Difference Between Leopard and Snow Leopard

Leopard and Snow Leopard are OS for Mac users from Apple. Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) is new OS for Mac, announced on June 9, 2009. Just the name Snow Leopard tells the story. The earlier OS,, the Mac OS X was called Leopard, and since Snow Leopards are just another kind of Leopards, one can easily guess that nothing much has been changed in Snow Leopard from its earlier version. However, there are similarities and there are some differences too. How else would Apple justify an increase in price of $30 if there are no changes? This article will look into the major changes that have introduced in Snow Leopard compared to the earlier OS called Leopard.

Make no mistake, this is not a major upgrade, and there are some minor changes here and there which are referred to as refinements by Apple. Much of the changes that are claimed by Apple in Mac OS X 10.6 are not detected by the user. However, Apple says that these refinements will result in a much faster and better performance from the OS than Mac OS X. One can feel the difference as it takes almost half the time to install Snow Leopard than Leopard. It is also speedier in shutting down and when joining wireless networks. It also takes up much less space in the hard drive. Actually Leopard could never utilize its untapped power but now that Apple has switched over to PC architecture, multi core processing and high RAM can now be utilized.

Users however have given a mixed response to speed and performance of the new OS as running third party applications such as Photoshop does not make a visible improvement in performance. This is more to do with the code in which these programs were written. They were designed to operate on Leopard and thus until rewritten, cannot take advantage of the new OS. However, since upgrade costs as little as $30, it is worthwhile to do so as in future more and more programs will be written keeping in mind requirements of Snow Leopard.