[vie_ascenseur]

I know this has probably been discussed on these forums a while before, but I thought I'd just ask.

I've got a Unibody MacBook (not the Pro one, I got it late 2008 - before they changed it all); 2.0GHz of joy (in my opinion) compared to my old acer.

But, not long after I got my Mac, Apple released iMovie '09. I was wondering if it was a worthy upgrade from '08?

Also, as I got my mac before 2009, it has OS X 10.5 and Apple only operate the "up-to-date" program they had for ones purchased around july! Is that another worthy upgrade?

Thanks

Joe

[amon91]

If you're using iLife '08 and you're happy be with it, my advice would be hold off. Apple usually introduces new versions of iLife around January so you might want to wait a few more months. It surely doesn't feel great to buy a product then watching it get upgraded a few months later. So yeah, unless you're in a hurry stick with what you have.

As for Snow Leopard, well, it has no major new features so it's not that big of a deal, but as it's just $29 I'd go ahead and buy it and you'll benefit from many performance improvements and even minor new features.

[.William]

Snow Leopard: Buy.
iLife '09: Wait. Unless you really want the stabilization stuff in iMovie, but that's not worth the extra money IMO.

[Whitewolf1218]

.William, on 02 November 2009 - 05:16 PM, said:

Snow Leopard: Buy.
iLife '09: Wait. Unless you really want the stabilization stuff in iMovie, but that's not worth the extra money IMO.

What William said. Snow Leopard is inexpensive, but has a lot of little tweaks to improve an already great OS. And if you're comfortable with iLife 08, then there's no big reason to change

[vie_ascenseur]

Also, one more question -

Clean install?

I take it (from reading online) that you only save the disk space from doing a complete clean install. Are there any quirks to snow leopard than anyone knows of that it would be helpful for me to know? I know about the guest account one where data ends up deleted, but I dont use the Guest account, so that don't matter! Also, I guess that backing up to Time Machine (when I get my drive back) is enough to to be able to clean install Snow Leopard and then reinstall all the apps from the old version. Any more hints/tips here?

Thanks

Joe

[amon91]

I have to say my clean install experience with Snow Leopard has been great, even though I still wouldn't recommend it. If you're using some third-party add-on or something that hasn't been updated to work with Snow Leopard, you pretty much won't be able to boot. If you have a backup, fine, but if you have the time why not take a few ours to install it from scratch?

Some also say the system is a lot snappier when not "upgraded".

[vie_ascenseur]

amon91, on 03 November 2009 - 07:50 PM, said:

I have to say my clean install experience with Snow Leopard has been great, even though I still wouldn't recommend it. If you have a backup, fine, but if you have the time why not take a few ours to install it from scratch?

Some also say the system is a lot snappier when not "upgraded".

Thanks - I think that finally sealed my decision to do a complete reinstall and just reinstall all the apps I have that I have that are Snow Leopard compatible.

Joe

amon91, on 02 November 2009 - 09:29 PM, said:

but as it's just $29 I'd go ahead and buy it and you'll benefit from many performance improvements and even minor new features.

I agree! Also, I think that the £25 for a new version of OS X is great; Imagine if microsoft started charging for Service Packs! (I know that SP's arent exactly the same sort of thing as the Snow Leopard release, but just imagine!)


Thanks all of you for your help, its definatley great to be back on these forums again!

Joe

This post has been edited by vie_ascenseur: 03 November 2009 - 08:22 PM

[.William]

Snow Leopard isn't a service pack though. The entire OS has been reworked from the ground up, and in many ways, it's like Windows 7 - a major upgrade to the backend, not so much the front end.

[Captain Awesome]

A new iLife will most likely come out in January, so don't jump on that just yet.
For $30, Snow Leopard is a steal, go for it

[CowboyOnAMac]

Captain Awesome, on 06 November 2009 - 03:33 AM, said:

A new iLife will most likely come out in January, so don't jump on that just yet.
For $30, Snow Leopard is a steal, go for it

I have whatever iLife came with my MacBook Pro in September. Honestly though? I've never used iMovie because on my previous Macs (2 G3 iMacs, a G5 iMac and a G4 Mini) it ran at a snail's pace and taxed the processor for all it was worth. In fact, I believe it was primarily responsible for the early demise of my G5. I was in between PCs and didn't have another DVD burner. When I burned "The Last King of Scotland" I used iMovie to piece together two halves, and then iDVD to encode and write it. It took nearly eighteen hours to do all that and the fans were running at better than 6200 rpm the whole time. Even though I have a 2,6 Intel now, I haven't opened iMovie or iDVD on this new Book.

[vie_ascenseur]

Hi everyone,

I know this is probably another dead thread, but I'll post on it anyway - just in case someone reads it!

I upgraded to Snow Leopard today, a full month after I posted here! Anyway, I upgraded my MacBook unibody 13" a couple of days ago, and it runs so much better.

I didnt actually do an "upgrade install" - I took some time out of the day and completely zeroed-out the disk (after a time machine backup, of course!) and then install Snow Leopard.
It runs quite a bit quicker, there are little things that I've noticed that are lots better and shutdown has shortened massively from about 15s to just 3.

Overall, a success!

Joe

[.William]

I'm still not convinced about Snow Leopard's shut down method. I swear it's just force-killing everything to make it go that fast. Surely it can't be legitimately that good!