The first time I upgraded the iMac to Lion, it ran very slowly. Snow Leopard need a gig of ram to run, but Lion needs two, so machines with three gig are a bit handicapped. Under Snow Leopard, the iMac had been a steady little machine. Not a rocket but useable. I wiped the machine and installed Snow Leopard from scratch. This turned the iMac from a so-so Mac into a much faster one - probably because of the layers of Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard that were installed. The clean install made a huge difference. I was laughing hysterically at how fast things launched. I tried upgrading again but still felt Lion was too slow. Wiped again, started again... Yeah, I know, Time Machine... Anyway. More on that whole story here.
Snow Leopard 10.6
Snow Leopard has some key strengths for me.
- Snow Leopard felt faster. I'm not running benchmark tests. It just felt snappier.
- A key thing for me is that Snow Leopard has real scroll bars. Big fat blue ones that I can grab. Lion assumes that everyone has a trackpad or a Magic Mouse. I have an old transparent black Apple mouse. It needs scrollbars. I like scrollbars. I miss them.
- Compared with earlier versions of Lion, Snow Leopard used less ram. I sometimes run Ubuntu on virtual machines. Older versions of Lion didn't seem to have enough ram to make this enjoyable, although that has changed now.
- Snow Leopard could run old PowerPC apps. Luckily, I didn't have many of these and the main one I would have liked to run, Adobe Photoshop Elements, wouldn't install any more, for reasons of its own.
And Snow Leopard also had some limitations.
- No iCloud. This is annoying - my main email address is on mac.com. I could use iCloud.com, but Mail is way faster.
- Some apps in the store require Lion. Or newer than Lion, but we don't need to go there. Not on this iMac.
- Lion has more trackpad gestures. I got a trackpad as a gift and Snow Leopard didn't make the most of it. Now that I've upgraded, the trackpad has become more useful. I do love swiping to go back to previous pages in Safari.
- Security updates should be more common - although having said that, Apple were still issuing security fixes for Snow Leopard in 2014.
Lion 10.7
Lion's strengths are Snow Leopard's weaknesses, mostly.
- Lion will run newer software and has full support for iCloud.
- Security should be better.
- Lion 10.7.5 feels a bit faster than older versions of Lion did and seems to use less ram.
- On bootup, it uses about 870mb of ram, leaving about 2.15gb free, which isn't bad on a 3gb system.
- Also, I used to watch Lion exhaust the ram on early versions but 10.7.5 seems to have that fixed. Playing Youtube videos at 720p still leaves a third of the ram (about one gigabyte) free. The CPUs aren't hammered either.
- Lion still doesn't feel as fast as Snow Leopard but it's useable. Newer. Maybe more secure.
But why…?
You're asking: why don't I upgrade the hardware?
Well... I could buy a Mac Mini and use the spare screen upstairs. I could... But I love this old machine. I met my wife online on this iMac (a Windows girl, but we compromised). I did my MSc thesis on it. It's played the whole West Wing end to end and Galactica (I'm the only "serious tv" fan in this house of gamers, sadly). I love the look, same as I did on the day I bought it. It just works, to coin a phrase. Lion will keep it going for another while and if I really get annoyed with it, I can get someone to put in an SSD for more speed. I want to see how long it will last. It's like a VW camper. It's a classic.
