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Slick.  Speedy.  Sexy.  Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.  You could easily replace the word “snow” in “Snow Leopard” with any other “s” adjective and still describe it accurately.  Snow Leopard, by Apple’s own admission, is “The worlds most advanced operating system [Leopard].  Finely tuned.”  It is, however, a truly unique experience for Mac users.  This is the first time that an OS upgrade has not introduced major changes to the look, feel, and features of an OS, so there is virtually no learning curve.  What there is, and love it we must, is simply a faster, easier, better…everything!  And for 29 bucks, it can not be denied that this is easily the best OS upgrade the Mac has ever seen.

What’s left out?

First off, change is always hard, because you either cut something out or you end up with backwards compatible bloat a la Vista.  Several big things have been lost in this revision, including PowerPC support (time to ditch the old Power- or i- computers, folks), Quicktime Pro, and Rosetta.  Okay, those last two are sort of false positives: you can still run Quicktime 7 Pro - in fact if it is installed, the Snow Leopard installer will keep it, along with your license, and install Quicktime X side-by-side.  And Rosetta is now an optional install, so you can get your PowerPC applications running if needed.  In addition, Apple has dropped support for its original HFS file system, supporting only the more modern HFS+.  HFS was introduced in 1985, and HFS+ in 1998 with OS 8.1, so this is not really a surprising move (24 years for a file format is pretty good).  Undoubtedly a third party compatibility tool will arise for those few whose needs include archival disks, but for the majority of us, this isn’t a huge loss.

What’s New?

More intelligent everything.

No, seriously.  Apple has somehow managed to raise the functionality bar.  The new Exposé features, better Stacks, and ability to minimize windows into an app’s Dock icon raise the Dock from an app launcher to a full-on computer interface.  Most people seem to miss this in favor of the whiz-bang graphics, but if Apple is going for a Tablet computer, they’ve just built the only interface that computer would need in the Dock.  Start paying attention Microsoft: the Start menu serves waaaaay too many functions, and doesn’t meet any of the needs fully.  All Apple has to do is add a link to the hard drive any any attached/inserted storage media, and there’s suddenly no need for a desktop.
Exposé now shows all windows, including those that have been minimized:

Exposé is also activated for a particular app, when you hold the mouse button down on an app’s icon (notice the subtle highlighting):

Stacks are now mini Finder windows—the iPod style of left-and-right moving, scrollable sheets has been been implemented (this is the Applications/Utilities folder):

General slickness.

Inertia.  Animation.  Seriously; when you scroll, FInder windows feel like iPhone lists, in that they scroll and then come go a gradual stop.  Renamed files/folders zoom to their new positions in the Finder window, while the items displaced gracefully slide to their new positions.  Everything about the system, including app launches and visual effects, feels faster, snappier, and somehow cooler. 

Size matters.

One of Apple’s claims with Snow Leopard is that it will slim down the footprint of the OS on your hard drive; the published number is somewhere around six gigabytes.  But many users are reporting heftier gains. How is this possible?  Well, not only does Snow Leopard take up less space (it is literally half the OS, since all PowerPC libraries have been cut), but the OS also reports drive space in a different way now.  For many years, there has been a dichotomy between geeks, who measure one gigabyte as 1,024 megabytes, and marketers, who rounded down to 1,000 (that’s why your 16 gig iPhone shows only 14.64 gigs in iTunes).  Snow Leopard has done away with the double math, favoring the marketing number.  So the free space reported on a disk post-Snow Leopard is not directly comparable to the pre-SL size.

Pre- and post-install Get Info windows for a 250GB disk:

What’s to Love?

Sounds of silence.

In exceptionally unscientific testing, the OS seems to put less burden on the logic board, leading to less fan noise than before.  Even running Windows 7 in VMWare isn’t kicking up the fans as often as it did before.  Not a killer feature, but more signs that the OS has really been improved.

Faster Shutdown.

Snow Leopard shuts down significantly faster than its predecessor, especially if you keep lots of apps open at once.  This is thanks to a new feature by which applications report their status to the OS: apps with unsaved changes receive a polite request to shut down, which can take a while, while apps who report no unsaved changes are axed immediately.  It is only a second or two per app, but that can add up the more apps you have running.

The look that thrills.

One major difference that you will notice is the higher contrast of your screen post-install.  This is because Snow Leopard changes the Mac’s default display gamma from 1.8 to the more standard 2.2 (used in televisions and Windows PCs).  The result: more contrast in bright portions of the screen, while some darker portions may lose some detail.  Photographers/digital print folks will need to be aware of this.  One other cool item is the general availability of the SnowStack photo browser to the general public.  This is just a cool bit of eye candy leveraging some of Snow Leopard’s more advanced WebKit features, but it is so worth it:  SnowStack

To Buy?

All in all, Snow Leopard is one of the most enjoyable Mac OS X Upgrades.  Nothing new to learn/figure out, just everything made better.  There are some known incompatibilities (see Apple’s List), but as with any release, most of those will be dealt with in a few months.  It is interesting to contrast Apple’s new OS with the recent upgrades from Microsoft.  One of the biggest differences, and here MS definitely needs to be paying attention, is the sheer amount of graphical interface.  Office 2007 introduced a rather bulky ribbon interface that will eat up at least one or two inches of your pages.  With Quicktime X, Apple has completely removed the interface (even the title bar disappears until you move the mouse).  Shrinking screens aside, this is still a great design: what you really care about, the content, is what you get.  In Windows 7, as in Vista, the title bars of windows take up a great deal of space to show a title and three buttons.  Take a lesson here Microsoft: trim the bloat, both visual and technical.  Apple has put the focus squarely on usability enhancements, and it exceeds expectations in every way.