Apple Mac Os 10.6 Free Download Updated

Apple Mac Os 10.6 Free Download

Sneaking in a few days before its promised September release, the tune-upwards for Mac Bone X Leopard costs $29 for electric current Leopard users, and packs just enough punch to be worth your money. Apple is careful to point out that Snowfall Leopard isn't a complete system overhaul, only rather a drove of hundreds of smaller refinements to make Leopard run more gracefully. Subconscious among smaller tweaks are some technical improvements that result in a smoother, easier-to-employ Leopard with plenty for Mac fans to be excited about. The user interface and everyday tasks feel faster in general, although nosotros didn't detect a substantive improvement in application performance.

Fifty-fifty if you're non a electric current Leopard user, the $169 package that includes Snow Leopard, iLife, and iWork is a steal for the system upgrade and two of Apple's major software suites, non to mention the long-pined-after inclusion of Microsoft Exchange compatibility. Finally you will be able to connect with Exchange Servers (without using Microsoft's Entourage), but only if your visitor is using Microsoft Exchange 2007; many still aren't. Snowfall Leopard is offered on a single install disk--there are no separate, tiered pricing structures to worry about--and you're getting every feature and technical enhancement available in a single install. Unfortunately, for those on PowerPC systems, Snow Leopard but works with Intel Macs.

Installation
Installation of Snowfall Leopard is dead simple and (co-ordinate to Apple) upwardly to 45 percent faster than Leopard using a newly designed installer that asks just 1 question during the process. On our test machine, the procedure took nearly an hour, including two automatic restarts. The default setting installs Snow Leopard without tampering with any of your saved files, music, photos, or documents. Mostly we had no problems, just on one test machine we needed to reinstall the Os when it had problem rebooting. Fortunately the new installer is designed for safely reinstalling the Os in the event you lot see any hiccups during your initial installation. On our second try, the Bone installed perfectly on our test machine and no files were harmed. PowerPC Macs are no longer supported with Snow Leopard, however; you will demand an Intel-based Mac to install the latest Mac Os.

Those who desire to do a "Make clean Install" (starting fresh past deleting everything for minimal conflicts) however can, but unlike installations in previous versions of previous Mac OS Ten that offered the clean install equally a principal selection, you'll demand to utilize Deejay Utility to first erase the volume, then run the install. Apple tree explained to us that not everyone knows what a make clean install is and often chose it, not knowing that they would lose their files. We're happy with that answer, as long every bit people all the same get the option in some class.

Apple also claims that Snowfall Leopard uses 7GB less space than Leopard because of better file compression paired with selective driver inclusion. According to Apple, Snow Leopard will locate whatever missing drivers on the Spider web for you lot. We had no need of any special drivers during our tests.

New technologies
Apple says a few new technologies in Snow Leopard make it worthy of the upgrade alone, with several features that Apple says will boost performance. Because all new Macs come with 64-scrap multicore processors, multiple GBs of RAM, and high-powered graphics processing units, all the major applications in Snow Leopard--including the Finder--take been rewritten in 64-fleck to take full advantage of the hardware. (The 64-bit technology allows application developers to allocate more retention to consummate tasks then that the software runs faster and more smoothly.)

Apple has also added what information technology calls the Grand Key Acceleration that manages data sent to multicore processors in an effort to maximize performance; Apple says the GCD volition speed upward any application task, from processing images in Photoshop to playing your favorite games. The add-on of the GCD also takes away the need for software developers to spend as much fourth dimension managing multicore processors.

Another new engineering science in Snow Leopard is OpenCL, which allows software developers to tap into the power of any onboard video cards (or GPUs, for graphics processing units) for general-purpose calculating without the add-on of enormous amounts of lawmaking. Like the GCD, these are improvements that volition mainly affect software developers. But hopefully it will mean more than and improve-performing software for users in the future.

To put some of these claims to the test, nosotros decided to pit Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard confronting Mac OS X ten.six Snowfall Leopard to meet how these new technologies affected overall performance.

In our anecdotal tests of performance within the Snowfall Leopard user interface (UI), the operating system seems faster and more than responsive than with Leopard. Finder, Stacks, Expose, launching apps, and other everyday processes feel snappy. We didn't, however, notice any comeback in awarding performance.

Overall, we saw only a 2.v pct slowdown in application performance from Leopard to Snow Leopard on our more processor-intensive performance tests, including our multimedia multitasking test, in which we measure the time for QuickTime to end converting a curt movie while iTunes is performing its own conversion of MP3 into AAC format in the background simultaneously. As this falls within our typical margin of fault (five pct), we saw no meaning departure with awarding functioning when moving from Leopard to Snow Leopard. (Encounter the bottom of this review for performance charts.)

New features

Expose
Snowfall Leopard includes a number of user UI improvements intended to brand working with Mac Os 10 easier and more efficient. Expose, Apple'due south organization for visually finding the window you want on a cluttered desktop, used to be relegated to the Office keys on your keyboard. Snow Leopard now makes Betrayal attainable from the Dock; merely click and concur on a Dock icon to see thumbnails of all the open up windows in that application. Hit the Tab key lets you lot cycle through the preview thumbnails of each open application. Using Expose in the Dock is very natural and elegant, making u.s.a. wonder why this wasn't already a characteristic in Leopard.

Click and concord on an application icon in the Dock to bring up total thumbnails of open windows in an application.

The Dock
In addition to using Expose to find the correct window, you now also have the ability to elevate files from one application to some other using the Dock. Let'due south say you lot want to add an image to an e-mail, but your desktop is full of open windows. In Snow Leopard yous tin can go to the image, drag information technology to the Mail service icon in the Dock, and your east-mail window will spring-load, allowing you to drop the paradigm into place. Though the ability to elevate and drop files in this fashion is nice, we're not sure information technology'southward much easier than attaching an image by browsing through your folders. Nevertheless, if you know the epitome is already on your desktop, it's probably the faster method.

Stacks
Stacks got a much-needed upgrade as well. In Leopard, Stacks simply listed a certain number of files and applications requiring you to go to a Finder window if your app wasn't listed. Similarly, if you lot tried to open up a folder in Stacks, you were sent to the Finder. In Snow Leopard, Stacks comes with a curl bar so icons are still easy to read and anything can be launched out of the Dock. Folders are now accessible inside Stacks besides, so you'll exist able to navigate to files within folders all without leaving the Stacks Window. These changes brand Stacks much more useful than before and probably should accept been bachelor when Stacks was introduced.

Now you can roll through your applications and documents (and fifty-fifty open folders in Stacks) without being sent to the Finder.

The Finder
While the Finder itself saw little in the way of interface tweaks, the way files behave in the Finder makes it easier to use. A zoom slider has been added to the lower correct of Finder windows so you can zoom in on icons. An enhanced icon view has been added, letting you preview multipage documents and even play QuickTime movies without e'er leaving the Finder window.

Preview now lets you preview almost any file, even if it was created with software you don't take on your hard drive. This means common file types from Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and even PDF files can all be previewed without owning the programs they were created in. As an added bonus, Preview in Snow Leopard provides accurate text pick to multicolumn PDF files using artificial intelligence to infer the layout of each page. This means that Preview recognizes that in that location are multiple columns in your certificate so you can select the text you want from any cavalcade.

You tin now flip through the pages of multipage PDF documents using the arrows that appear over PDF docs when you mouse over.

Safari 4
Safari iv has been widely available for some time, merely it offers a couple of new features when running in Snow Leopard. Safari 4 already includes Meridian Sites for viewing all your favorite sites as thumbnails for easy access and full history search, which lets you view your history in a Cover Menses-like interface. Just in Snow Leopard, Safari is now crash resistant. This means that if a plug-in crashes, it won't crash the whole browser. Simply refresh the page to try to load the plug-in over again. Besides, Safari checks to come across if a site y'all are visiting is known to be fraudulent, is distributing malware, or is known to be a phishing site, and then warns you lot if it is.

Tiptop Sites, which was already available in Safari 4, lets you navigate to your most viewed Web sites apace.

QuickTime X
QuickTime X, Apple tree's media player, got some major tweaks in Snowfall Leopard. Now, when you play a motion picture and move your mouse exterior the window, the interface fades away quickly to give y'all a more than immersive video-viewing feel. When watching a flick, you tin can click the new Share button to convert your movie for iPod, iPhone, or Apple Telly, and QuickTime converts the video to work best on your chosen device. You besides tin can now record video from your Webcam, audio, or just the action on your screen with a few clicks. Those with the iPhone 3GS will recognize the new trimming feature in QuickTime X, letting you grab just the video content you want.

QuickTime X probably received the most interface tweaks in the Snow Leopard update. The cleaned-up interface and autofade features look not bad (like nigh things Apple tree), but it's more of an aesthetic improvement than anything else. The recording features for video, audio, and screencast capturing are the big wins here and used to be offered only in QuickTime Pro. It's good to come across these features volition exist able to be used by a wider audience in Snow Leopard.

Trim your videos hands past clicking and dragging start and end points of the prune.

Exchange support
Ane of the main roadblocks for Mac users in a primarily Windows workplace was the inability to connect with Microsoft Commutation servers. Virtually Mac users used Microsoft Entourage or bachelor open-source options as a work-around, simply it was never equally polish as connecting from a Windows machine with Microsoft Office. Snowfall Leopard now supports Microsoft Commutation Server 2007 out of the box and so you can easily connect using Apple'southward Mail app, grab global address lists in the Address Book, and create meetings with contacts using iCal.

Apple tree did more than but give y'all the ability to connect, however. Common tasks like creating meetings, for instance, are incredibly easy with intuitive controls. iCal lets you view work events and personal activities all in the same window (with easy controls to include or non include the data you desire). The Apple Address Book works seamlessly across Mail and iCal so you can apace bring upwards global accost lists, add people to a meeting (including predesigned groups), and invitations will automatically be sent to each attendee. As an added bonus, if some attendees have scheduling conflicts with your proposed coming together fourth dimension, iCal will automatically figure out the earliest available time that everyone is gratuitous. These are features already available in Microsoft's Outlook for Windows, only in Snowfall Leopard the process feels much more intuitive.

File Quarantine
According to Apple, File Quarantine has also been refined in Snow Leopard. Outset introduced in Mac OS X 10.four Tiger, File Quarantine checks for known malware signatures, and in Snowfall Leopard, will now display an alert dialog if information technology finds a known offender. The dialog volition tell users to move the offending file to the Trash. For example, a bogus version of iWork circulated on the Web a few months ago that independent malware. That particular malware is now automatically detected by File Quarantine in Snow Leopard.

Apple says that File Quarantine will exist automatically updated via Mac OS 10'south software update as new malware signatures are institute in the wild. We had no fashion to test these features, but nosotros are happy to see that Apple is taking strides to defend against malware every bit more people switch to Macs and the danger of new malware becomes more prevalent.

Universal admission
Start with Mac Os X 10.4 Tiger, Apple included VoiceOver to help people who are blind or with dumb vision to better understand and interact with what is happening onscreen. Apple continues to help visually impaired users in Snow Leopard by adding gesture back up on multitouch trackpads with easy-to-acquire gestures to perform specific functions. We had mixed results with these features depending on the Spider web page we visited, only mostly we found the features to be useful. The trackpad acts equally the viewable area on the electric current window so you tin tap to have Window elements explained to you or swipe to motion on to the next item in the window, for example. New features in Snow Leopard are particularly helpful when Web browsing, with options like Web folio summaries to explain the various elements on a Web page yous haven't visited before, making it easier to become the information yous want.

More than than twoscore different Braille displays (including wireless Bluetooth displays) are supported in Snow Leopard right out of the box, allowing visually dumb users to plug in and kickoff computing immediately.

Other refinements
Some of the smaller refinements in Snow Leopard are worthy of annotation, affecting many of Apple tree's core apps. iChat is now compatible with more routers, making video chat accessible to a wider range of users, and iChat Theater now offers 640x480 resolution, using but 1-third the bandwidth information technology used before. New Chinese character input via the trackpad predicts which characters you're creating and offers likely subsequent characters to speed up the process. A new text commutation feature in applications like iChat, Mail, and TextEdit lets you create shortcuts for phrases you use frequently. The Services menu in Snowfall Leopard has been rewritten to include but the services relevant to the application or content y'all're viewing. Core Location engineering locates nearby Wi-Fi hot spots to discover your location and automatically resets your time zone so wherever y'all are in the world, your Mac will be prepare to the correct time. While all of these are small refinements, each brand your Mac easier to use with smart features not found in other operating systems.

Conclusions
Mac Os X x.6 Snow Leopard is not a consummate organization overhaul and is instead a refinement of the current Leopard OS--some have gone then far as to call it a "service pack." We recollect the interface tweaks to Expose, Stacks, the Finder, Mail, and iCal brand Snow Leopard more than only a service pack and worthy of the $29 upgrade price. We don't like that PowerPC users are unable to employ Snowfall Leopard, but nosotros sympathise that afterwards iii years with Intel, Apple is making a determination to continue moving forward with this engineering science.

The largest of the feature enhancements are probably reason plenty for Intel Mac users to spend the money on Snow Leopard. Added enhancements such as video, audio, and screen recording in QuickTime X were once merely available to those who purchased QuickTime Pro (which was about $xxx--the same as this system upgrade). But the killer feature addition for Snow Leopard might be Exchange support out of the box--non even Windows vii comes with Microsoft Exchange support without ownership Microsoft Office.

Overall, we call up that Snow Leopard did nigh everything Apple says information technology set up out to do: information technology refined and enhanced Leopard to brand information technology easier to use. Though the system performs well in everyday use, many of our tests indicate it is slightly slower than the older version of Leopard in more intensive application processes. Still, we highly recommend upgrading for all the new features and Microsoft Exchange support.

iTunes encoding (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate improve performance)

Photoshop (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

QuickTime multimedia multitasking test (QT7 on x.5.viii and QTX on 10.6) (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

iTunes multimedia multitasking examination (in seconds)
(Shorter bars bespeak meliorate performance)

Cinebench
(Longer confined indicate better performance)

System configurations:

Unibody Apple Macbook Pro / Core 2 Duo 15.4-inch
Intel Core ii Duo 2.53GHz; 4096MB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz; 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT; 320GB Hitachi v,400rpm

Apple tree MacBook Pro / Core Duo 15.4-inch
Intel Cadre Duo 2.0GHz; 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB ATI Radion 1600, 100GB Toshiba 5,400rpm