Performance
On paper the Macbook Pro 13″ is a good system, and should have more than enough power to do everything I wanted. But after getting it home I noticed that Firefox was sluggish, especially when trying to play flash video. When opening lots of tabs (like I do very day when I start up my browser) there would often be hiccups for a couple of seconds when the computer thought about opening them. I gave Apple the benifit of the doubt because my desktop system sometimes has some problems with Firefox and Flash video too.

After doing a clean install of Snow Leopard everything is faster, and I was especially happy and a little surprised that Firefox and Flash are a lot faster too. On top of that all apps and general system usage seem to be noticeably snappier.

Printer Support
I am running a Windows Home Server as a file and print server and have had a lot of problems getting everything to play together. For some reason my Brother Laser printer would never even show up in the Leopard print setup dialog. After installing Snow Leopard I went to install the printer again and had my samba address and printer name ready. To my surprise the server was already listed, so I just clicked it and went all the way to the Brother Printer. I was then prompted to select the printer from a very long list of printers. The driver was then installed and it work right away.

Heat and Power
Another thing I did not like in Leopard was the heat and power usage. I had decent power usage, but I noticed that after being off power for just a half hour the meter said I only had three hours left. With Snow Leopard I have been using my system for over an hour and a half and it says I still have five and a half hours left. Now I am not sure if this is an actual change in battery drain, or if they just tweaked the battery meter code. But either way it makes me feel much better about my battery.

In Leopard I also noticed that the fan would come on quite a bit when the computer was idle and would get quite hot from time to time. Now I have not heard the fan get loud enough to hear one, and the weather here is hotter than ever. The system feels a little cooler too.

My Thoughts
As you can tell from my comments so far I am happy with Snow Leopard so far. Personally I only paid $10 for shipping so I have been looking forward to it for a while. But to be honest I would have been happy if I had paid $30. Maybe because I have programming experience I appreciate smaller more efficient code just as much as shiny features.

A few caveats though, I do not have a large library of Apple software I use all the time. Everything I use is pretty common and frequently updated. Also the Macbook Pro 13″ is very new, so it was unlikely it would have any compatibility problems. So after doing a clean install I had no issues with compatibility or stability.

If you have a lot of legacy software or hardware devices it would be a good idea to research support for your stuff before wiping your system. But when you are pretty sure all your stuff will work Snow Leopard is well worth the $30.

Everything they did in Snow Leopard seems help both the desktop but mostly the tablet. For example:

• Smaller Footprint: A new Tablet will most likely sport an SSD so the few extra gigabytes we scoffed at on the desktop become more relevant on a tablet.
• Faster: Faster code means they streamlined and made their code run more efficiently. This means much better performance for us on laptops and desktops, but would also mean that the full OS will run better on smaller devices. A tablet will most likely have a lower powered embedded CPU, like a Atom. So efficiency would be important.
• Software Support: A tablet would probably not like running emulation software like Rosetta. So this clean break mentality of Snow Leopard will help force developers to update their applications to the latest Snow Leopard API’s, and get rid of as much legacy apps and drivers as possible. Then when the tablet launches it will have as much software support as possible

These are just thoughts about where this could be leading. Even it a tablet is not coming I think optimizing code is a great thing, especially when the results are so noticeable. Personally I am not even all that excited about a tablet unless it costs around $300, which I am pretty sure it will not. My Macbook Pro and PC serve me well.

The recent news that they will not support CS3 on Snow Leopard is just another sign, but it has been going on for a long time. For me the first time I noticed it was when I tried to upgrade to Windows Vista 64. Back then CS3 was the newest release and people running Photoshop are the most likely to want more than 4GB’s of RAM that a 64bit OS provides. However first off Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 would not even install without several error messages and trips to the message boards. Once it was installed the PDF printer would not work at all. It took several months for them to release a fix, and to this day CS3 still has some more minor visual bugs that stopped me moving to 64bit Vista.

Now they are going one step further and just saying if you move to Snow Leopard you are on your own. So the software I spent nearly $1,500 on (more than the total cost of my main computer) just over a year ago is now unsupported on OS I might want to use it on. I have heard some people say that CS3 runs on Snow Leopard, but that is not the point. CS3 is so large there are many features that may not work properly, and even more situations we can not predict. That’s why rely on Adobe to release patches and fixes when these bugs crop up. With this announcement they are basically saying screw you to all the more cutting edge people trying to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but can not afford the several hundred dollars “UPGRADE” cost to move to CS4 from CS3.

Adobe is creating a lot of bad will by trying to force people to pay $500 dollars a year to get a few features each year. Which is pretty much what you have to do if you want to get updates to your software and keep the thing working.

What scared me more was when I looked around at my alternatives they are really thin. There is no option with the amount of integration Adobe CS provides between applications and bridge. There are a bunch of separate apps that provide some of the functionality. I do not like where this is leading at all.