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Hands-On Review: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard--How fast is it?

The Fashion Valley Apple Store in San Diego was busy, but not more than is usual for a Friday afternoon, when I picked up a copy of Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard, Apple's latest version. For those of you wondering, the build number is 10A432 which is the same as the last developer release in mid-August mentioned by several web sites and then rumored to be the so-called "Golden Master."

My main reason for upgrading beyond just a penchant for keeping current is the promised compatibility with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for Mail and iCal. I have been using Parallels on my Mac Pro and Boot Camp on my MacBook Air to use Microsoft Outlook, a really poor application in my opinion, and to get around some proprietary Microsoft web coding in certain applications.

Snow Leopard only runs on Intel-based Macs so it leaves behind my two PowerBook G4s, a 17" and 12", and two Power Mac G4 Cubes. The PowerBooks are running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) as is the stock Cube but Leopard Server 10.5.8 is running on the Cube with an upgraded 1.4GHz CPU. Snow Leopard will go on my Mac Pro (early 2008), MacBook Air (early 2008) and white Intel-based iMac, all running Leopard 10.5.8.

Installation

On my Mac Pro, the 10.6 installation took a very quick 24 minutes from the time I clicked "Install" to the reboot into 10.6. It was an automatic upgrade install since Apple has done away with selecting the type of install to do. Because I have a 60 percent empty 1TB hard drive, I used the "Customize" button to load almost everything on the install disc including all fonts, languages, X11, Rosetta and QuickTime 7. However, I left the printer drivers on the default option.

The 10.6 installation on my MacBook Air took a little longer, about 31 minutes. But it also installed with no drama. I'm holding off for awhile on the iMac because my spouse uses it and wants me to make sure there are no instabilities in 10.6 like there were with the initial Leopard release.

Boot Camp 3.0, unfortunately, is another story. It installed just fine on my Mac Pro, upgrading Boot Camp 2.1 and Windows XP SP3 to Boot Camp 3.0. However, because the Windows partition on my MacBook Air was nearly full and I was already having problems with CDs being recognized by the MacBook Air's special USB external optical drive in Windows XP SP3, I decided to remove the 11GB partition, make a new 22GB partition and reinstall Windows XP SP3, a 2+ hour process after also reinstalling the application software.

[Update: Apple has posted a workaround (HT3841)--thanks Kevin Meiser!] I tried and failed to install the Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) three times. The first two times the SP3 installer was unable to copy a file while backing up third party drivers, meaning Boot Camp 3.0. Ending the SP3 installation process gave an error message that SP3 had been partially installed and Windows XP may not work correctly. The third time I tried to install Boot Camp 2.0 from the Leopard CD because it had previously survived the SP3 upgrade but that caused Windows to crash and destroy the Windows partition. So, on the fourth attempt I left it at SP2. Maybe I can get an SP3 disc from Microsoft. If not, hopefully the Windows 7 upgrade, when available, will work on SP2 or better Apple will quickly post a fix. I put up with this grief because in some countries I have needed a real Windows installation to get on the internet. This took over 6 hours, including downloading and installing some 117 other updates and reinstalling Microsoft Office 2007.

Use

Mail and iCal sync beautifully with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on both Macs. All the applications I use frequently appear to work fine: Adobe Reader 9, Dreamweaver CS3, Photoshop Extended CS3 and Photoshop Elements 6; Apple iWork 9 and iLife 8; Microsoft Office 2008 and Skype. Unfortunately, two very handy Mail pluggins do not: Letterbox 0.22 and Widemail 0.5.1. Both pluggins that move the message viewer pane to the right of the mail list pane instead of under it, a shape that fits the screen much better, are disabled by Snow Leopard. The authors of both applications are working on a version for 10.6.

I ran most of my standard speed tests to see if there are any identifiable speed improvements in 10.6 over 10.5. My Mac Pro (early 2008 with dual quad 2.8GHz CPUs) has an upgraded video card (EVGA GeForce GTX 285), and upgraded 1TB hard drive and 10GB of RAM. Here are the results:

Speed of Mac OS X 10.6 vs 10.5

Test	Mac Pro	Mac Pro
BENCHMARKS/Mac OS X Version	10.6	10.5*
Altivec Fractal 1.3 (GFLOPS)	48	48
Cinebench R10 Rendering (8x)	18516	18768
-OpenGL Hardware Lighting	6018	5961
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0+	13	8
Xbench 1.3 - CPU	199	189
- Threading	842	811
- Memory	204	199
- Quartz Graphics	227	239
- OpenGL Graphics	93	177
-User Interface Graphics	385	406
"REAL WORLD" TESTS
Startup (sec)	36	26
Shutdown (sec)	7**	9
Dup. 500 MB Folder (sec)	--	26
Quake III Arena (frames/sec)	903	970
Halo 2.0.3 (frames/sec)	122	124

Blue is slower by 10% or more. *Mostly 10.5.7. **Erratic results.

Snow Leopard 10.6 tested slower than Leopard 10.5.7 in virtually all of the graphics benchmarks, some significantly slower. Also, the startup time was significantly slower. While the shutdown time appeared to be slightly faster, the result were erratic with an occasional very long shutdown time.

[Update] With regard to performance, Lloyd Chambers posted some benchmarks using photography applications that show some marginal speed gains of Snow Leopard over Leopard, especially using the 64-bit kernel. However, he did not post which graphics card he used in obtaining the benchmarks.

Summary

Well, the good news is that I got Snow Leopard primarily because of its advertised compatibility with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and it did not disappoint me in that department. So far the compatibility is seamless. This will save me from having to work long hours with Microsoft Outlook. In addition, none of my principal applications seem to have any problems with Snow Leopard, a real plus.

But the disappointments are not inconsequential.

There are newer Nvidia drivers in 10.6 for the superb EVGA GeForce 285 GTX graphics card in 10.6 so I was hoping that the new drivers would speed up the card's slow performance in Mac OS X but I was disappointed. Snow Leopard is slower than Leopard in the graphics tests, some very significantly so.

Finally, there is the egregious apparent incompatibility between Boot Camp 3.0 and the Windows XP Service Pack 3 updater. [Update] Apple has quickly posted a workaround (HT3841)--thanks for pointing this out Kevin Meiser! The problem is with the new feature of Boot Camp 3.0 that allows access to the Mac side of the hard drive from within Windows XP. The workaround of disabling the AppleMNT driver, installing SP3 and re-enabling the driver worked for me. [Bill Fox]