back to article Snow Leopard arrives with meow, not a roar

Snow Leopard went on sale this morning, and in San Francisco the turnout was modest, with merely a hundred-plus fanbois in line. Most of those queuing up with whom we spoke remarked about the lack of crowds, many comparing today's relaxed atmosphere to the wrapping-around-the-block lines for Leopard's release and the veritable …

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  1. David Webb
    Jobs Horns

    BSOD

    BSOD's? Its not Vista, its him. I've never had a BSOD on vista, ever, so maybe its his hardware.......

  2. jake Silver badge

    During the meanwhile ...

    Slackware 13 has been released.

    It installed in about an hour on this three year old HP laptop, and as near as I can tell all the hardware works without tweaking anything. Including audio, two-screen video, wireless, the hardware control buttons, ALPS touch pad (with "thumbwheel") etc. The only thing I needed to add was the text-only monitor that I have hanging off the docking station's serial port ... It even found both printers & the scanner. This has been the single most trouble-free installation I have ever seem, of ANY OS in the third of a century I've been using computers.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Mostly men, and none I'd want to sleep with

    The Reg pictures are priceless. Now excuse me while I visit the li'l girls' room before I hurl.

  4. Dreams
    FAIL

    Believe it or not

    "I have Vista in a partition on my Mac," he told us, "and I hate it. It crashes all the time, I get blue screens of death, and the start-up times are ridiculous."

    I'm not a Vista fan, but I've had Vista for almost two years and I still haven't experienced the blue screen that the Mac user above is complaining about. Oh. wait a second...maybe it's because I'm not using a Mac.

  5. DZ-Jay

    Could it be...

    Could it be because Apple offered a $29.00 online purchase with free shipping and guaranteed delivery by Friday? I myself, along with other friends, ordered it so and received it by FedEx delivery this Friday morning.

    So perhaps the fanbois didn't make the queues because there was no reason to--when you can get it delivered directly at your doorstep.

    -dZ.

  6. asdf
    WTF?

    Re: jake

    I am officially old because I said out loud when I was younger slackware was such a pain in the ass to install, it seperated the men from the boys (still remember slackware 3 release, pre ver 2.0 kernels I believe). In them days you had to spend a weekend to get X to work with your monitor, not to mention the nightmare process of actually getting an inet connection with modems and ppp. Linux has come a long way and never thought I would hear that slackware is a breeze to install.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Awards

    I think that "ol Reg should establish the HOHUM award of the week.

    Yawningly yours,

    Snore

  8. Christian Berger

    Vista on a Mac is important

    The Vista installation on a Mac is important, because you need to have something worse to compare your own stuff to, to find it good. It's a psychological thing.

  9. jake Silver badge

    @asdf

    "I am officially old because I said out loud when I was younger slackware was such a pain in the ass to install, it seperated the men from the boys (still remember slackware 3 release, pre ver 2.0 kernels I believe)."

    Then I'm positively ancient. I've been using Un*x-like systems since ken was lecturing at Berkeley. My first post-PDP home system was an AT&T 3B1 "Unix PC". Following that, I ran SunOS on Motorola and/or Coherent on Intel. When it was obvious that Mark Williams Company was about to close its doors, I considered BSD for my desktop (which I already had on my home servers), but settled on Slackware. That was in mid 1993 or so, whenever release 1.0 came out ... I haven't looked back. Slack did and does what a UN*X system is supposed to do (in my opinion, as always, YMMV, and very probably does).

    Yes, in the past Slackware was a pain in the arse to setup and use. It isn't anymore. No, it doesn't have a GUI installer, but the curses based installer that it uses is perfectly adequate. Burn the DVD ISO, boot from it, and follow the prompts. I think I had to hit the enter key six times. That's it. I chose not to setup networking ('dhcpcd eth0' or 'dhcpcd wlan0' isn't exactly difficult to remember, and makes this laptop a trifle more friendly when I bring it into a company I'm consulting for ... yes, I know that most folks don't know what HOSTNAME &etc. means, I have suggestion email in to PV for 13.1). Slack also boots into runlevel 3, not 4, which is a pain in the ass if you don't like the command line, never heard of startx (or whatever you prefer), and/or don't know what /etc/inittab does. Other than that ...

    "Linux has come a long way and never thought I would hear that slackware is a breeze to install."

    Try Slack 13.0 for yourself and report back as scathingly as you like ... I'm not religious on the subject ... I have production Sun, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, HP, DEC (TOPS-10 & -20), Amdahl, Tandom & etc. gear at my fingertips as I type(o), and maybe I just got lucky with my first Slack13 32-bit install (I haven't tried the Slack13 64-bit release yet) ... but the similar laptop that has been synced to -current for around four years seems to be running Slack13 just fine, too :-)

    One minor thingie ... PV decided to go RC1 just before KDE4.3 came out, so it comes with KDE4.2 (timing, as they say, is everything) ... On the bright side, it's easy enough to install the latest KDE if you have a mind to do so.

  10. Matt B
    Flame

    Apple / fanboys make me sick

    "And upon exiting, each purchaser was sent off with a hearty "Congratulations!" from a smiling Apple ambassador."

    Congratulations for what? Joining or staying in their retarded, ignorant and very annoying cult?

    Flames because it seems to be what a lot of their products are doing at the moment.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    RE: BSOD

    Sorry to disappoint you people, but i have seen said BSOD 5 times this week on my colleague's Lenovo T61 - very corporate setup, not an uber machine like most reg readers may use.

    I myself use linux so am free of that. I am not trying to start a flame war, but just because you have not seen it does not mean it does not exist....

    (... if you are a hardcore Vista user its kinda like you not seeing quick start up times, meaningful error messages, a decent file search, the ability to just delete a file ... etc etc - all these things do exist in linux and OSX)

    Oh and i have a mac, still running Tiger.. cant be arsed to pay for an upgrade when it works so well and is not my main machine.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    WTF

    AS many people have said why queue when you can have it delivered. Bit scary that the woman (AC above) selects her mates from random queues. I also run Vista on my MacPro for my gaming fix, and run XP under Parallels for an old CAD program I can't find an alternative for and to be quite honest neither of them has ever crashed. In fact they seem to be more stable on my Mac than on some of the PCs I had to use in the past.

    I look forward to seeing the queues at the Microsoft stores when they open. I'm sure they'll be quite long, but they'll be on the other side of the door...let me out!

  13. Gareth Irwin

    bloody hell

    lay off the 13 year old kid, this has probably made his whole year. Grow up boys and girls you would be so offended at a 13 year old kids opinion of Vista? Much older people have had far more to say.

    Its great a young lad is having a go, making his own website etc and all elreg can do is take the piss? Quite concerning the depths plumbed just because apple sent them a letter. Really.

  14. Michael Jones

    Vista BSOD

    I agree with first poster. Whilst Vista has many things to criticise, system stability isn't one of them. I'm not saying I've never had BSOD, but I'd have to struggle to think of the number of times it has occurred!

  15. tomjol
    Stop

    But if *I* experienced X, then X must be true!

    Give me a break, people. Some of you will think Vista is the best thing since sliced bread, because for you it's worked flawlessly. For the majority, there were at least some problems with it. The same goes for any OS you care to mention, including OS X - and yes, I'm writing this from Snow Leopard. Does that make me a fanboy? I don't think so...I spend my working life on a Windows desktop writing code on mainly HPUX and AIX boxes, and when I come home I like to use a Mac for my browsing, listening to music, watching videos, tweeting, and spending endless hours on Facebook pretending I'm still a student.

    Every OS has its merits, every OS has its downfalls. The sooner some of you people realise that, the sooner you can actually open your eyes and choose the best tool for both you and the job.

  16. G-HAM 2000
    FAIL

    "lmao"

    Grown adults writing paragraph tirades on an internet forum in some effort to rile against some comments abotu Vista by a 12 year old boy.

  17. mrweekender
    WTF?

    WTF

    @MattB - Apple Fanbois? Looks like people queuing to buy a product to me. There even looks like a parent with her kid. Are these the archetypal fanbois you picture in your mind? Sounds to me like you need a cold beer and some sunshine.

    @AC 00:09 - You sound like a whore or a man pretending to be a woman who thinks he knows what women say - either way it's disturbing.

    By all accounts Snow Leopard appears to be a well designed, solid, secure and fast OS. Time to invest me thinks.

  18. jake Silver badge

    @G-HAM 2000

    "Grown adults"

    Post proof or retract.

  19. Anonymous Cowardess
    Happy

    Photo

    For me, the best thing about Snow Leopard is that every time I open El Reg these days, a snow leopard is looking at me. I really, really like that photo from the "first look" article.

  20. bmo
    Linux

    Funny...

    ... how nobody has queued up for Windows in 15 years.

    Tux, because watching the Wintard vs. Mactard foodfight is fun.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    @Jake

    You likely correct - the posters maybe grown but they are not adults.

  22. jake Silver badge

    @bmo

    "... how nobody has queued up for Windows in 15 years."

    ::snort:: Where were you for the launch of Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP?

    "Tux, because watching the Wintard vs. Mactard foodfight is fun."

    No. It's not. Fanbois have been tedious (at best) as long as there has been more than one computing tool provider. Another word for "fanboi" is "unpaid marketing moron". Probably the only worse example are the cyclists (gas/petrol powered & people powered) who pay lots of money for the "privilege" of advertising for the multinational, billion dollar provider of their conveyance of choice.

    No icon, because icons are for fanbois.

  23. Jeffrey Nonken
    Headmaster

    @G-HAM 2000

    Isn't that a tautology?

  24. Alice Andretti
    Stop

    Double standards, eh?

    "You sound like a whore or a man pretending to be a woman who thinks he knows what women say - either way it's disturbing."

    So she touched a nerve with some readers, did she? (Anticipated response from some readers: "No, but I'll give you something else she can touch" etc.)

    Funny how it's fine for men to say slutty things about women ("Yeah I'd like to get that bitch in the sack" or "I wouldn't fuck her if she was the last c*nt on earth" or some of the disgusting Paris comments that regularly appear on this site with alarming frequency), but when women say something slutty about men, it's "disturbing" or she's a "whore" or a "man pretending to be a woman". Puh-lease.

    Just because some woman expresses that she finds a particular man or group of men to be totally non-sexy and unattractive for whatever reason, and she chooses to express that sentiment by saying that she "wouldn't want to sleep with" them, does not automatically make her a whore. She might be, or she might not be.

    It's more likely that she's just chosen a rather tactless and incendiary method of expressing that she finds the men in question to be unattractive for whatever reason.

    Note:

    My observation of humans has led me to believe that some of the trashiest-talking people, can sometimes be the ones the *least* likely to ever do any of the stuff they talk about. So when men, *or* women, make off-color remarks of a sexual nature, it doesn't necessarily provide much insight into their actual lifestyle.

    People learn from example and osmosis:

    Any natural-born woman who's spent any time working around a bunch of men (this *is* an IT site, after all, and IT is still predominately a male-dominated job), such a woman has likely assimilated quite a few of the speech patterns and thought processes of her male co-workers - including trash-talking about the opposite sex.

    Rude and troll-like: probably. Whore: doubtful.

    Sorry to disappoint anyone who *prefers* whores ;)

  25. RichyS
    Jobs Halo

    What about Regent St.?

    Might have been better to look at the queues outside the Regent Street Apple Store in London. Thanks to the work-shy layabout bastards at the Post Office, we have _yet another_ postal strike here. So, the 25 quid (or whatever it is) price with free postage wouldn't have got you your Snow Leopard fix by Friday.

    Oh, and my wife's lappy BSODs quite frequently with Vista on it. I blame Sony and their esoteric components though. My work Thinkpad X61 crashes a couple of times a week. Mind you, it BSODed the very first time I turned it on. I blame corporate IT and their esoteric software. Having said that, I rebooted my Mac yesterday too after Spaces went weird. It didn't crash as such, it just seemed easier to reboot than sort out the problem another way. OS X does crash though. Just like every other highly complex general purpose OS...

  26. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Come Home To A Real Fire -

    Buy a Mac

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    FACT

    Snow leopards can't roar.

  28. sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD
    FAIL

    64 bit kernel?

    I'm not upgrading since I generally only early adopt generally cool stuff...

    Ok I admit it, it's nerdy but face it, Snow Leopard is not like a major upgrade elsewise.

    Recompiled stuff to 64 bits on top of the kernel? Big deal, not like it's THAT much faster.

    Really I doubt it'll make me more productive.

    Now a 64 bit kernel, now that's interesting indeed.... Hum hum hum... much to mess about with indeed. This is DEFINITELY going to make me less productive :)

    BUT...

    Since apparently Apple has decided that only Xserves, Macbook Pros and Mac Pros apparently get to boot the 64 bit kernel... I'm out of luck even though I have a 64 bit Macbook, with 64 bit EFI, I am stuck with the plain old 32 bit version.

    So I'm gonna have to stick it to you Apple, I'm sticking with Leopard until you have the decency to allow Macbook users to boot into 64 bits.

    And if you do not I suspect something is amiss... You gonna downgrade Macbook CPU's to 32 bit only ones in the near future? Run 'em on Atoms? Readers, you have been warned.

  29. Eradicate all BB entrants
    Thumb Up

    @AC 00:09

    I think mrweekender was in one of the pics ;)

  30. kurucu

    Meow not a roar...

    ... but Apple promised to deliver Snow Leopard on the same day it was released to my door. So why would I go and queue for it? It seems pretty obvious to me why the crowds were small - people had better things to do with their time (like sleep in until the postman comes).

  31. ElReg!comments!Pierre
    Coat

    Oy! (females?)

    So as it appears, there ARE wiminz on the interwebs, and they do NOT use macs. Watch your world crumble before your sorry eyes guize...

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BSOD on vista

    Havent seen it. Ever. I get other problems with vista but never had BSOD. As for search time and deleating delays? Well i use Total commander to manage files and that works as fast as you would want. Thats the thing about windows and PCs. You get a lot of programs for them not just native crap.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re : BSOD on Vista

    I agree. I didn't even know there *was* a BSOD on Vista.

    I'm not a huge fan of Vista, but I have it running constantly on one of my machines and I've never seen the BSOD.

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    I looked like that kid

    when I was twelve, but with NHS glasses instead of braces. And I was programming on a ZX Spectrum, most probably not in Java. Haha, good times.

  35. blackworx
    WTF?

    @ Jake

    "Probably the only worse example are the cyclists (gas/petrol powered & people powered) who pay lots of money for the "privilege" of advertising for the multinational, billion dollar provider of their conveyance of choice."

    Cyclist here. Wut? Is this some particulary fanboi-ish brand you're talking about? Or have I just answered my own question? Are you talking about KTM?

  36. Corrine

    vista BSOD

    Vista likes to hide its BSODs, but they happen. Watch for random shutdowns, or going to a black screen and locking up. Thats usually a BSOD, and Vista is hiding it to make itself look better (you can usually find the code in the event log to confirm if its an actual BSOD or not).

    Getting as many as the kid describes though... He probably didn't install any updated drivers. Or his hardware is just crappy quality.

  37. Sureo
    Pint

    BSOD

    I have had plenty of BSODs over the years which were caused by

    * bad memory module

    * bad hard drive

    * bad caps on the motherboard

    I am no MS fan but I don't blame MS for my defective or incompatible hardware. My only complaint is that the BSOD error message could be a lot clearer.

    A beer helps in these cases...

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    where do i queue...

    for the Fedora Core 12 release? ;-)

  39. J 3
    FAIL

    Congratulations?

    How arrogant, how typical... What they should have said is "thank you", but that would require having had a mum and dad who taught them manners... If they had congratulated someone on being able to finish an install of something, that would have had at least some respectable meaning.

    @Alice Andretti: well said, there. I myself was thinking of commenting on the sexist pigs' stances (I'm a man myself, if that matters), but you did it much better than I would have. For starters, I'd be much less elegant... :-)

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Corinne

    Nope. Never had any of those scenarios either.

    I have to agree with Sureo on this one. The error message could be better, but the error is probably still down to the user.

  41. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Halo

    iQueue

    Hey, I was in a queue of at least 3 people when I bought Windows Millennium Edition and it's still running great!

  42. jake Silver badge

    @blackworx

    "Cyclist here. Wut? Is this some particulary fanboi-ish brand you're talking about? Or have I just answered my own question? Are you talking about KTM?"

    I'm talking about the cyclists who get themselves up in kit emblazoned with the logos of their conveyance of choice. The wife & I have a eighteen or so motorcycles, vintage to modern, dirt to cruiser/tourer to sport (her fave is her old BMW airhead, or her Honda Hawk; mine is either the Moto Guzzi I built from 6 wrecked bikes in college, my '59 Pan frame-up resto, my rebuilt R1150RT-P, or the in need of restoration KZ1100 I bought new) ... The bikes are ridden in all weathers, with appropriate protective clothing (usually with armor on the street). We also both ride dirt daily when checking fence here on the ranch. Not one stitch of our riding gear has a manufacturers logo. I'll wear a logo when they PAY me to wear it.

    Likewise, we both have misc. bicycles (Mt. Tam. is not far from here ...). When riding street or dirt, we wear appropriate kit, but none of it has manufacturers logos ...

    The neon-clad packs of logo-wearing sheep who go out of their way to piss-off the idiots in cages (who can't drive to begin with, and are already a hazard to the rest of us), and/or the off-road cyclists who enjoy pissing off the hikers and equestrians on the trails, need to wake up and smell the bacon sarnies before everything but foot and four-wheel travel is banned entirely ... Maybe it's a left-pondian, left-coast thing, but it is a pet peeve. Can you tell? ;-)

  43. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @tomjol

    "....yes, I'm writing this from Snow Leopard. Does that make me a fanboy? I don't think so..."

    In itself, no. Using Apple products does not inherently make you a fanboi.

    However, on balance the quality and target of your post, along with the poor attempt at distraction suggests you are actually a fanboi.

  44. Gavin Bloeman
    Boffin

    It's my hat!!

    Mine!!!!!!

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