Don’t upgrade to Snow Leopard until you’ve read this
Tomorrow is the day Mac users have been anticipating for the best part of this year - the release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard by Apple. At $29, the speed improvements and subtle enhancements it will bring are a snip. However be warned - it seems the Leopard will come with a bite and there will inevitably be some nasty incompatibility surprises in store in terms of software and possibly even hardware.
Engadget and Wired have been two of the first sites to give Snow Leopard a test and have discovered quite a few problems along the way. Here are some of the most important things to be aware of before you upgrade:
- Don’t expect a visual revolution. If you’re expecting an entirely new looking Operating System to Leopard then don’t bother. Most of the enhancements in Snow Leopard are under the hood.
- PowerPC Macs are not supported. As Wired point out:
If you own an older Mac powered by a PowerPC chip (rather than Intel), then you’re out of luck: Snow Leopard won’t run on your machine. The requirements are as follows: You must own an Intel Mac equipped with at least 1GB of memory, and the install requires at least 5GB of free hard drive space for the install. And of course, you’ll need a DVD drive to be able to read the disc and run the installation. (MacBook Air owners: We hope you have an external optical drive.) Not sure what kind of processor you own? Click on the Apple icon in the upper-left corner and select “About This Mac.” If the word “PowerPC” comes up in the “Processor” field, then you can not run this upgrade. If it says “Intel,” you’re fine.
- Don’t be in a hurry. You’ll need 45 minutes to an hour to complete the installation (so make sure your battery is fully charged if you intend doing it unplugged)
- iMacs will struggle the most. Engadget report:
We didn’t have any problems with the more pristine MacBook Pros in our fleet, but one of our production machines is a cranky older iMac that’s been in constant use for over two years without a system rebuild, and when it restarted the desktop pictures were all set to the defaults, the System Preferences app wouldn’t launch from the Apple Menu, our MobileMe sync states were a little confused and Spotlight began reindexing all the external drives. Fixing these problems didn’t take much, but if your machine is already acting up don’t expect everything to go perfectly.
- Hard drive space gains will vary. Apple promises you will get around 7GB of hard drive space back after installing Snow Leopard but it seems the reality could be a lot lower (only 3.5GB in the case of Wired) or a lot higher (up to 20GB in the case of Engadget!)
- Make sure you’ve got all your printers handy. Snow Leopard only installs drivers for those printers that you’ve used in the past.
- Get rid of your tweaks and hacks. If you’ve hacked or tweaked Leopard significantly, then expect a lot of ironing-out to do when you’ve upgraded.
- QuickTime Pro will be replaced by QuickTime X. If you performed a Standard Upgrade and got QuickTime Pro, it will be replaced by the new version QuickTime X for which there are no preferences meaning you can’t view videos on a second monitor, choose a default full screen setting or export to as many formats anymore. You can however apparently re-install Pro from the Snow Leopard disc or the “Utilities” folder.
- InputManager plugins won’t work. This includes many extensions for Safari and applications such as 1Password won’t work under Snow Leopard.
- Growl alerts may not work properly. Although this will surely be remedied by the developers very shortly.
- WiFi and Spotlight may act erratically. Depending on the model you use. Engadget reports:
On a 17-inch unibody we were putting through the paces, the WiFi inexplicably has gone out and we have yet to get it working again. On a 15-inch, older generation MacBook Pro (3,1), Spotlight will only fetch search results in the dropdown - — results in a Finder window come up empty.
As both tests found, most applications will work fine on Snow Leopard and those that don’t will rapidly be updated to do so. As a general rule, if an application is older than 3 years, then there’s a good chance you’ll experience some problems with it but for most people, that will be a minority of their apps. Such teething problems are to be expected with a new OS install and are nothing to be unduly concerned about.
Let us know any further bugs or problems you’ve found after upgrading!
Posted at 4:14 am on Aug 30th
I only had one problem and that is that i cant get into Mail, not at all I have to force quit because the application is not responding. So i am thinking about going back to Leopard until Snow Leopard gets it right, thank god i had my ipod touch or i wouldn’t see who wrote me, or write them back.
Posted at 7:56 am on Aug 31st
Sorry to hear about that Daniel - Mail is quite a big one for them to overlook. I wonder if it’s got anything to do with the new support for Exchange in Snow Leopard. I’m sure Apple will issue a fix very soon as more users discover it if it’s a genuine bug.
Posted at 8:01 pm on Aug 31st
Also got problems getting into mail. It starts, reindexes database for a while, then looks like its starting. Trying to connect to my two gmail accounts it just crashes. Tried to reboot, restart mail and no results. Mail starts to just crash again. I would say its a problem.
Posted at 11:45 pm on Aug 31st
repair permissions before and after the upgrade
Posted at 11:37 am on Sep 2nd
Massive problems here. Mail crashes occasionally, Aperture crashes all the time, especially when trying to export. CS3 has crashed. I mainly see the crashing when going into the dialog boxes (i.e export etc)
I am not going to go into work arounds, that’s not my job, I paid a fortune for all of my apple gear to get away from these type of issues. Apple should have gotten this right before releasing it.
Posted at 11:44 am on Sep 2nd
Yes same problem here. I installed Snow leopard on a mbp 2.4 and everything went well but when I did the same on a macbook 2.13 black edition, I had a problem with my mail. Mail launched but after that it crashed. Here’s how I worked around this problem.
I moved my complete mail folder from /username/libary/ to my desktop.
Then I launched mail and it worked.
After this I imported my messages from my desktop using the import menu in mail. (file-import mailboxes-apple mail, continue and choose your “old” mail folder on your desktop and press continue.
After you have imported your mail you will have to move your messages back to the original locations. (Inbox sent messages etc).
This is not the solution but barely a work around.
Good luck!
Posted at 7:41 am on Sep 4th
Had to restore Leopard, as Snow Leopard rendered Mail unusable. All outgoing mail server accounts suddenly started rejecting all my email addresses.
Posted at 1:32 pm on Sep 4th
Thanks for all your comments and feedback. I’ve posted something on possible solutions here:
http://en.onsoftware.com/how-to-fix-mail-problems-in-snow-leopard/
Posted at 11:13 am on Sep 5th
Same here - mail will not work, crashes everytime on launch, going back to Leopard.
Posted at 3:58 pm on Sep 8th
Add another user with mail crashing. So far no work around. Can’t access the menus either.
Posted at 3:23 pm on Sep 9th
We were three people at the office upgrading yesterday having issues.
These two issues will make me go back to Leopard tonight:
1) The DNS service seems to stop working frequently. To get it up again you have to disconnect turn airport on and off again
2) Mail is configured against our exchange sever, but quite soon it stops receiving new mails… I have to restart mail to get new mails delivered! My inbox is quite big, 3500 mails and 500 unread and I seem to experience more problems than my colleagues which all have the DNS issue. The mail and DNS issue are unrelated, because web browser work when mail is failing.
Posted at 6:26 am on Sep 15th
Same prob here (mbp 2.4, 17”)
1: mail crash
2: cannot acces subfolders in finder (Qnap 401 NAS)
3: cannot access subfolders on USB hard disk (mac formated)
went back to leopard this night-((((
bouhaaa not used to get this shit with apple…
Posted at 9:01 pm on Sep 18th
Also, under Snow Leopard mail, dragging a group from Address Book to the send fields in mail leaves them in a non-alphabatized fashion. Unlike Leopard which kept them alphabatized.
Posted at 2:36 pm on Oct 27th
Too many network problems for me on a MacBook and a mac Mini. I even tried clean installs with no improvement. So I went back to leopard.
Should not be this hard. I hard almost no third party applications and on a clean install you would have thought at least one Mac would have improved? This tells me from reading about other user’s with similar issues that Apple did not test SL enough. It was pushed out early in my opinion to beat Microsoft. Gee, I have heard this story before with Vista. Now I guess the shoes on the other foot.
Posted at 9:23 am on Nov 21st
My ISP tech tells gives me a specific address to enter in my Mail>Preference>Accounts>Out Going Mail (SMTP).
When I try to enter the address Mac blocks any attempt to fill in the blank. I bet that Mac won’t let me send this note anyhow, so I’ll end it here. It’s a classic ‘catch 22′, no mail access because your not allowed, and you can’t use the mail to access help because you can’t use e-mail because you can’t get any help…ad-infinitum?
Posted at 3:39 pm on Nov 27th
When I copy an email address to paste to another database or YouSendIt or such, instead of just getting the email address, I get the person’s full name with the email address in brackets. It’s not a crash or anything like some of the other problems detailed above, but it’s an unwanted “new feature,” causes the extra step of deleting the person’s name, and it’s a bit irritating. Anyone know if this is fixable?