First off, if you are looking for the animals, this is not the right place. Leopard and Snow Leopard are names for operating systems on the Mac systems. Leopard is the name for OS X version 10.5 while Snow Leopard stood for the version 10.6. At first glance, there seems to be nothing new with Snow Leopard. Aside from minor tweaks in the user interface, there were no new programs or new capabilities introduced. There seemed to be no reason to spend the extra few bucks needed to upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard even if its quite cheap.

Looking deeper into these two, you would find that the changes in the OS is not in the aesthetics but in its core. Snow Leopard was coded to take advantage of the processing power that has been available since Apple moved to the PC architecture. Multi core processing and high amounts of RAM have been largely untapped with the Leopard OS and Apple moved to utilize the untapped power. Benchmarks on the system and its native applications resulted in very significant gains. There are even a lot of side by side comparisons that shows just how fast the Snow Leopard operating system is.

The speed increase doesn’t really translate very well with all programs that runs on the Snow Leopard. Programs like Photoshop did not show any markable gains in performance. This is attributed to the code in these programs. They were originally written for Leopard and were not yet rewritten to exploit the advantages provided by Snow Leopard. This problem would probably be addressed once the makers of these third party programs release optimized code for their programs.

It might not be such a good idea to upgrade since there are still very few programs that takes advantage of what Snow Leopard has to offer. But considering that it only costs $30 to get the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard, it might be worth it to upgrade just for the performance improvements and fixes in the native applications.

Summary:
1. Snow Leopard does not present anything really new compared to Leopard.
2. The Snow Leopard’s significant change was the improvement in speed due to optimization.
3. The speed increase can only be noticed in native applications since third party programs have not yet been optimized for this OS.
4. It costs extra to upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard.