Has anyone picked up Snow Leopard 10.6? How much of an improvement is it on 10.5?

It's very nice. I am also saying that because my Macbook exploded on my floor earlier today thus forcing me to purchase a new macbook pro with Snow Leopard pre-loaded on it. It's a beast.

I originally read that as Slow Leopard.

So far, so good. It seems pretty snappy and I have not encountered any problems yet. Even MacPorts is working fine.

Windows 7 isn't even out yet and it works stable as all hell.
:winsmug:

Tibby, if you've got nothing useful to say, don't say anything at all, you're just making the Signal/Noise ratio worse. This discussion has nothing to do with Win7, which by the way I think is going to be awesome, but it's irrelevant right now so just shut your cakehole.

Anyway:

Becuase I got an up-to-date version (i.e. the £8 / $10 version due to new mac after 8th June) mine is in the Snail Mail which seems to be the case at least here in the UK. Hence, mine was supposed to ship yesterday but hasn't yet. Also the post has come this morning and no sign of it, so I won't see it until at least Tuesday, as Monday is a Bank Holiday.

Sigh.

Ah well, at least I've got time this long weekend to get everything backed up before the big Erase and Install. (I've got so little stuff on here apart from my music/photos that I might as well do a full reformat)

Martyn, I heard that the installer doesn't let you choose a clean install unless you reformat it separately ... apparently Apple really wants you to use the upgrade installer / they're really proud of it.

yeah truly great, all my machines have had a huge performance on all my machines at home, its been great at work, even the white macbook seems to be a lot better and copes better with all the software we have pre loaded on there. its been a great succees here we sold out of 10.6 in 5 hours and we have just sold todays deliveries of 10.6 last copy as well.

Very impressed with the whole thing and well worth the £25/$29 upgrade price.

Definitely worth the $30. It's very snappy on my machine.

I saw a screenshot somewhere: you hit the Upgrade OSX button for archive and install, and the Install OSX button for the Erase and install. Either way, I've got time to get it done even if it's a bit of a faff.

I've got the email now - they say to allow 3 business days for the post office to get it here, but I'd like to hope I get it by Tuesday.

There was only one option for me, and that was "Install OS X". It upgraded.

The good:
Most of the standard OS X applications are much faster. Mail opens in 1 second, literally.
Small graphical tweaks
Networking with windows seems to finally be working perfectly. And quickly.

The bad:
Most of my menu items are broken. iStat, MenuMeters, SynergyKM, and more. Synergy worries me especially since I really need that and I don't think it'll be getting an update.
Still can't change the touchpad gestures (especially needed with 4 finger swipes)
Not that much actually changed other than performance in OS X default apps. Firefox still runs like a dog, for example.

I did a clean install then restored for a Time Machine backup. Aside from a few font conflicts on first boot, it seems to be running pretty snappy. The 10-12GB I gained on install made me very happy.

So what's the real amount of size the install is reduced by, since Snow Leopard reports disk sizes in base 10 now instead of base 2? How much of it is just people not realizing that their hard drives look bigger in base 10?

Using -h with df and du reports the sizes in base 2.

I just found out that Apple will not let my Mac Mini boot with a 64-bit kernel. Now I cannot use that last 256 MiB of RAM and a slew of CPU registers (well, at least my kernel cannot).

I do not know how big the install was in Leopard, but in Snow Leopard the size is ~5.2 GiB.

MacOSX used to report disk sizes in base 2?
What?

As in 1GB = 1024MB (2^10) instead of 1000MB

Oh I see, that whole thing.

Another improvement: 10.6 had drivers for my WWAN USB device. No need to fuss with Sprint's crap now, it has it's own menubar and everything now. I don't know if there was WWAN support like this in 10.5, but it definitely didn't have my drivers. It's much nicer now, it works just like wifi, with the signal indicator and everything.

Almost makes me wish I had it built into the laptop >.>

How much did that put you out? I've been considering buying one to supplement my eee.

How are the new Boot Camp 3.0 drivers? They claim to have added tap-to-click support (welcome to the 90's, Apple!) in them. Anything else? Double-finger-tap right-click? Not-super-erratic two-finger-scrolling?

My copy should be here tomorrow, so I guess I'll find out then if no one else knows.

Tap-to-click was in the 2.0 drivers. As for the boot camp drivers with Snow Leopard I haven't updated my Windows 7 partition with them yet.

No it wasn't. At least not for pre-unibody MBPs, hence why the support docs for 3.0 say:

Ah, I have a unibody so that explains why I had it before.

Is that all they improved in Boot Camp?

I didn't even think about Boot Camp! I hope they did other things as well.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3777

Not much, at least not that they've mentioned.

Thank God. I didn't want to pay for MacDrive.

One improvement in Boot Camp: TF2 no longer crashes.

One big disappointment: STILL NO FREAKING GESTURES. Seriously?!

I've been out of town so I haven't had the opportunity. I'm hoping to try it out next weekend.

I got my invoice via email today - hopefully it'll turn up while I'm at work...