MacMost Now 283: Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Snow Leopard

Gary Rosenzweig runs down his top 10 reasons to get Snow Leopard, Apple's new OS for Intel-based Macs.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Well this Friday Snow Leopard will finally be out. Let's go ahead and take a look at the top 10 reasons to upgrade to Snow Leopard. So Snow Leopard is the complete upgrade to Leopard but without any new features. Well that's not totally true. There are some new features, but it isn't as feature rich as most updates. That's because Apple spent most of its time rewriting the underlying OS software. So you're going to get lots of different things like speed increase and all that but you're not going to get many new features. So why should you upgrade? Well, reason number one is you're going to get back a lot of space. That's right a lot of applications that are built into Mac OS X things like mail and safari and all that are specifically built for Intel only machines, which means they don't have all the code overhead of being able to run on G3, G4, G5 machines. And they've also been optimized. So these applications are actually going to shrink in size. So you're actually going to get space back on your hard drive when you install Snow Leopard over Leopard. So reason number 2 is Quicktime X or Quicktime 10. This new version of Quicktime is actually more similar to Quicktime Pro than previous version of Mac OS X. So you've got all sorts of cool features like the ability to record directly off your camera or off your microphone. You can also trim and edit videos. It's got a whole new interface. It can stream all sorts of different formats. Do all sorts of cool things. It can even do video screen captures. It can record video of your screen just using Quicktime X. So this is a very big upgrade for Quicktime and reason enough to want to upgrade to Snow Leopard. So reason number three is that Snow Leopard will wake up from sleep and shut down faster than previous versions of Mac OS X. So if you have a mac book and you travel a lot you know how important those seconds are when moving around with your mac book. So having Snow Leopard do that quicker will make your life a little bit better. So reason number four is for people that work in a more corporate environment and use Microsoft Exchange. Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes support for Exchange. That's support for mail, iCal, and address book. It's interesting that Mac will be the only computer that actually supports Exchange out of the box. That's right Windows users actually have to upgrade to have Outlook to be able to support Exchange. So reason number five is another reason for travelers. You take your Mac Book to a different time zone and you notice only a few days later that your Mac Book still has the time from where you live. And this might throw off your ICal events, may throw off your meeting schedules. All sorts of things. But Mac OS X Snow Leopard will actually recognize that the wifi you're connected to is on a different network in a different time zone and correct the time. It's a very useful feature for travelers. So reason number six is for people that use expose and stacks which are for most of us. These features are useful already but they are even more useful in Snow Leopard. Expose activates from the dock if you want it to and also presents a cleaner grid. Stacks are now scrollable. Reason number seven is for those of us that are all thumbs when typing on a keyboard. Snow Leopard will actually replace text that you type wrong. Now this automatically happens in applications like Microsoft but now it will happen system wide which means your mistakes like spelling "the" "teh" can be auto corrected throughout all the basic Mac OS X applications and third party developers can access this and incorporate it into their own applications as well. Now reason number eight is you should upgrade to Snow Leopard because it is the same as Leopard. Now this may seem a little strange but think about it. One of the reasons people don't upgrade software, upgrade their OS is because they don't have time to learn something new. But, since Snow Leopard is basically the same interface as Leopard, you don't have to learn anything new. You can start using it right away. Now reason number nine to upgrade is that Snow Leopard is cheap. It's only $29 to upgrade. Now if it was more than $100 you can kind of make the excuse "Oh I don't have the money right now" but you've already spent more than $1000 on your Mac. You might as well have it running the most up-to-date operating system. It's a cheap upgrade, so go ahead and do it. And the final reason, reason number ten to upgrade to Snow Leopard is the fact that this is the future. If you want to take advantage of all the new features, all the different things coming out, not only from Apple but third party software vendors, you're going to need Snow Leopard. So if you have an Intel based Mac, you really should go and take the time to upgrade to Snow Leopard so you can move forward with it. Hope you my look at the top ten reasons I think to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Now- got a big announcement coming at the end of the week that involves Snow Leopard and MacMost. So stay tuned for that and of course as soon as Snow Leopard comes out I'll be covering some of these features directly in individual episodes. So until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 283: Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Snow Leopard”

Homer

15 years ago

Thanks Gary for this quick wrap-up!

It's pretty amazing that Apple can take the liberty to release a "better written" copy of their operating system. It is actually an improved version of their very successful Leopard system...

While Microsoft is still trying to release a serious alternative to the miserable Vista. I wish for them Windows 7 will be lucky.

Gaston F.

Jurb

Previously hadn't bothered to upgrade as I thought it would be more intensive on memory but after watching this blog I am more than happy to upgrade. Your blog also mentions that it actually is less heavy on memory on programs such as Safari (which I know from experience is very hungry) so almost for that reason alone, I want the upgrade!

Thanks for this very helpful video Blog and also for the numerous other videos which have been so useful to me (far too many to mention!) and other friends/family.

Thanks!

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 283: Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Snow Leopard

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 283: Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Snow Leopard”

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