Ask any Mac owner and they’ll likely tell you the Apple allure is a game of two halves: the reassuring hardware and the slick, consistent OS. Apple is finally delivering their latest version of OS X, v10.6 Snow Leopard, adding a new coat of polish to the company’s software prowess. SlashGear has been testing out Snow Leopard over the past few weeks, and we’ve found that perhaps its most satisfying aspect is that it upgrades things both visibly and less obviously, rather than one or the other. After the cut, why 64-bit matters, how Apple have streamlined the way you interact with your data, and why Snow Leopard might just be the bargain of the year.

Ease of installation

There’s a lot to be said for an OS upgrade that makes reliability its initial promise, and we had no issues installing Snow Leopard – a roughly 30 minute endeavor – on any of our test machines. OS X 10.6 also leaves your existing apps and data untouched – though we’d argue that such behavior is an expected aspect rather than a boasting point these days – together with being designed to seamlessly pick up the install baton at a later point should your first attempt be interrupted. It’s hard to imagine that people might attempt to upgrade their MacBook while running on battery only, but some will and they – together with those interrupted by power cuts, burst fuses and similar – can rest assured that Snow Leopard will resume without data loss. Incidentally, while Apple require 5GB of free space for the install process as a whole, Snow Leopard in fact frees up a total of 7GB previously used by Leopard once the update is complete.

Source: SlashGear