I wasn’t really all that excited about Snow Leopard to begin with.

Probably the only features I was interested in were QuickTime 10 video & screencast recording, and some savings of disk space.

As for 64-bit support, I had mixed feelings. Since 1993 I’ve worked on 64-bit OS’s on systems such as the DEC Alpha, Solaris on UltraSparc, and racks of 64-bit Linux. However, I don’t run 64-bit OS’s on my Windows/Linux desktops as a general rule.

The reason mostly has to do with software and hardware driver issues with Windows and Linux 64-bit versions. Although most of these issues have been worked out over 8 years of both OS’s having 64-bit versions, you can sometimes run into one or two small issues which can just be really annoying.

Even today, brand-new cutting edge hardware can lack 64-bit driver support, and I like cutting-edge hardware!

In addition, none of the day to day programs I run on Windows or Linux desktops really take advantage of 64-bit processing, nor do I even own a desktop with over 4GB of memory.

Servers are a different story. Servers don’t plug into all kinds of crazy consumer hardware, so you can plug 64-bit Linux into them quite easily. Its not unusual for a Linux server to process multimedia and/or host large SQL databases. For these systems, 64-bit is a better choice.

But for consumer hardware, I will take hardware & software compatibility over 64-bitness any day of the week.

So, to take a bite of MacOS first dipping its toes into 64-bitness was risky, and I knew it.

Backing up

My first step was to back up my MacBook. I plugged in my USB SATA dock, inserted a 500GB disk, and fired up Time Machine.

Although all of my data seemed to backup, something that runs at the end of the backup told me the backup was unsuccessful with no addition information.

Not happy with Time Machine.

Upgrading in-place

From viewing the backup, I knew I had all the important stuff so I installed Snow Leopard anyway, doing an in-place upgrade.

This was extremely simple, and when it was complete I wouldn’t know the upgrade had happened at all. Great.

At one point, using Safari caused my entire MacBook to freeze behind the beach ball of death, but I tried to pretend that didn’t happen.

Testing 64-bit kernel – big mistake!

I had read that Snow Leopard doesn’t boot into 64-bit mode by default, so I decided to try the ‘64′ trick to see if I could make it, just out of curiosity. I pressed the ‘6′ and ‘4′ keys while booting, but not only did it not boot, it never booted again. Grey apple screen, that’s it. No matter how I booted, even safe mode, it would not load MacOS from the bootdisk.

What a bitch.

Booting from the install disk, the disk utility told me the bootdisk was borked and unfixable.

Argh.

So, I inserted my OEM hard drive and attempted a clean install with data migration, which was recommended anyway. While Time Machine had warned me my backup didn’t work, it didn’t complain about restoring it, which was great.

This worked fine (although Apple needs to have a look at its code which calculates ‘time remaining’), with some exceptions.

Stuff that broke

None of my Office 2008 programs would run (not even the uninstaller), some did not have icons anymore. I tried reinstalling over it but that did not work – I had to trash the Office app folder manually and then re-install.

Also broken was Adobe Reader and my Adobe Air apps like Tweetdeck. I had to trash these also and reinstall, as well as installing Rosetta, which is not installed by default with Snow Leopard.

Finally, Safari would not download files, really weird issue. It may have something to do with my download manager, Folx. I haven’t been able to isolate the issue yet.

Snow Leopard is not going to change your day to day computing experience (well, unless more of these issues crop up). It looks and smells just like Leopard, although I suspect Leopard is more stable and problem-free.

As for performance – I use a High-Performance SSD in my MacBook, which makes any Snow Leopard performance improvement negligible anyway. If you want performance, get a High-Performance SSD , don’t look to OS tweaks, MacOS is already very well optimized.

Going back to my OEM 5400 RPM hard drive for a bit while repairing the system really highlighted how used I have become to SSD performance. Things no longer happened instantly and in unison. Sometimes I actually had to WAIT for stuff. Argh.

In the end, I think Snow Leopard was a little tricky. It certainly involved a lot of work on Apple’s part, but none of that really shines through to the end user, so I agree that its a $29 Service Pack, which is kind of a ripoff.

Windows came out with 64-bit versions 8 years ago, but consumers were not forced to pay for that code unless they needed the 64-bit version – a decision they continue to have the option of doing or not doing.

For Mac users, 64-bitness comes 8 years late and $29 short.