Updated: read our full Snow Leopard review.
Many of Snow Leopard's changes are under the hood - new architecture that provides a foundation for the Mac going forward.
But while there's no Spotlight, Time Machine or Quick Look equivalent this time round, Snow Leopard still packs in new user-oriented features, big and small. Here are our favourites.
1. Exchange support
The biggie for corporate types, and word on the street is Snow Leopard's Exchange support works beautifully. It certainly makes Microsoft's Office 2010 announcement ("We'll be doing Exchange things, too!") look a bit sad.
2. Better stacks
Dock stacks viewed as grids now have a scroll bar if there are many items. You can also move up and down the folder hierarchy within the stack.
3. Dock Exposé
Click-hold a Dock app icon and its open windows show in Exposé. Even minimised windows are shown, displayed smaller and under a subtle horizontal line.
4. Minimised window options
To take advantage of Dock Exposé and not clutter the Dock with minimised windows, you can set 'Minimize windows into application icon' in the Dock System Preferences pane.
5. Malware protection
It's early days, but Snow Leopard contains basic malware protection to stop you killing your Mac to death.
6. Revamped eject manager
In Leopard, disks often couldn't be ejected, because a file was in use by an application. Snow Leopard indicates which app is causing the problem.
7. Improved Keyboard Shortcuts management
Keyboard shortcuts now live in a revised Keyboard System Preferences pane, listed by category for ease of editing.
8. Revised Services
The Services menu is now context-sensitive, showing only relevant options on a per-app basis. Services can also be toggled via the Services section of the Keyboard Shortcuts preferences.
9. Smart text select
Preview now selects text intelligently in multi-column documents, rather than selecting across the entire page width.
10. Text replacement
One for the future, once apps support it, but Mac OS X now has system-wide, user-definable text substitution—see the Text tab of Language & Text in System Preferences.
Your comments (24) Click to add a new comment
flymo
September 6th
24. Nice going, Apple. Comparisons with Windows 7 are unfair - look what Windows 6 (Vista) was like! <grin>
And underpinning OS X is the industrial strength of my favourite Unix from the 1980s, BSD. Smart move.
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serenitylodge
August 31st
23. I haven't seen this documented anyplace -- yet. But, I just discovered the "new and improved" PREVIEW application. I was astounded and pleased to see functions added: the ability to scan into and from Preview, without going into my scanner software (both my Brother MFC and my HP all in one worked great); the ability to import pictures directly from my connected iPhone's Camera Roll; (wow!); and spell check. Unless I missed something in previous versions, these are new . . . and very welcomed. A few other little surprises there . . . check it out.
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veggiedude
August 30th
22. Snow Leopard a 'service pack'? Let me point out that the OS of Leopard supported 32GB of RAM, now the OS supports 16,000 GB of RAM. Boy, that is some service pack!!!
By comparison, Windows 7 will 'only' support 192GB of RAM. So you better start early to call Microsoft for their major service pack for Windows 7. My guess it will be called Windows 8 sometime around 2015.
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veggiedude
August 30th
21. One of my fav's, is the ability to select some text, and from a contextual menu right-click, select 'send to iTunes'. Nice and easy to convert text to audio.
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hss1
August 30th
20. Snow Leopard Boot with SSD drive 20 Seconds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-1DRoB1zfU
Check out how slow windows 7 is compared to Snow leopard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFRWkW1pZ6s
Mac OS X Leopard vs Snow Leopard Speed Test
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nm5bvh_ric
Don't think windows 7 can boot up this quick
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hss1
August 30th
19. Installed Snow leopard onto my 2 year old Imac 24inch Alu and now i am getting 25 second boot times and 5 second shutdown.
The whole system is alot quicker, this speed is without apps being specifically written for Snow leopard's Grand Central and Open Cl so these will be alot quicker when they are.
http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/technology/
Very impressed done a speed test of my machine with a windows 7 unit that i also have as a test machine of higher spec than my Imac and sorry to say but Windows 7 is slow compared Snow Leopard doing the same tasks.
Snow leopard is not a service pack do you think a 90% code change and features such as, Open CL, Grand central, Exchange Support is a service pack?
Windows 7 maybe as Steve Ballmer said "Windows 7 will be Vista, but a lot better." lol sounds like service pack to me
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