Comments on: Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack

By: Charles B. Thomsen

Charles B. Thomsen — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:40:14 +0000

Snow Leopard is a great product. But this is advertised as a Family Pack (5-User). The problem is, it comes with only one disk. Part of my family doesn’t live at home and it is essential to always have a installation disk nearby for trouble shooting. I know that a single Snow Leopard OS can be installed on a many computers as you want–it is not copy protected or licensed to any particular computer so i could have bought one and installed it on all the family computers. But i believe in being honest with Apple because they are such a great resource. But i would have thought that they would have included 5 disks in this 5-User pack. The title is misleading.
Rating: 2 / 5

By: John Galt

John Galt — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:28:51 +0000

I really love Apple, but ... I installed the Family Pack Snow Leopard on my iMac only to find that there are no drivers for the HP All in One 5610 printer -- a very popular (and good) printer, BTW. There are ideas from users for "workarounds" that have been posted on the Apple and HP message boards. However, there have been no official annoucements from the vendors as to when an "official" fix will be released. There was no warning ahead of time as to a possible problem.

So, regretfully, I must give this product one star. I will update the review if and when an official fix is released.

Rating: 1 / 5

By: J. ROBERTS

J. ROBERTS — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:50:50 +0000

WARNING: Apple has dropped Appletalk support from this release. If you have older printers, as I do, they don’t show up as options and you can’t print anything. I consider this a fatal flaw — I’m not about to simply throw out printers which cost us over $6000 just to have the benefits of this release.
Rating: 1 / 5

By: Nobody Special

Nobody Special — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:43:54 +0000

I have a 17″ MacBook Pro and a 24″ IMac 3.06, the IMac got Apple upgrade and the MacBook upgrade was purchased from Amazon. Both crashed Microsoft Office and others (had to enter Admin log in and password but wouldn’t accept them, similar to the 10.5.7 bug). Apple support had me remove everything from “preferences” fixed the boot up issues, BUT, I now have to reenter all serial numbers, reset all e-mail settings, dock is gone, dashboard widgets are gone, etc. I might as well had an HD crash.
Rating: 1 / 5

By: S. Macdonald

S. Macdonald — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:25:07 +0000

In short: Snow Leopard (SL) feels like a Beta release. It is NOT ready for prime-time. This honestly feels like the release of Microsoft Me (Millenium edition, remember when MS put out that garbage as an "upgrade" to '98?). SL is THAT bad.

Details: With every update to OS X you hear the stories of third-party apps not being compatible and causing issues. Understandable, given the limitations of some (especially smaller) developers. In my case, the apps in question are Apple's own Mail and iTunes. Specifically, Mail would lock while trying to download new mail. The update circle/arrow next to each email address would spin all day. Meanwhile, the same mail came through just fine on my wife's MacBook Pro (running 10.5.8). iTunes would at some point (while sitting idle all day while I'm off at work) inform me that my iTunes library could not be found and the pop-up error messages (one for each of the thousands of items in my iTunes library) could not be Force Quit. After rebooting, everything would work fine for a while. This is why I switched to a Mac. To avoid this exact issue (rebooting multiple times a day just to do the basics).

I upgraded my iMac (just over a year old, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4) to SL on 9/3 and gave it a week to sort out any issues. Last night I threw in the towel and reverted back to Leopard (this is why you MUST create a cloned copy of your hard drive before you upgrade (use Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner and create a bootable drive (and test it! (hold down the Option key while you reboot)) before you do any OS upgrade (PC or Mac))). Time Machine couldn't save me. It told me I was out of disk space (I wasn't).

I know all the great features Apple put into SL (which I why I upgraded so early in the life-cycle) and was loving them (smart disk eject, click and hold on an app in the Dock and see all the occurences of that app, super fast boot times, etc). But until the bugs get fixed, I don't dare go near Microsoft Me - sorry, I meant Snow Leopard - again.

Apple, shame on you for putting out this garbage as a gold master. You were a month ahead of schedule and still rushed the QA. And it shows. No longer will I be able to say "get a Mac, it just works". I've put many friends into Macs over the years. Now I just can't recommend them without a huge caveat. Not until Apple makes this right. Well, Apple... we're waiting.... Rating: 1 / 5