Snow Leopard on a first-gen MacBook AirThose who are interesting in upgrading from Apple OS X 10.5 to Snow Leopard (10.6) would have read a ton of reviews by now. Many of these evaluations use the MacBook Pro for their benchmarks. In this mini review, I'll be talking about my experience with Snow Leopard on a first-generation MacBook Air.
 Leopard's overall benchmark results (left) are marginally better than Snow Leopard's. Actual experienceNow, based on hard numbers, it all seems very negative up to this point. But in contrast, the actual experience has been good. Previously, even though I'd undervolted my processor (using an application, Coolbook, to feed less power to the chip so it runs cooler), the CPU would still heat up and cause the fan to run noisily. While this was inevitable in some instances, the problem was that the fan didn't lessen its speed for some time after that even when the CPU had cooled down. With Snow Leopard, fan speed reduced much faster after an intensive spell even without Coolbook, so I've been having quieter sessions with my notebook.Previously, with Leopard installed, Flash videos embedded in browsers would stutter after a few minutes of viewing. This still happens when using Snow Leopard with the Safari browser. What's surprising is that the third-party Opera and Firefox browsers don't exhibit this and I'm able to watch a full 10-minute YouTube video smoothly. Overall, that, too, is an improvement. Storage and the definition of a kilobyteStorage is limited on the first-gen MacBook Air with either an 80GB harddisk or a 64GB SSD. With the installation of Snow Leopard, Apple has streamlined system files so about 7GB is freed up--good news especially if you lack space for images or music.One major thing to take note is that the definition of a kilobyte has changed in this OS update. OS X, as with all major operating systems, has traditionally defined kilo-, mega- and gigabytes as 1,024 times of the preceding degree. So, 1 kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, 1 megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes, and so on. With Snow Leopard, kilo, mega, giga and so on are defined in degrees of 1,000. What this means is a file that is exactly 1,024,000 bytes in size will appear as 1MB in Windows, but 1.024MB in Snow Leopard. This may not seem like much, but when we talk about files which are in the magnitude of gigabytes, confusion may ensue. In the image below, Snow Leopard says that I have 60.52GB free while the third-party widget iStat Pro (which uses the conventional binary prefix) reports a lower 55.69GB even though they are calculating free space on the same hard drive.  Apple's intention appears as if it's trying to conform to the SI prefix for kilo, mega and so on, but we don't know if the software industry will follow suit. If other operating systems maintain the binary prefix of 1,024, everyone will have to make calculations when moving files between OS X and other platforms in the future, especially since we are moving into the terabyte era. ConclusionOverall, the experience with OS X Snow Leopard has been positive. One issue I've had is that the third-party addon Growl has not been updated to work with this new version, but it is forthcoming. Reviews have been generally positive especially given the low US$29 price tag on this update. Though it wasn't a quantum leap for my first-gen MacBook Air, I concur with the reviews that it's a worthy upgrade for the price.Tags: Apple MacBook, Web Browser, Snow Leopard, Mozilla Firefox, Apple MacBook Air
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I too upgraded to Snow Leopard on my 1st gen Macbook Air, sad to say my experience leaves a lot to be desired as there was this kernel_task problem which kept eating up my CPU cycles.
Did both an upgrade as well as a clean install and both resulted in the same unacceptable behaviour.
Running only Safari or Firefox with a few tabs open rendered the machine highly sluggish and totally unusable, checked Activity Monitor and kernel_task was way up at around 125%, used to be around 4% with Leopard.
Back to 10.5.7 now and all is well (10.5.8 had this high temperature problem even with coolbook installed), I'll probably wait until Snow Leopard grows up a few more versions before taking the plunge again.
Sep 08, 2009 17:35
