I’ve upgrade two Macs (2009 MacBook Pro Laptop & 2006 Mac Pro desktop) to Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 and here’s a few things I’ve experienced.
Note: These findings are mostly from my older Mac Desktop which has many years of accumulation of odd utilities and applications. Your mileage may vary with your own Snow Leopard upgrade but I’m sharing so you’ll know what I ran into. On the newer laptop the upgrade was uneventful.
I purchased a family pack upgrade and I had a couple failed upgrade attempts with my machines getting an error while reading the DVD–until I cleaned the DVD. There wasn’t anything I could see on the disk but after cleaning it no more problems. Strange!
Snow Leopard by default doesn’t load Rosette (the application that allows you to run older PowerPC applications on newer Intel boxes. So if you have any old applications/utilities you’ll get a message that they couldn’t be run without Rosetta. At that point you can either install Rosetta from the upgrade DVD or replace/upgrade the application(s). I didn’t think I had any older applications but found out there was a screen calibration notification utility–I deleted it. Just be aware.
Snow Leopard Mail will upgrade your mail database and will disable any older plugins. I had a wide screen plugin for previewing mail in a window to the right rather then below (similar to Outlook)–gone!
I had to reenter license data for a couple of utilities from Ambrosia Software Inc. After entering then information they worked okay.
Take note, simply because you’ve got an Intel Mac doesn’t mean that it will now run in 64-bit mode with Snow Leopard. Older Intel Macs may not. By default my 2006 Mac Pro doesn’t load the 64-bit OS X kernel because it has 32 bit EFI firmware–my 2009 MacBook Pro will load the 64-bit kernel. This isn’t a big deal at the moment but may be when application developers take full advantage of Snow Leopards 64-bit capabilities. The processors on my Mac Pro are 64-bit Xeon Dual-Core so there may be a future work around (hack) in my case.
Printers: My Magicolor 2430Dl network laser printer worked with the OS X 10.5 driver. My Epson Stylus R2880 color photo printer required a new OS X 10.6 driver which was available on the Epson web site. Both are now working.
Scanner: My Epson Perfection 4870 Photo scanner is working–using VueScan software.
Update 9/3/09: If you use Apple’s Safari as your browser with third party plugins such as GLIMS, XMarks, 1Password 2.x the plugins will not work with Safari in its default 64-bit mode. Work arounds: You can set a flag for Safari to run in 32-bit mode and GLIMS will work, no work around yet for Xmarks and for 1Password you’ll have o upgrade to version 3.x.
Update 9/5/09: Subjectively, Snow Leopard does seem a little faster then Leopard. Applications seem to launch a bit faster and windows are a little snappier. I haven’t measured anything–this is a “seat-of-the-pants” observation.
Update 9/8/09: A beta version of Xmarks for Safari which works in Snow Leopard has been released.
I’ll update this post if/when I discover any new issues. It’s not a major upgrade but there are a few nice features that I believe make it worth while. It’s smaller then Leopard so you’ll get some HD space back. For the price I’d recommend it.
Glad to hear that everything went well. Maybe I’ll do the upgrade in a couple of weeks/months. :-)
1Password is beta testing version 3 which works properly in Snow Leopard. Visit their forums to find out more.
@Court: I did mention the 1Password v3 in my update to this post but thanks for the shout out! 1password v2.x will work if you have Safari run in the 32-bit mode. Version 3 (beta) is required if you want to run Safari in 64-bit mode. However, if you run Safari in 64-bit mode some of the other plugins will not work (GLIM) at this time.
Thank you for this post – we have very similar desktop configurations – a 2006 Mac Pro with the 64-bit dual Xeon processors, and better yet, the same printer. I’ve held off upgrading until I could find out whether my printer would continue to work, since it wasn’t on Apple’s Snow Leopard-compatible list. We don’t share the same model scanner, but I bet it uses the same set of drivers – yours is an Epson 4870, and mine is a 4490. I’m going to go out and pick up my family pack now.
Thanks again
@Dreadnought: Glad you found this post helpful and good luck on your upgrades!
The message There is a problem reading the Mac OS X Install DVD. Carefully clean the disc and try again turns out to be misleading. In my case, the problem was bad memory. I replaced the bad memory card and the upgrade then went quickly and flawlessly. In the bargain, a number of other problems (Firefox and Safari crashing frequently) have also gone away.
Its rare for OS X to generate wrong error messages. This is the first time in 20 years of being a Macintosh user that Ive encountered one.
@David: Thanks for sharing your experience with misleading error messages and memory problems.
In my case, once I cleaned the DVD the error went away and never returned. I used the same DVD (family pack) to upgrade five computers with no additional error messages. I’ve also not been experiencing any crashes. For me, I believe it was something on the DVD.
Earl: Just an update. I finally installed Snow Leopard (yah!), but I initially had trouble getting my Konica Minolta Magicolor to work. I thought I’d try downloading and reinstalling a fresh copy of the driver, and was a little shocked to see that KM hasn’t updated the driver since Panther was released.
Anyway, I launched the uninstaller app, and was prompted that I’d need Rosetta to make it run – and then the lightbulb went on. I needed Rosetta to make the printer driver operate, and once that was installed, no further issues. I didn’t need to update my scanner driver – it worked just fine.