Aulia Masna

Bertrand Serlet, a senior figure at Apple Inc., talking about Snow Leopard at an Apple conference in San Francisco. (Photo: AFP)

Mac's Snow Leopard Is One Cool Cat

Upgrading the operating system of a personal computer is something most people are afraid to do. When it comes to things they don’t fully understand, they’d rather take the conservative approach and stick with what they know will work.

That’s why you see most computers running on software that’s eight years old instead of something released just two years ago, for example.

New operating systems also tend to require better hardware specifications, take up more space and will generally render your old, or even not-so-old machine either obsolete or less useful than before.

Businesses don’t like things that are out of their comfort zone either. Unless there is a significant incentive to upgrade, you’re not going to see companies adopt new technologies or systems, let alone rush in to embrace them.

Then there’s the little matter of cost. Buying a new operating system means parting with some hard-earned cash. Paying to have possible new problems dumped on you while you haven’t even figured out how to fix the old ones, is not a terribly exciting prospect.

With Mac OS X 10.6, which goes by the name Snow Leopard, Apple is attempting to address all of the above.

Last year, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, company chief executive Steve Jobs said — to a rousing response from an audience of software developers and other IT types — that there would be no new features in this version of Mac OS X.

No new features tends to mean no new bugs. Nothing new that tech support and developers have to deal with. However, in all honesty, that is not exactly true. There is actually a ton of new features in Snow Leopard.

The average Mac user probably just won’t realize these features exist, unless someone tells them about it. The majority of them actually come in the form of improvements, tune ups, and polished versions of existing features.

Most Mac users are already happy with Mac OS X 10.5, also known as Leopard. It is reasonably fast, stable, free of viruses and most malware, and does not get in the way.

Other Mac users are still holding on to 10.4 or Tiger, which was released in 2005 and last updated in 2007, just after Leopard was released.

The question is: “Why would anyone upgrade to Snow Leopard?” After all, Apple said there’s no new features, it’s only, “a better Leopard.” Let’s take a look back at the points above and see what Snow Leopard does to address them.

First off, change. Change is scary. Change requires introduction, adaptation and acceptance. An entire learning process to go through all over again.

By looking almost exactly like the old Leopard, it will be easier for people to accept Snow Leopard. Even the name invokes familiarity with the existing environment. It’s like walking into a renovated house, where it’s still the same house, just improved. Maybe some swing doors were replaced by sliding ones, a couple of walls replaced with glass blocks, that sort of thing.

Snow Leopard also requires almost the same hardware requirements as its predecessor with one caveat: If you’re still using an old Mac powered by a Power PC processor, such as an iBook, PowerBook, eMac or PowerMac, you’re out of luck. Also, G3, G4 and G5 iMacs are left out as well as the G4 Mac mini.

You need to be running an Intel-based Mac computer to check out Snow Leopard — basically any Mac that was released since 2006.

Aside from that, this new Mac OS X requires at least 5 gigabytes of free hard drive space and 1 GB of memory.

Apple has finally offered a reprieve for people frustrated or confused when it comes to hard-drive space calculations. If you’ve ever bought an external drive or a USB flash drive, you’ll notice that a 250 GB drive, for example, will only give you 232 GB or so of free space.

This discrepancy is simply due to the difference in the way computers calculate, as opposed to humans. They count using base-2, meaning numbers go from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 256 and so on. Humans do it in base-10 so we get nice round numbers such as 10, 100, 200, 1000, and so on.

Snow Leopard now displays drive space the way we see it, which means a 250GB drive is 250GB.

Apple claims that upon installing Snow Leopard, it will give you back around 7GB of space after counting the above changes. Depending on how you set up your computer, this is apparently around the low end of the scale. Some Macs even received up to 15GB back during testing.

Many businesses often avoid or reject the idea of having Macs at the office, but many employees and company executives are Mac users. These people want to use Macs at work, despite being discouraged by tech support. Most of the time, this is because many IT people are unfamiliar with Mac support .

When it comes to corporate communications, the enterprise market relies on Microsoft Exchange to manage e-mails, contact lists and scheduling. Snow Leopard offers this built in. Ironically, Microsoft’s own Windows does not. The next version of Windows does not even have a mail client built in, you have to either download a free one or buy Microsoft Outlook for Exchange support.

Having support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 provides a better avenue for Macs to become more accepted in the workplace.

Conveniently, it hands Apple a year’s head start against the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac, to be released in late 2010, which includes a Mac version of Outlook with proper support for Exchange Server, unlike the problematic Entourage it currently ships with.

Now for most consumers, Exchange might not be a relevant issue, but they will certainly enjoy the little tweaks and changes evident in Snow Leopard. For instance, performing tasks such as doing a computer-wide search via Spotlight, or looking for e-mails in Mail are now up to two times faster, and Mail uses much less resources during idle time.

The 64-bit support lets applications use more than 4 GB of RAM at any time, with a ceiling of 16 Exabytes, or 16 billion GB. Most hard drives in the market aren’t even anywhere near that large yet.

Installation is also a breeze, taking half the time it used to take. Instead of showing multiple options, Apple now offers a clean install ,which wipes everything out, or a straight upgrade that replaces the old system without touching user data.

If more seasoned users want the old options back, they are available through the Disk Utility application that can be accessed from the DVD.

One of the biggest tweaks though is support for the visually impaired. Mac OS X now fully supports braille typing and VoiceOver speaks to you to let you know where on the screen your mouse pointer is located.

Universal access has always been a feature, but this is leaps and bounds better than Apple’s previous attempts. The multitouch trackpad on the more recent Apple notebooks now acts as a proxy for the screen.

QuickTime now has a screen recording feature. A boon for those who create tutorial videos or often have to show how to perform certain actions on the Mac.

While it is quite basic, it does the job enough to potentially reduce those tech-support calls from family members who think you’re the expert.

No new system is free from issues and Snow Leopard is guilty of this too, although most problems can be easily rectified. A few of the issues that have been reported were regarding Adobe CS3 programs and Microsoft Office 2008.

While an update to Microsoft Office fixes most of its problems, Adobe wants you to upgrade to CS4 because CS3 was not designed to run on Snow Leopard.

If you insist on keeping with CS3, you’re on your own.

Those issues aside, Snow Leopard is one fast cat thanks to the major tune up of the core technologies that power it.

Some might see it as a service pack upgrade because the changes aren’t immediately visible, but so is Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7, which is just around the corner.

Both Apple and Microsoft are laying the foundation for future operating systems.

With hundreds of changes in 10.6, Apple is surprisingly charging only Rp 379,000 ($38) for Snow Leopard, if you use Leopard.

Tiger users are expected to buy the Mac Box Set for Rp 2.1 million, which also nets you iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 productivity packages.

If you bought a Mac after June 8, you qualify for even lower pricing at Rp 120,000. You need only go to www.apple.com/asia/macosx/uptodate to download a PDF form, or obtain one from the store, complete it and send it to Apple with proof of purchase and payment.

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