Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User)

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User) Snow Leopard is a truly exciting addition to the Mac OS X line, with half the footprint of previous versions, great new features in Expose & Stacks, quicker Time Machine backup, and faster wireless network interaction. It’s the world’s most advanced operating system, finely tuned.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User) System Requirements

Platform: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Media: DVD-ROM
Item Quantity: 1

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Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User) Reviews

Family pack is a fantastic value

The price of the family pack makes this a no brainer. You get license to install on 5 computers in the same household for a price less than two individual copies of Snow Leopard. And the OS itself is fantastic, below is my review of the OS itself:

I installed the family edition tonight on two laptops, a MacBook and MacBook Pro. It is immediately obvious the new Finder is worth the price of admission alone. Finder windows open and close quickly, there’s no annoying pauses and hangs. File copies are dramatically faster; no more need for power users to use a third party tool or drop into Terminal to copy files quickly. Time Machine backups are indeed faster, my old applications still work fine. When I opened a PowerPC app that needed Rosetta, Snow Leopard went to the Internet to download Rosetta–no need to dig out a DVD.

My primary applications–Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, OmniGraffle Pro, PowerPoint 2008, Word 2008, Flex Builder, Eclipse, FireFox, VMware Fusion–all seem to work just fine.

So I see no reason not to upgrade: The speed improvements, the painless installation, and most significantly, the much-improved Finder make this a bargain of an upgrade.

And that’s ignoring all the cool technologies under the hood (discussed in other reviews) and the small details that have been added (signal strength icons of wireless networks in the AirPort menu, for example).

Its Apple OSX, Nothing More Needs to be Said!!

People always get excited for OS upgrades and rightfully so given how much time we now spend in front of computers. Its also no secret that expectations for Mac OSX upgrades are always sky high. Its the best OS in the world so people expect Apple to continue pushing the envelope and they rarely if ever disappoint. With that being said I expect that a lot of people will ultimately be disappointed with Snow Leopard simply because this is really not like any of the previous OSX upgrades. With all of the previous upgrades Apple unleashed hundreds of powerful tools and upgrades and in so doing each iteration was obviously much better than the previous versions. The problem with Snow Leopard is that instead of concentrating on creating new tools or doing serious work on the user interface, Apple has instead chosen to pretty much leave things as be and instead focus on performance. So because of this a lot of people will see very little difference between Leopard and snow leopard, at least not as much of a difference as they have seen with previous updates. Hence the reason why I expect some will be disappointed.

Should People be disappointed, absolutely not. In fact I tip my hat to Apple for choosing to go this direction with this upgrade. Then again things are much different today than they were 4-5 years ago. Apple is doing amazingly well right now in regards to getting new customers. In fact I just saw some statistics a couple days ago that showed that almost 50% of the people who bought a Mac last quarter were people who had never purchased an Apple before. They are absolutely eating up market share. This combined with the complete and utter failure of Windows Vista has really taken the pressure off of Apple, at least in regards to the development of new features for its OS. In other words they don’t feel like they have to create something flashy and new. They are instead focusing on really tightening down the screws and getting OSX to a new level performance wise and that of course is all about making OSX 64 bit throughout.

The other thing that makes this update different from previous updates is that it isnt for everyone. This is the first time that the entire Mac community may not upgrade. This upgrade is only for Intel processor Macs. That means that anyone who is still using a G3, G4 or G5 is now stuck at 10.5. Your days of OS upgrades are over. I know that there are some Apple users out there that were really disappointed by this decision however it was without a doubt the proper decision. The future of Apple is with Intel and this really allows them to focus on the future and make this OS all it can be. Making this OS compatible with older Macs would be a complete and utter waste of resources. People who have older Macs can still use 10.5 so its not like they are screwed. 10.5 is more than good enough for older Macs. If you want to run 10.6, buy a new Mac.

I wont bother discussing the details of Snow Leopard as there are already a couple of reviews up that do a good job of discussing the new features. I will simply say that if you have an intel Mac then you wont want to miss this one. It may not have all the bells and whistles of past updates but it has something even more important in my book. It has power and a level of stability that other OS’s can only dream of achieving.

Bottom line – Apple just took the worlds best OS and made it that much better. It may appear to be pretty much the same OS but it only appears that way.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User)