Yay for Snow Leopard!

Okay, okay. It's not a PowerPC Mac operating system but it runs PPC software, so be nice. Anyway, it's a good story.

I have a 2006 Core2Duo iMac which is maxed out at 3gb of ram - technically, 4GB of ram, but the motherboard can only see three of them. I bought the iMac new, with Tiger installed. Over the years, I added Leopard, then Snow Leopard, then Lion. By the time I got to Lion, the iMac was feeling slow. After a few weeks, I wiped it and reinstalled Snow Leopard. And had a shock. With a clean install of Snow Leopard (the first time I'd ever wiped the machine clean since purchase), my iMac was way faster than it had been under Snow Leopard previously. It was like having two processors. I assume that going from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6 and adding all sorts of odd software over the years must have kept adding stuff that clogged the machine up somehow.

On the basis that there's no point being stupid if you don't show it, I upgraded to Lion again to see what that might be like. In fairness, it was better than it had been. But a year later, I've bitten the bullet and reverted to 10.6.8 again.

Why? Well, Lion demands 2gb of ram and the iMac only has three. So with Lion, the iMac has 1.5x recommended ram, which isn't much. Meanwhile, Snow Leopard only needs 1gb ram,  so on 10.6, the iMac has 3x recommended ram. I got tired of suffering a slow machine. I was thinking of selling it, but on a whim and because I had a day free, I decided to reinsall 10.6 just to see if it would help.

Simply put, with 10.6.8, this is a different Mac. The whole machine feels snappier - maybe as quick as a well-specced i5. Safari 5 starts with one bounce sometimes. I was clearing out a Firewire drive the other day (old backups from when the iMac was running 10.7, mostly) and when I emptied the Trash, I had over a million files to delete. Over a million files! I switched on Activity Monitor to see how Finder would cope with this and memory use barely moved. Snow Leopard uses about one gig of RAM from rest. I still had almost 2gb free, although I was running Safari and a couple of other apps as well.

After changing down from Lion, most of my apps still work on Snow Leopard: iWork, MS Office 2011, Evernote, Dropbox, Virtual Box and others. Safari 6 is Lion-only but having said that, there have been two Safari 5 updates in 2013 so far. Longterm support is one issue with Snow Leopard but nothing lasts forever. And when I want a new browser, Firefox will probably support Snow Leopard for some time to come. Indeed, TenFourFox - which is keeping older PowerPC-based Macs up to date with PowerPC builds of Firefox - ought to work as well, as 10.6 will run PowerPC apps.

The other problem is iCloud, which doesn't work on Snow Leopard. I've had iCloud email so long that I have a .mac email address and I also have an iPhone. So on the iMac I get my mail via iCloud.com. The speed's acceptable. In fairness, iCloud.com runs slowly but reliably in my iBook G4 so it shouldn't surprise me. I just wish there was a way to access bookmarks on the site. The whole iCloud thing has been a fiasco for Snow Leopard users but that's another post.

Apart from the speed, the other thing I love about Snow Leopard is having proper fat scrollbars that I can grab with the mouse. I have an old black Apple Pro Mouse that doesn't do anything clever, but I like the look (and it cost a lot at the time), so I like scrollbars that work like, well, scrollbars should work.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the change back to 10.6. It's made the iMac feel like a current machine again. It's fun to use again, which is good when you're trying to do any sort of creative work. It's no fun struggling with a slow machine. I should easily get another three years out of the iMac, which will bring it up to its tenth birthday - and all thanks to Snow Leopard and 3gb of ram.