But the test is only focused on theoretical CPU and memory performance, which may not translate into every day use.

Here's a video of those JPEGs cranking open in parallel, rather than serial, fashion:

Impressed yet?! You shouldn't be. Well, not by the act of opening images. But you definitely should once you realize what it really shows: Apple just pulled 2X performance out of my hardware, by software alone. Tada!

How is Snow Leopard Getting Faster?

There are three fundamental reasons for these performance increases: Better multicore processor support through what Apple calls GCD (Grand Central Dispatch—which we explain here); OpenCL APIs for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing; and they've rewritten almost all the applications that ship with Snow Leopard to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. So it's making processing for today's chips more efficient and easier for developers. And giving programs a way to utilize the power of the video card when it's not playing games. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. (More on all that at the bottom of the page.*)

Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. Install size is down to 10GB from 16GB, most of that weight shed by losing printer drivers and the PowerPC part of universal binaries. (Snow Leopard runs only on Intel hardware and downloads printer drivers it needs from the net, as you need them.) Installation is also quicker by about 30% on any given piece of hardware (consistent with the smaller install footprint). And in a move that can only be categorized as showing off, Snow Leopard can finish its installation if you accidentally power it down midway through.

But I'm digressing. The bottom line on performance is that the programs included with this operating system will do just about everything faster on modern machines that support those technologies—that is, most of the multicore Macs or those running Nvidia 8600 series video cards or higher. And not just a bit faster, but faster on the scale of 25 to 50% which means there's typically a good amount of latent processing juju in your video card and CPU. Great, but to be honest, it's a bit less impressive than it sounds in real life today, because all the basic system tasks happen fast anyhow. (When was the last time you sat around while a JPEG opened up?) Again, no other apps that use GCD or OpenCL are available from software makers outside of Apple. But if the theoretical gains are here to be had via easier programming methods, I'd bet those apps will come soon.

Interface Streamlining

There are 5 major changes in the UI:

Finder
Icons now scale, courtesy of a little slider on the bottom right of the pane, up to 512 pixels wide. It sounds wasteful, except that video files can be played directly from the finder window. Honestly, I don't prefer it more than the QuickLook (hitting spacebar to popup a quick preview window) in Leopard and carried over in Snow Leopard. I don't mind the option, but I have no use for this feature.

Dock
OS X's dock has been interactive for some time. You could drag a file to an icon there to somehow get the two to interact, but you could never use the dock to select which window instance of an app to use. Now clicking and holding (empty handed or with a file) triggers Expose, Apple's window management doohickey, for that particular application. Being able to quickly pop out an app's windows and then select the right one in a single step is terrific, but you still can't use Expose to quickly find the browser tab you want within a window. That's an increasingly big problem as the time spent in browsers goes up.

Expose
Expose itself has been improved, too. When viewing all the windows for one application in Expose's zoomed-out view, the items are now arranged in a grid instead of a single, impossible to read line, and each window has a text label. (That's helpful when you're trying to recognize a particular window amongst lots of similar looking—and rendered tiny by Expose—text documents or emails.) Minimized windows are also now shown at the bottom of the screen under a faint line dividing it from other maximized windows from the same application.

Stacks
When Stacks made its debut in Leopard, the dock mounted quick file viewer was too twitchy to use. You'd try to move a file andit would snap close, offended you'd try to do anything but open a file. And the space was always too limited in fan or grid mode to display more than a few icons. Stacks improves on this by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, but by also adding a smart list view capable of showing numerous files at once. It's an improvement.

QuickTime 10
Putting QuickTime in this list is questionable, but aside from its acceleration, there are some major changes here. That is, as you mouse away, the video screen loses all borders and buttons, appearing like the video equivalent of an infinity pool or one of those ultra thin LCDs. The program has a new capture system for encording video and audio clips and even voice annotated screen capture sessions. It also borrows the trimming thumbnail line from iMovie '09. I love it.

Let's face it, in the big picture, calling these changes "major" is generous. But there are literally dozens of even smaller examples, all welcome, all reducing friction points in the OS's usage, eliminating clicks needed and making the OS less obtuse. You can read about all of these additions in the gallery below, or here on one page, if you're curious to read about them all. If not, take my word for it: They all make things better.

While it's not UI- or performance-related, one additional Snow Leopard benefit is free Exchange support, so your mail, address books and calendars can all sync through it. I don't work at a corporation, so I don't care, but you may.

Bad Things

What kind of sick fanboy would I be if I didn't mention the imperfections?

And Safari 4's ability to segment unstable browser plugins made itself useful when many more flash powered pages crashed in Snow Leopard than Leopard.

Other reviewers have discovered that Snow Leopard has disabled or quirk-ified some of their apps.

I've also noticed that Expose doesn't work as smoothly with spaces now. You sometimes select a window on another virtual spaces desktop and it won't bring the window up top.

If you've got some third part mission critical app that you need to run every day, you should double check its compatibility and wait for a new version before upgrading your OS. Look before you leap here. The OS isn't so radically new that you have to have it right this moment.

Meow

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you're looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard's biggest feature is that it doesn't have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up
the apps it comes with by relatively huge amounts

Costs $30 to upgrade

Still haven't seen any third party apps
rewritten to take advantage of Snow Leopard's speed yet

No major new functionality might turn off
some

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

*Performance Background: You May Skip This Section.
Today's chips have hovered in the 2-3.6GHz range for some time, with gains in theoretical processing power made by increasing the number of CPU cores on one chip and optimizing the silicon in those cores. Think about it as roof shingles: It's easier to protect your roof with lots of little shingles than one huge one. Unfortunately, the power afforded by the additional CPU cores has largely gone to waste, because it's difficult to write code that takes full advantage of multiple cores. The programmer has to write the application in a way that breaks down large problems into multiple smaller problems (called threads), each of which runs on a single CPU core. The application then becomes a traffic cop keeping threads in sync. If any part gets out of sync, the app crashes or hangs.

This problem is made more complex because many apps are written with a maximum number of threads in mind. While some workloads, such as video encoding or photo processing can take advantage of many cores innately, most need to have some work done to add support for more threads, so future-proofing has been difficult. I don't know if programming GCD is easier than straight-up multiple-core programming—we cover some of those details here—but the key here is that Apple's created a middleware that developers can write for, which automatically scales up to work with the number of CPU cores or other hardware in your system. The developer writes for GCD, while the system handles the gruntwork. Apple hopes more people will use this easier, more future-proofed way to tap into multiple-core power. Of course, no one has so far, except Apple programmers themselves. This explains why Finder, Preview and basically everything else that ships with Snow Leopard run faster. But in my tests, Photoshop, still a 32-bit program on the Mac and written without any support of GCD or OpenCL, showed less than 1% variation from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Still, as we can see from the system apps, there's potential here. And let's face it, the majority of us are not rendering Photoshop files all day, so this is performance you can put in your pocket today.

There's a story of efficiency here, too, however. Because GCD is better at managing resources, a program like, Mail, for example, shows less system impact (thread usage, cpu usage) while sitting idle in Snow Leopard, than on Leopard. When testing OpenCL's hardware acceleration, something Windows machines have had for awhile, by playing a 1080p trailer of James Cameron's awesome new Avatar movie, CPU usage dropped drastically when machines were using the 64-bit CoreCL and GCD supported version of QuickTime. Any modern machine can play 1080p video well, but here, we were talking about Snow Leopard causing the strain on the system to take total CPU usage from 30% to 16% on the 13-inch MacBook Pros. Other apps will eventually be able to use these GPU superpowers, but what Apple claims is the real potential for GPU processing is that OpenCL will let computers use video cards for not only 3D acceleration, video encoding, and heavy math, but more general computing tasks, too, because its written in a non-specific (C-based) programming language.

Furthermore, there have been a number of good articles questioning the speed benefits of 64-bit computing. Apple only goes so far to claim that math-based tasks benefit from the larger bus, but generally the only concrete advantage of 64-bit computing is the ability apps gain to manipulate over 4GB of RAM, a 32-bit limitation. Apple's dev docs go on to say that some apps will incur a penalty if going 64-bit. So, rewriting apps in 64-bit versions is not a surefire recipe for speed improvement.

In many cases, with many of the built-in apps, Apple attributes the performance improvements to all three core technologies above. That stuff that means not so much today, but might mean a lot tomorrow as GPUs get faster and CPUs gain more cores and there's already an infrastructure in place to take advantage of all that.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

The new feature behaves like a cross between a traditional antivirus tool and the "Are you sure you want to open this?" warnings already present in Leopard. I doubt it's doing any real-time heuristic scanning and it's definitely not running as a visible app in the OS, but if it's checking .PKG and .DMG files for malware before you run or mount them, well, that sounds an awful lot like what your average Symantec, AVG or Kapersky product is intended to do.

The first report came from the Intego blog, (they make Mac antivirus software) and it's been corroborated by Snow Leopard testers over at the MacRumors forums. We'll try to test this one out as best we can, but it's looking like Apple may have slipped this ever-so-slightly unflattering feature into their new OS under the radar. [The Mac Security Blog, MacRumors]

Following handwritten correspondence and a voicemail, I'm fairly certain that "Macwind" is just one industrious high school kid with a nice website.

But Macwind has requested this review, and how could I possibly pass it up?

So Apple, I plead that you go easy on "Craig," the owner of Macwind, even if his practice of preloading OS X onto netbooks for resale (using publicly available tutorials, I'm sure) is pretty unquestionably a breach of one or more laws.

His site shares your aesthetics, and the MSI Wind he's selling, loaded with a 1.6GHz atom, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive and of course, OS 10.5.8, is really a pretty good product even for the $100 premium over a stock U100.

You guys should sell these things!

Because the build is solid with all the necessary drivers preloaded (some of which MSI has actually "leaked" themselves). The 1024x600 screen displays your desktop beautifully, while most of they keyboard's function keys are operational (like brightness, volume and sleep).

You can even pop in an SD card to expand the storage, just like your latest Macbooks!

But alas, we know that you know that you must shut Craig down. We won't frown upon your actions. After all, just because the kid is young doesn't excuse him from your trademarks and copyrights.

We simply ask that you go easy on him. Make him cry, sure, but pity him, too. Don't crush him with a lifetime of legal debt. A kind call from Steve Jobs, a middle manager or one of those attractive ladies in Apple PR will probably clear up any legal misunderstandings. (His number is on the site, otherwise I'll be happy to provide it.)

And maybe, while Craig's first garage-based computer business has failed him, his next one will not. [Macwind (down)]

No installs needed.

Reasonable price for the laziest among us.

Oh right, this operation can't be legal.

A kid might go to jail or something.

Looking at the history of OS X releases, final builds, and rumors about final builds, ZDNet concludes the version in the box is gonna be 10A432, what everybody thought was the gold master in the first place. Historically, the pattern's been that after the gold master is known, a rumor pops up about an even newer build—like with Tiger, the GM was 8A428, but rumors pegged the fresher 8A432 as final. 8A428 was in the box.

In other words, expect the 10A432 build when you crack that box (or download) open. [ZDNet]