Official Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Thread & FAQ

[fryke]

I sold my AppleTV and put an older Mac mini (see sig) there. While I had certainly enjoyed the AppleTV for a while (and for its simplicity), the Mac mini does much of the same but more. Its sleep-mode seems to be much more efficient than the always-on, always-hot AppleTV. I believe the next _hardware_ version of the AppleTV will at least have a power button, so they can simply add a "shutdown" menu item. But of course a real sleep mode would basically be enough. (But really: This has _nothing_ to do with 10.6, chevy...)

[chevy]

Unless the AppleTV next rev of the SW is moved to 10.6 (it is 10.4 today as far as I know). The 10.6 being much smaller than 10.5, it would make sense.

[fryke]

I fear the current hardware simply doesn't support a deep-sleep mode. 10.4 already _had_ support for other machines to sleep correctly (like, for example, every intel Mac, but PPC notebooks as well), so it's not simply a system software issue. It's either a design decision (we don't _want_ AppleTV to ever go into a deep sleep state, because maybe it crashes or something) or a hardware problem. Since Apple is not currently making much money off of AppleTV, apparently, Apple hasn't updated the hardware much yet. (Only had the harddrive upgrade to 160 GB.)

Oh, and I doubt AppleTV contains PPC code in its version of 10.4, so I doubt moving to 10.6 codebase would make it _that_ much smaller (if it doesn't even grow bigger).

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Btw.: I used "upgrade" as the method for all of my Macs. I always test this first, until serious problems arise, but none have so far. Interesting, I find. Performance, overall, is up, I think.

One of the touted features of Snow Leopard is the smaller footprint it uses on your hard drive -- there are reports that it can save you around 6GB.

When using an upgrade install, did you notice any space freed on your hard drive? I would think that it would replace the universal binary versions of many Apple apps with Intel-only binaries, and that would definitely save space... just wondering if the upgrade install saves you the same amount of space that a clean install would (not that I'm hard up for space now that WD 1TB Elements drives are under $90 now and I've got 5 of them!).

[fryke]

Before installing anything, Snow Leopard's installer does indeed remove the PPC code from all universal binaries it finds receipts from. It's a bit scary to look at the full logfile during installation, when you read "reaping Mac OS X" or something like that. ... But yes, the installer does this touted feature. However, it's a tad difficult to say how much space actually was saved (unless the logfile states it, I haven't checked), because one MORE IMPORTANT Snow Leopard feature steps in, as soon as you're booted into it: Mac OS X now shows gigabytes instead of gibibytes, i.e. my 320 GB harddrive now shows up as a 320.07 GB harddrive, and not something like 287 GB or similar.

[Satcomer]

I sold my AppleTV and put an older Mac mini (see sig) there.

I saw a ScreenCastOnline using a Mac Mini and using the Plex application. It might be something you might would want to use.

[Doctor X]

Before installing anything, Snow Leopard's installer does indeed remove the PPC code from all universal binaries it finds. . . .

Will that kill my Palm Pilot?

--J.D.

P.S. It appears the Palm Pilot is PPC based programs. The Intel happily runs them. If it only removes the PPC from binaries, I gather that will be fine.

[fryke]

Only UBs with receipts. I gather Palm's Desktop app is neither a UB nor a package installer that delivers a receipt, no? I could be wrong about how Apple's installer handles this, but I think it'll be safe. Don't use Palm's Desktop app myself, though.