Last Friday was the global launch of Apple’s new operating system, ‘Snow Leopard’. This has already sparked controversy with the techie people I’ve been talking to. Responses like “Oh they’re just charging you for a service pack update” and “it’s not a full OS, it’s hardly an upgrade, but they charge you anyway”.

That’s the kind of response I’ve been hearing over the last week. Not from everyone, though, certainly not from people that actually know what this new release was all about.

For a start, Snow Leopard technically IS a whole new OS, as it can be installed on a Mac from fresh, not just upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard. What Apple have done, (from what I have read, and in my opinion) is exploiting the new technology that is around, and the new technology that they’ve invented to make it much better.

Leopard was already a fantastic OS that didn’t really need to be ‘fixed’ as such, as some techies have said that it’s just a “bug fix, and I didn’t think Macs needed bug fixes” (they said sarcastically.)

Snow Leopard has been totally reworked from the ground up, meaning that when you install it (through a regular upgrade, no wiping involved), instead of piling on lots more GB of information like many other OS’s, this actually gives you back around 7GB of hard disk space! (I’ve also known other people get more than that). To me, that is incredible for such a powerful operating system!

So, in my humble opinion, this isn’t a ‘fix’ as has been labelled, but an opportunity to install a much faster OS, with lots more features, that gives you back hard disk space which is all too important, because Apple have made use of new technology to make it happen. And would I pay £25 to have that? Yes I would, and yes I did!

I’ve been running it now since last Friday, and I have to say I’ve been exceptionally pleased with the new updates. My systems, a 2 year old iMac (white) and 1.5 year old MacBook Pro run even faster than before, (and MBP was running very quick anyway as earlier in the year it had a RAM upgrade to 4GB). With Snow Leopard, it’s turbo charged both my Macs even further, meaning productivity increases, programs load much quicker, and all in all, I think that’s a very good thing.

To anyone thinking about upgrading to Snow Leopard, just make sure you back up everything on your computer beforehand, as you can never be too careful, plus check your printers etc have the right drivers to operate as normal after the upgrade. All mine were perfectly fine but my sister’s printer, which is about 2 years old, doesn’t yet work under SL as HP haven’t released the update yet. (Although I think in HP’s case it has only affected a very small number of models). So if you have important things you need, and don’t want to wait until the manufacturer releases the driver update (which could be a month or so) then hold off installing until you know you’re ok.

Try Snow Leopard, I don’t think you’re going to be disappointed….