Thoroughly Unannoying

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fast and stable, a no-brainer upgrade for all Intel Macs.

Cons: It doesn't do the dishes

The Bottom Line: 
Not perfect, but EXTREMELY close.

Author's Review
  Earlier today, I posted a review of Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system.  In that review, the main focus was on how Windows 7 is less annoying than Windows Vista, which in turn was less annoying than Windows XP (for me at least).  With an Apple OS, things are a little different.


Don't get me wrong, I still measure the worth of an OS by its annoyance level.  Windows XP annoyed me, as did Mac OS 7.5, while Windows 2000 and OS X 10.3 are personal favorites.  I loved and hated those OS versions not for their features or how pretty they were, but for how much or little they bothered me.  Whether they made it easy to get my work done, or constantly nagged me with crashes, pop-ups and delays.

Windows has been annoying, at least to me, for many years.  Instability, resume failures, clunky user interface and a general difficulty getting basics tasks accomplished made Windows annoying enough that I used my Mac wherever possible, and my Windows system only for tasks the Mac wasn't suited.  Windows 7 is, in my opinion, the first version of Windows that is pleasant enough to use exclusively.  Before Windows 7, the only version of Windows that I didn't find annoying was 1999's Windows 2000, which like Windows 7, just went about its business quietly and reliably.  Windows 2000 was far less annoying than Mac OS 8.

Of course, OS X is also pleasant enough to use exclusively, and has been since 2003's OS X 10.3 release.  Panther was so good because Apple took the previous version, 2002's Jaguar, and smoothed away all of the rough edges.  Jaguar had the user interface down and everything was smooth and easy, but some tasks were just difficult to accomplish.  The interface was also fairly inconsistent, with about half of the OS in Apple's "brushed metal" look, and the other half in "platinum", while some of the original OS X 10.0 and 10.1's garish colors remained as well.

Panther made OS X less annoying, while Jaguar made it modern and usable.  Just as 7 makes Windows less annoying, while Vista made it modern and usable.  And there, dear reader, lies the difference.  Panther was 6-years-ago, and Apple has continued to make its modern OS less and less annoying.  Microsoft, to be applauded for Windows 7, is still behind the power curve when it comes to getting out of the way. 

So where does that leave the latest, greatest OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard"?  I consider Snow Leopard to be the best desktop operating system available today.  Yes, there are tasks that are easier in Windows 7, just as there have always been tasks that are better implemented on Windows, but there are just as many tasks that are easier on OS X.  Lets look at a few.

As a trial lawyer, suspend to RAM (called sleep by Mac users) is the holy grail.  My first PowerBook, a 1993 model 145b, could sleep and wake near instantly, requiring at most a second or two to become fully responsive.  That today's OS X takes about 3 seconds is extremely impressive when you consider how many more things my MacBook Air has to do to suspend and resume than that PowerBook 145b did.  USB, wifi, Bluetooth, not to mention applications measured in hundreds of megabytes instead of hundreds of kilobytes should suggest how much more is involved in putting a computer to sleep and waking it up.

Every version of OS X suspends and resumes just about as fast as the version before, while handing more and more memory, larger and larger applications and more and more complex connections.  Windows couldn't even wake up reliably until Vista, and still takes about twice as long in Windows 7.

Where OS X is also superior is in its integration with Apple hardware.  Installation is always easy as all drivers for every supported Apple computer are included on the OS X install DVD and are installed by default.  There is no issue about whether you'll be able to find the correct driver for your laptop's video chipset or your wifi card, if it came from Apple,   it will just work, right away.

Snow Leopard is $29 from Apple, so moving from previous versions, so long as you have an Intel Mac, is pretty much a no-brainer.  Making it even easier is the fact that in-place upgrades, which I never recommend, do seem to be reliable from most accounts on the web.  I'm a fanatic and I still do only clean installs, but I would appear to be in the minority these days.  In-place upgrade is easy, just boot from the 10.6 DVD, click a few times and less than an hour later your Mac will be faster and more stable.

Clean install is also much easier than on Windows.  Back up your old install to an external drive (Leopard's Time Machine is great for this) and then wipe your drive from the 10.6 DVD.  After your install is complete, you can select your Time Machine archive and OS X's Migration Assistant will copy over your data, settings and documents.  You may need to reactivate an application or two, but most likely everything will just work, exactly as it used to.  Migration Assistant takes a few hours over a network, about 45 minutes over FireWire, but sure is easier and more convenient than reinstalling all application and data from scratch like a clean Windows install requires.

Unlike with Windows 7, where I recommend its adoption as part of normal equipment replacement cycles from XP and Vista machines, with Snow Leopard I recommend its immediate adoption by anyone and everyone with an Intel Macintosh.  Snow Leopard is that good, that inexpensive, and thoroughly unannoying.