| |
Mac OS X Snow
Leopard - Family Pack
MC224ZA
In ways big and small, Mac OS X
Snow Leopard makes your Mac faster, more reliable, and
easier to use.
Refined, not reinvented.
Mac OS X is renowned for its simplicity, its reliability,
and its ease of use. So when it came to designing Snow
Leopard, Apple engineers had a single goal: to make a great
thing even better. They searched for areas to refine,
further simplify, and speed up — from little things like
ejecting external drives to big things like installing the
OS. In many cases, they elevated great to amazing. Here are
just a few examples of how your Mac experience was
fine-tuned.
A more advanced, more nimble Finder.
The Finder has been completely rewritten in Cocoa to take
advantage of all the modern technologies in Mac OS X,
including 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch. It’s
more responsive from top to bottom, with snappier
performance throughout the Finder. And it includes new
features such as customizable Spotlight search options and
an enhanced icon view that lets you thumb through a
multipage document or watch a QuickTime movie.
New look, new features for Exposé and Stacks.
Exposé is refined and more convenient. It’s now integrated
in the Dock, so you can just click and hold an application
icon in the Dock and all the windows for that application
will unshuffle so you can quickly change to another one.
Exposé also has a whole new look. Windows are displayed in
an organized grid, making it even easier to find what you’re
looking for. And stacks — Dock items that give you fast
access to a folder of files — are now scrollable, so you can
easily view all items. You can also navigate through folders
in a stack to see all the files inside it.
Quicker Time Machine backup.
Introduced in Mac OS X Leopard, the revolutionary Time
Machine made backing up your hard drive easy for the first
time. Time Capsule took backup even further with its
wireless hard drive that works seamlessly with Time Machine.
Now Snow Leopard makes Time Machine up to 80 percent faster
and reduces the time it takes to complete your initial
backup to Time Capsule.
Faster to wake up and shut down.
With Snow Leopard, your Mac wakes from sleep up to twice as
quickly when you have screen locking enabled. And shutting
down is up to 80 percent faster, saving precious moments
when you’re trying to head home or to the airport.
Faster, more reliable installation.
Upgrading your Mac has never been easier. For Snow Leopard,
the entire process has been simplified, streamlined, and is
up to 50 percent faster, yet more comprehensive and
reliable. For example, Snow Leopard checks your applications
to make sure they’re compatible and sets aside any programs
known to be incompatible. In case a power outage interrupts
your installation, it can start again without losing any
data.
Smaller footprint.
Snow Leopard takes up less than half the disk space of the
previous version, freeing about 7GB for you — enough for
about 1,750 more songs or a few thousand more photos.
Another leap forward for QuickTime.
QuickTime X is the next-generation media technology that
powers the audio and video experience in Mac OS X Snow
Leopard. It includes a completely new QuickTime Player
application with a clean, uncluttered design, a new trimming
interface, and easy uploads to YouTube and MobileMe. And it
delivers more efficient media playback, HTTP-based live
streaming, and greater color accuracy.
More reliable, higher-resolution iChat.
Having a video chat using iChat is more reliable and more
accessible than ever in Snow Leopard. It includes technology
to address many common router incompatibilities that can
interfere with connections. And if iChat can’t make a direct
connection, it will use the AIM relay server to create a
successful chat session.
Now more people can have high-resolution, 640-by-480-pixel
video chats, because the technical requirements are less
demanding: You need only one-third the upstream bandwidth
previously required — 300 Kbps instead of 900 Kbps. And
finally, iChat Theater now offers 640-by-480 resolution,
four times greater than before.
The right service at the right time.
The Services menu in Mac OS X lets you use features of one
application while working in another. In Snow Leopard,
services are more simplified, streamlined, and helpful. The
Services menu is contextual, so it shows just the services
appropriate for the application you’re using or content
you’re viewing rather than all available services. You can
access services with a right click of your mouse or
Control-click of your trackpad. You can configure the menu
to show only the services you want, and you can even create
your own services using Automator.
Automatic updates for printer drivers.
Snow Leopard makes sure you always have the most up-to-date
driver so you can get the most from your printer. When you
plug in a printer, Mac OS X can download the latest driver
available over the Internet. And it periodically checks to
make sure it has the latest driver. If not, it downloads the
newest version through Software Update. Easy.
Automatic time zone setup.
If you’re traveling around the world, the last thing you
want to worry about is whether your computer is set to the
correct time zone. Snow Leopard takes care of that for you.
Using the Core Location technology, it locates known Wi-Fi
hotspots to set the time zone automatically, so you’ll
always know the right time no matter where you are.
Easy PDF text selection.
Here’s an enhancement that exemplifies the pursuit of
perfection. When using a PDF viewer such as Preview, have
you ever tried to copy text from a PDF document that has
more than one column? It’s almost impossible. Instead of
selecting only the text you want, your cursor selects all
the text across the page, so you end up with a mix of words
from every column.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard applies sophisticated artificial
intelligence algorithms to fix the problem. It analyzes the
layout of each page in the PDF to identify columns of text.
So when you use the cursor to select text, you get only the
words you want. That’s a real time-saver.
Faster, more powerful Safari.
Safari 4 is the latest version of the blazing-fast web
browser. It renders web pages at high speed and delivers a
range of new features, including full history search, smart
address and search fields, an innovative way to display your
top sites, industry-leading support for web standards, and
more.
With Snow Leopard, Safari 4 delivers up to 50 percent faster
JavaScript performance thanks to its 64-bit support.6 In
addition, Safari is even more resistant to crashes. It turns
out that the number one cause of crashes in Mac OS X is
browser plug-ins. So Apple engineers redesigned Safari to
make plug-ins run separately. If a plug-in crashes on a web
page, Safari will keep running.
More reliable disk eject.
Snow Leopard improves the reliability of ejecting discs and
external drives. Sometimes when an application or process is
using the files on a drive, Mac OS X prevents you from
ejecting it, but you don’t always know why. In Snow Leopard,
you’ll get fewer of those errors and when you do get them,
you’ll see exactly which application is using the drive, so
you can quit it and eject the drive properly.
More efficient file sharing.
The Bonjour technology in every Mac makes file and media
sharing virtually effortless. Now Bonjour in Snow Leopard
makes sharing more energy efficient. If you have a computer
in your home or office that shares files — like media files
for your Apple TV — you have to leave the computer on all
the time, which isn’t very energy efficient. With Snow
Leopard and a compatible AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule
base station, however, your computer can go to sleep yet
continue to share its files with other computers and
devices, waking when you need it and sleeping when you
don’t.
More Features
64-bit
64-bit computing used to be the province of scientists and
engineers, but now this generational shift in computing
gives all users the tools to apply the power of 64-bit to
speed up everything from everyday applications to the most
demanding scientific computations. Although Mac OS X is
already 64-bit capable in many ways, Snow Leopard takes the
next big step by rewriting nearly all system applications in
64-bit code¹ and by enabling the Mac to address massive
amounts of memory. Now Mac OS X is faster, more secure, and
completely ready for the future.
Grand Central Dispatch
More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance
increases in today’s processors. Grand Central Dispatch
takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore
aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple
cores and processors. Grand Central Dispatch also makes it
much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze
every last drop of power from multicore systems.
Open CL
With graphics processors surpassing speeds of a trillion
operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more
than just drawing pictures. OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a
technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the
vast gigaflops of computing power currently in the graphics
processor and use it for any application.
QuickTime X
Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, a major leap forward
that advances modern media and Internet standards. QuickTime
X includes a brand-new player application, offers optimized
support for modern codecs, and delivers more efficient media
playback, making it ideal for any application that needs to
play media content.
Out-of-the-box support for Microsoft® Exchange™
With Snow Leopard, the Mac is the only computer with
built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft
Exchange Server. So you can use your Mac — with all the
features and applications you love — at home and at work and
have all your messages, meetings, and contacts in one place.
System Requirements
- Mac computer with an Intel processor
- 1GB of memory
- 5GB of available disk space
- DVD drive for installation
- Some features require a compatible Internet service
provider; fees may apply.
- Some features require Apple’s MobileMe service; fees
and terms apply.
Feature-specific requirements
- Time Machine
requires an additional hard drive or Time Capsule (sold
separately).
- Photo Booth
requires an iSight camera (built in or external), USB
video class (UVC) camera, or FireWire DV camcorder.
Backdrop effects when using a DV camcorder require fixed
focus, exposure, and white balance.
- Boot Camp
requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista
(sold separately).
- Screen sharing
in iChat and the Finder requires a 128-Kbps Internet
connection (300 Kbps recommended).
- DVD Player
requires a 1.6GHz processor or faster for improved
deinterlacing.
- iChat
Audio chats require a microphone and a 56-Kbps Internet
connection.
Video chats require an iSight camera (built in or
external), USB video class (UVC) camera, or FireWire DV
camcorder; and a 128-Kbps upstream and downstream
Internet connection.
Backdrop effects when using a DV camcorder require fixed
focus, exposure, and white balance.
Some iChat features offer better performance and quality
with higher system capabilities.
- Exchange Support
requires Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1
Update Rollup 4. Auto-setup requires enabling the
Autodiscovery feature of Microsoft Exchange Server.
- QuickTime X movie capture
requires iSight camera (built-in or external), USB video
class (UVC) camera, or FireWire DV camcorder.
- QuickTime H.264 hardware acceleration
requires a Mac with an NVIDIA 9400M graphics processor.
- Developer tools
require 1GB of memory and an additional 3GB of available
disk space.
- OpenCL
requires one of the following graphics cards or graphics
processors:
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce 8600M
GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, GeForce GTX 285,
GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GS, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro
FX5600
ATI Radeon HD 4670, ATI Radeon HD 4850, Radeon HD 4870
- 64-bit support
requires a Mac with a 64-bit processor.
- Grand Central Dispatch
requires a Mac with a multicore processor.
|
|