Wait for a few releases first.
It’s the typical hype of a new beginning with every new operating system. The promise of an enjoyable computing experience with no worries plus dazzling performance.
You’re expecting way too much, you are going to be a little disappointed. Early adopters of the new Snow Leopard or any new operating system will have to wait longer for software updates to be released to resolve problems. You will be the first to experience the bugs that slipped by the quality assurance team.
Benefits down the road.
Some of Snow Leopard’s promised performance gains aren’t going to manifest until developers fine-tune their applications to take advantage of multiple processing cores, and OpenCL, which grabs power from your Mac’s graphics processing unit. For the full-on Snow Leopard experience, give programmers a few months to catch up.
Can your Mac handle Snow Leopard?
Machines with graphics cards that are more than a couple of years old and even Macs that were released more than two years ago will not dramatically benefit any performance boost with Snow Leopard. If you want to run Snow Leopard just to take advantage of other features like the enhanced Services menu, perkier iChat, and improved accessibility might be a good reason to upgrade. Of course Snow Leopard WILL NOT work on any PowerPC Mac, Intel Macs only.
Can your software handle Snow Leopard?
The majority of core business applications run fine on Snow Leopard, but some apps aren’t completely compatible yet with the new OS. Check the list with Snow Leopard Checker, a free download, to see what’s not working and what’s sort of working before you upgrade. Snow Leopard Checker currently lists 70+ apps that aren’t compatible with Snow Leopard, such as Adobe CS2 Suite, Cyber Duck, CuteFTP, Google Gears browser extension, TiVo Desktop 1.94, Parallels 3.0 (v.4.0 works),and others that are “sort of” working, like the Adobe CS3 Suite, where Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver are reportedly experiencing minor bugs. Sometimes bugs manifest due to a combination of issues that may not be present on everyone’s machines — but if a program you rely on is on the “not working” list you may want to check the developer’s website for updates.
Older peripherals that you can’t afford to replace.
That slide scanner you only use a few times a year, the old printer you rely on for faxing and cranking out documents cheaply, an old digital camera you keep had for a long time… don’t assume they’ll be supported in Snow Leopard. If you depend on it and don’t want to lose it’s operation with your computer, wait and see if the manufacturer rolls out updated drivers in the next month or two — certainly newer products will be first on the provide-support priority list.
Do you have the time to do it right?
This is likely of deep concern only to geeks but we’ve learned anything can go wrong and some prep work is needed. From checking out the health of hard drives, backing up data or making a mirror copy of the hard drive. If you want to do it right this is not an hour’s worth of work. If you can’t afford more than an hour of downtime or you don’t have the time to do the upgrade right, wait until you do. Otherwise, you wish might not have done it!
Exchange is not exactly plug n play.
Out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange doesn’t mean Exchange is going to work if your IT department still has to turn on Exchange Autodiscover. And don’t expect IT to instinctively understand how to get you Mac going with Exchange, especially if you work in a mostly-PC shop. If IT lacks patience, you may want to wait until the brave early adopters report back with full details on how to get Exchange going.
Snow Leopard is not a must have right now.
What do you expect for $29 bucks? Snow Leopard is indisputably the start of something really new and cool — an operating system that takes advantage of every last drop of power from hardware and software components. It’s an exciting glimpse into the future, but for now reality of Snow Leopard isn’t quite there.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
If you happy with the way your Mac is performing, leave it be!
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