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My Snow Leopard disk arrived Friday, and I promptly began upgrading my three Macs (A 2008 Mac Pro and early 2008 MacBook Pro at work, and a 2008 Mac Pro at home).
I've read very few horror stories so far about folks and their upgrades. I had no issues whatsoever. Install took about 1 hour for each of these three machines.
I likewise had virtually no issues with any of my apps. Preference pane add-ons iStat Menus and Blueharvest didn't work. Fortunately, Blueharvest's developer already had a new 10.6 compatible version available. Still waiting on something for iStat Menus however, but it is not a big operational loss for me to not know the exact load of my CPUs at any given moment.
10.6 boots by default into 32-bit kernel mode. This is done to maximize compatibility with dozens of apps that haven't been updated to work in 64-bit mode. 10.6 is great in 32-bit mode, though if you're like me and cannot use the new Exchange features (We're in the midst of migrating from Exch 03 to 07 and my account hasn't been moved yet), you were left Friday a little bit disappointed by just how few visible perks Snow Leopard gives you.
So this morning I booted into 64-bit mode on my Mac Pro at the office (done by holding down "6" and "4" keys during boot, hold "3" and "2" during boot to go back to 32-bit). All I have to say is "WOW." This machines flies now...start up was multiple times faster (or at least seemed..I didn't time it) than before, and all my login items fired up at least twice as fast as before.
64-bit mode, as you might suspect, produced more software incompatibilities. My Parallels 4.0 (mission critical for me to run a few Windows apps, as well as IE6 and IE7), would not load a VM. The problem was a driver incompatible with 64-bit mode. Big kudos to the folks at Parallels, however, because they released an update over the weekend that resolves the issues.
1Password 2 also encountered issues with 64-bit mode, but a few minutes spend cruizing the Agile Software website got me into the 1Password 3 BETA program and a 64-bit compatible version. Thanks to Brett Terpstra of TUAW for the tip.
Everything else seems to work, and work fantastically well. I've read reports of Office for Mac 2008 not running well in 64-bit mode, but its been fine for me, if not much quicker to load than in 32-bit mode.
Other Apps I've tested in 64-bit mode so far:
Netbeans 6.7.1 - works just fine
The Gimp (in X11) - seems to work fine
LittleSnapper - hung on my first try
Panic Transmit - works fine
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Cool! Have you tried Dreamweaver and Photoshop? I hear CS3 is a bit glitchy in Snow Leopard. (Love the name.)
Hi Anna Belle, thanks fir dropping in
. I don’t use either of those two apps, but my guess is they’ll work fine in 32-bit mode. I found out later today my. Early 2008 MBP won’t boot in 64-bit. Bummer for sure, but still worth the upgrage. I can’t wait for the Exchange migration to wrap up.