Mac Leopard 10.6

Mac Leopard 10.6 9,6/10 2772 votes

About Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update. The 10.6.8 update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes that: Enhance the Mac App Store to get your Mac ready to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was billed as primarily under-the-hood changes to OS X 10.5 Leopard, but it was much more significant than that. Snow Leopard was announced at the June 2008 Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) and released on August 28, 2009. Shop for mac os x 10.6 snow leopard at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up. Apple on Wednesday released Mac OS X 10.6.5, the latest version of its Snow Leopard operating system. As per usual, the update—which is recommended for all users of 10.6—is chock full of bug. Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Computer, Inc. And available as part of its Mac OS X operating system. It was included as the default browser in Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) and is the only browser bundled with Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger).

In June of 2004, during the WWDC keynote address, Steve Jobs revealed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to developers and the public for the first time. When the finished product arrived in April of 2005, Tiger was the biggest, most important, most feature-packed release in the history of Mac OS X by a wide margin. Apple's marketing campaign reflected this, touting 'over 150 new features.'

All those new features took time. Since its introduction in 2001, there had been at least one major release of Mac OS X each year. Tiger took over a year and a half to arrive. At the time, it definitely seemed worth the wait. Fac simile disdetta contratto software pdf. Tiger was a hit with users and developers. Apple took the lesson to heart and quickly set expectations for the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard. Through various channels, Apple communicated its intention to move from a 12-month to an 18-month release cycle for Mac OS X. Leopard was officially scheduled for 'spring 2007.'

As the date approached, Apple's marketing machine trod a predictable path.

Apple even went so far as to list all 300 new features on its website. As it turns out, 'spring' was a bit optimistic. Leopard actually shipped at the end of October 2007, nearly two and a half years after Tiger. Did Leopard really have twice as many new features as Tiger? That's debatable. What's certain is that Leopard included a solid crop of new features and technologies, many of which we now take for granted. (For example, have you had a discussion with a potential Mac user since the release of Leopard without mentioning Time Machine? I certainly haven't.)

Mac OS X appeared to be maturing. The progression was clear: longer release cycles, more features. What would Mac OS X 10.6 be like? Would it arrive three and a half years after Leopard? Would it and include 500 new features? A thousand?

Max payne 3 game pc. At WWDC 2009, Bertrand Serlet announced a move that he described as 'unprecedented' in the PC industry.

That's right, the next major release of Mac OS X would have no new features. The product name reflected this: 'Snow Leopard.' Mac OS X 10.6 would merely be a variant of Leopard. Better, faster, more refined, more.. uh.. snowy.

Advertisement

This was a risky strategy for Apple. After the rapid-fire updates of 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 followed by the riot of new features and APIs in 10.4 and 10.5, could Apple really get away with calling a 'time out?' I imagine Bertrand was really sweating this announcement up on the stage at WWDC in front of a live audience of Mac developers. Their reaction? Spontaneous applause. There were even a few hoots and whistles.

Many of these same developers applauded the '150+ new features' in Tiger and the '300 new features' in Leopard at past WWDCs. Now they were applauding zero new features for Snow Leopard? What explains this?

It probably helps to know that the '0 New Features' slide came at the end of an hour-long presentation detailing the major new APIs and technologies in Snow Leopard. It was also quickly followed by a back-pedaling ('well, there is one new feature..') slide describing the addition of Microsoft Exchange support. In isolation, 'no new features' may seem to imply stagnation. In context, however, it served as a developer-friendly affirmation.

The overall message from Apple to developers was something like this: 'We're adding a ton of new things to Mac OS X that will help you write better applications and make your existing code run faster, and we're going to make sure that all this new stuff is rock-solid and as bug-free as possible. We're not going to overextend ourselves adding a raft of new customer-facing, marketing-friendly features. Instead, we're going to concentrate 100% on the things that affect you, the developers.'

But if Snow Leopard is a love letter to developers, is it a Dear John letter to users? You know, those people that the marketing department might so crudely refer to as 'customers.' What's in it for them? Believe it or not, the sales pitch to users is actually quite similar. As exhausting as it has been for developers to keep up with Apple's seemingly never-ending stream of new APIs, it can be just as taxing for customers to stay on top of Mac OS X's features. Exposé, a new Finder, Spotlight, a new Dock, Time Machine, a new Finder again, a new iLife and iWorkalmost every year, and on and on. And as much as developers hate bugs in Apple's APIs, users who experience those bugs as application crashes have just as much reason to be annoyed.

Enter Snow Leopard: the release where we all get a break from the new-features/new-bugs treadmill of Mac OS X development. That's the pitch.

Leopard

Uncomfortable realities

But wait a second, didn't I just mention an 'hour-long presentation' about Snow Leopard featuring 'major new APIs and technologies?' When speaking to developers, Apple's message of 'no new features' is another way of saying 'no new bugs.' Snow Leopard is supposed to fix old bugs without introducing new ones. But nothing says 'new bugs, coming right up' quite like major new APIs. So which is it?

Advertisement

Similarly, for users, 'no new features' connotes stability and reliability. But if Snow Leopard includes enough changes to the core OS to fill an hour-long overview session at WWDC more than a year before its release, can Apple really make good on this promise? Or will users end up with all the disadvantages of a feature-packed release like Tiger or Leopard—the inevitable 10.x.0 bugs, the unfamiliar, untried new functionality—but without any of the actual new features?

Yes, it's enough to make one quite cynical about Apple's real motivations. To throw some more fuel on the fire, have a look at the Mac OS X release timeline below. Next to each release, I've included a list of its most significant features.

That curve is taking on a decidedly droopy shape, as if it's being weighed down by the ever-increasing number of new features. (The releases are distributed uniformly on the Y axis.) Maybe you think it's reasonable for the time between releases to stretch out as each one brings a heavier load of goodies than the last, but keep in mind the logical consequence of such a curve over the longhorn haul.

And yeah, there's a little upwards kick at the end for 10.6, but remember, this is supposed to be the 'no new features' release. Version 10.1 had a similar no-frills focus but took a heck of a lot less time to arrive.

Looking at this graph, it's hard not to wonder if there's something siphoning resources from the Mac OS X development effort. Maybe, say, some project that's in the first two or three major releases of its life, still in that steep, early section of its own timeline graph. Yes, I'm talking about the iPhone, specifically iPhone OS. The iPhone business has exploded onto Apple's balance sheets like no other product before, even the iPod. It's also accruing developers at an alarming rate.

It's not a stretch to imagine that many of the artists and developers who piled on the user-visible features in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have been reassigned to iPhone OS (temporarily or otherwise). After all, Mac OS X and iPhone OS share the same core operating system, the same language for GUI development, and many of the same APIs. Some workforce migration seems inevitable.

And let's not forget the 'Mac OS X' technologies that we later learned were developed for the iPhone and just happened to be announced for the Mac first (because the iPhone was still a secret), like Core Animation and code signing. Such conspiracy theories certainly aren't helped by WWDC keynote snubs and other indignities suffered by Mac OS X and the Mac in general since the iPhone arrived on the scene. And so, on top of everything else, Snow Leopard is tasked with restoring some luster to Mac OS X.

Mac snow leopard 10.6

Got all that? A nearly two-year development cycle, but no new features. Major new frameworks for developers, but few new bugs. Significant changes to the core OS, but more reliability. And a franchise rejuvenation with few user-visible changes.

It's enough to turn a leopard white.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was billed as primarily under-the-hood changes to OS X 10.5 Leopard, but it was much more significant than that.

Snow Leopard was announced at the June 2008 Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) and released on August 28, 2009.

For the first time since Mac OS 8.5 was released in October 1998, Apple left behind an entire processor architecture. In 1998, it left behind Motorola 680×0 CPUs in favor of PowerPC (the first PPC Macs hawered been introduced in March 1994). With OS X 10.6, Apple left behind PowerPC CPUs in favor of Intel (the first Intel Macs were introduced in January 2006).

Snow Leopard is not impacted by the “goto fail” bug discovered in early 2014.

Big Changes with 10.6

  • Snow Leopard is smaller than Leopard. By removing PowerPC and other unnecessary legacy code, Apple greatly reduced the drive space needed by the operating system. It takes up about half as much space and thus will install about twice as quickly as Leopard. That said, it makes more demands of your hardware, so a Mac that runs Leopard comfortably with 1 GB of memory may feel very sluggish with Snow Leopard once you have more than a couple apps running. We strongly recommend at least 2 GB of memory.
  • Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) means that the entire operating system is designed to take advantage of multiple cores, whether on one chip or more than one. Process threads, which were handled by apps in the past, are now handled by the OS with new programs designed to use GCD. GCD will assign only as many threads to an app as it currently needs, which makes for better use of resources.
  • Full 64-bit support means programs will no longer be limited to 4 GB of RAM; the new maximum (16 exabytes) is meaningless, as no computer in the forseeable future will be able to hold billions of gigabytes of memory. Both the OS and almost all “system applications” (Finder, Safari, Mail, iChat, iCal, etc.) are ready for 64-bit operation. And Snow Leopard is completely backwards-compatible with 32-bit apps. First generation Intel Macs designed around Intel Core Solo and Core Duo chips do not support 64-bit operation; all Macs since then do.
  • OpenCL takes advantage of powerful modern graphic processing units (GPUs, a.k.a. “video cards”) for more than displaying video. All of that processing power will also be available for general purpose computing.
  • QuickTime X introduced a new QuickTime player and will take full advantage of Core Audio, Core Video, and Core Animation. It can record audio and video using your Mac’s built-in microphone and webcam, and it can trim and export for iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, YouTube, and MobileMe so you don’t need to worry about which codec to use. QuickTime X supports HTTP live streaming, which can adjust quality on the fly based on available network bandwidth. Of course it takes advantage of GCD and 64-bit operation.
  • Exchange Support is built right into the OS. Mail, iCal, and Address Book will work with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. This may explain why Microsoft finally brought Outlook to the Mac with Office 2010. So long, Outlook.
  • The Finder has been completely rewritten to support 64-bit operation and take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch. This makes the Finder much more responsive.
  • For the first time, the Services menu is contextual: You will only see the services available to the current app. (Until now, half or more of the Services might be grayed out because they don’t work with your current program.)
  • Exposé can work in the Dock – click and hold an application icon and it will display that app’s active documents in a grid. Apple claims this will make it “even easier to find what you’re looking for.”
  • Time Machine backups are up to 50% faster, according to Apple. This will be especially helpful for that first, long, full backup.
  • Macs shut down and wake up more quickly, and joining a WiFi network is also faster. This makes for more energy efficient file sharing – your sleeping Mac uses less energy and wakes more quickly to serve up files.
  • If you travel with you’re Mac, you’ll appreciate automatic time zone settings.
  • The ‘Wake on Demand’ feature may keep your Mac from staying asleep. The fix is to reset the Energy Saver settings to their defaults, then put in your own settings.

Things Lost with 10.6

Mac Snow Leopard 10.6

  • There is no support for LocalTalk/AppleTalk in Snow Leopard. You’ll need to find another way to connect those old printers.
  • There is no longer any support for Palm OS devices in iSync. The Missing Sync (commercial software) does support Palm devices.
  • Snow Leopard ignores creator codes when launching documents, something every Mac OS prior to 10.6 has supported – it’s been part of the Mac OS since the beginning.
  • There is no write support for HFS+ volumes (floppies, hard drives, etc.)

Snow Leopard was replaced with OS X 10.7 Lion on July 20, 2011 after just 11 months at the helm.

Last Supported Software

As OS X has moved forward, more and more software has dropped support for Snow Leopard.

From Apple

From Other Vendors

Minimum Hardware Requirements

  • Intel-based Mac
  • 1 GB of RAM, although 2 GB is strongly recommended
  • 5 GB of available drive space
  • DVD-compatible optical drive
  • Grand Central Dispatch requires a dual-core CPU
  • 64-bit support requires a Core 2 or newer CPU
  • OpenCL is compatible with all current Macs. It is not compatible with:
    • iMacs released before March 2009
    • Mac mini released before March 2009
    • MacBook released before October 2008
    • MacBook Pro released before June 2007
    • Mac Pro released before January 2008 (Jan. 2008 and later models with unsupported video cards can used the discontinued GeForce 8800 upgrade kit – Apple part no. MB137Z/A – for OpenCL support. The GeForce GT 120 retails for $149, is designed to work with the 2009 Mac Pro and has been reported to work with the 2008 model as well.)

Further Reading

  • New iMacs and MacBooks soon?, Blu-ray on Macs, looking back at Lisa and Mac Plus, and more, Mac News Review, 09.25. Also Snow Leopard sales data, using FreeHand and AppleWorks with Snow Leopard, affordable Pentax K-x DSLR even comes in red, and more.
  • Cheap USB 2 CardBus solution, OS 9 and Kanga, mobile Mac value, and more, Charles W Moore, Miscellaneous Ramblings, 2009.09.09. Also a look at several options for using an old LocalTalk printer with a Mac running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
  • 100 apps incompatible with ‘Snow Leopard’, Mac mini and SuperDrive firmware updates, and more, Mac News Review, 2009.09.04. Also August market share changes, retrieving a stuck disc, anti-malware in Snow Leopard, USB 3.0 certification begins, and more.
  • Wake on demand in Snow Leopard, extended repair policy for MacBook Air hinges, big drives, and more, The ‘Book Review, 2009.09.04. Also Windows 7 great on a MacBook Pro, gScreen preparing dual display notebook, free OS X 10.6 deal from QuickerTek, bargain ‘Books from $179 to $2,294, and more.

Downloadable Updates

Mac Os X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Standalone Updates let you update to a newer version of Mac OS X from your hard drive instead of using Software Update, which requires an Internet connection. Download the one(s) you need and install them after mounting the disk image and launching the Installer program.

There are two types of Standalone Updates: Individual (or Delta) and Combo.

  • Individual Updates update one version of Mac OS X to the next version. For example, the Mac OS X 10.6.4 Update updates Mac OS X 10.6.3 to version 10.6.4. Individual Updates are also known as Delta Updates.
  • Combo Updates update the base version of a Mac OS X release to the version specified in the Combo Update, including all intermediate updates. For example, the Mac OS X 10.6.4 Combo Update updates any earlier version of Mac OS X 10.6 to Mac OS X 10.6.4 using a single installer, as opposed to installing the individual Mac OS X 10.6.1, 10.6.2, 10.6.3, and 10.6.4 updates.

Standalone Updates are generally available 24 to 48 hours after the Update is available through Software Update.

If you burn a Standalone Update to CD, its disk image must be copied to your desktop or another location on your Mac OS X startup disk in order to be installed.

This page will be updated as new Standalone Updates become available.

Mac OS X 10.6.1

Mac OS X 10.6.2

Mac OS X 10.6.3

Mac OS X 10.6.4

Mac OS X 10.6.5

Mac OS X 10.6.6

Version 10.6.6 introduced the Mac App Store.

Mac OS X 10.6.7

Mac OS X 10.6.8

Keywords: #osxsnowleopard #macosxsnowleopard #snowleopard

Short link: http://goo.gl/pPqRxm

searchword: osxsnowleopard

Comments are closed.