Customer Reviews

Mac Box Set Family Pack (with Snow Leopard) [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

When I came across this Mac Box Set Family Pack I couldn't believe it was what I thought it was--given the price. But it was exactly what I thought it was. The four Macs in our household all got Snow Leopard and an upgrade to the '09 versions of Numbers, Pages, Keynote, iPhoto, iWeb, iDVD, iMovie, and Garage Band for around $200--total, not each--Wow. My share for my MacBook Pro was only $50.

My only disappointment was that we couldn't upgrade our 5th Mac to Snow Leopard because it's a G4, and Snow Leopard only works with Intel Macs. I agree with the reasoning behind Apple's decision to drop G4 support at this point and move on with optimizing for multi-core machines, but I'm just a little bummed that the old Mini won't get the latest and greatest.

Other reviews have been helpful but have left out one important thing; the reason this is such a great price is it is 10.6 and the current version is 10.6.4 After installation simply use Software Update to update to 10.6.4 But, and this is what I wanted to let people know, the update is huge, 980MB, and took 2+ hours to download over a broadband cable. The whole installation process from installing from the DVD to downloading and installing 10.6.4 took me about 5 hours.

That being said, you absolutely can't beat getting OSX 10.6, iLife'09 plus iWorks'09 for 5 computers for under $100.

I don't need to review this software. Others have done it. You can read about it elsewhere.
What I do need is to answer the important questions.

1. This set does upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard. The specs listed and requirements have indicated that you must have at least Leopard on your computer, but when I received this boxed set (it was shipped from the Charlotte NC area to my house, virtually overnight, at the standard shipping zero price), it says on the back of the box it will upgrade Leopard AND Tiger.
2. Your Mac computer MUST have an Intel processor, not a G4 or earlier, however.
3. The bottom of the boxed set when I opened it even had a $229 price label, which is the price Apple charges if you buy it direct.

This all being said, I've made three installations on home computers thus far, and all worked flawlessly. For about $23 dollars more than the price of a normal upgrade for ONE computer from Tiger to Snow Leopard, I've got a boxed set that will upgrade five home computers, plus upgrade iLife on five computers, PLUS five installations of iWork 09l

Incredible value.

The Family Box Set is one of the best values Apple offers to purchase Snow Leopard, IWork & ILife. My Macs run almost twice as fast with Snow Leopard when starting up and shutting down as well as preforming system task like using Finder, Spotlight, Mail, and Quicktime is so much better now. TIme Machine runs faster now, although I would suggest to set aside time as Time Machine will do a complete backup and to install a few 3rd party upgrades and installs on programs. My Macbook Pro recovered 7+GB, the Macbook however recovered over 20GB as it fixed pervious Leopard problems with media files. The improvements made to iLife - iPhoto with locations is both cool and helpful, not to mention it is faster. iWork is almost a MS Office replacement now. Pages blows Word and Publisher out of the water hand down. Number makes Excel look like a kids toy in the way data is represented, however it still cant do a few of formulas done in Excel, and still missing is pivot table. But for 95% of the Excel function it handles with ease and has a better layout.

Last week I installed Snow Leopard 10.6 family pack on three of our family computers. Two MacBooks and one MacBook Pro. It installed flawlessly in each case. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the family to iLife 09 and iWork 09 - all went smoothly. Nice to have everything work so well on all counts. On my MBPro, I only had to upgrade a few items (drivers) to complete all the 'stuff' I use. Wacom 4 driver, and Logitech Control Center (for mouse and keyboard) - just released a few days ago. ALL GOOD! Everybody's happy.

If you have more than one iMac the Family Pack is the way to go. We had one iMac Leopard & one with Tiger. The Tiger one couldn't use most of the features for the iMac keyboard and the new Magic Mouse. Plus we didn't have all of the latest iWork & iLife programs. The frosting on the cake was getting the whole thing for $155 for our two iMacs instead of the retail price of $229. Minor problems setting up printers and scanners but everything works great!

Snow Leopard has been nothing but trouble. It deleted my iCal entirely and made all 12,500 of my photos unreadable. Customer Support has been tedious and not altogether helpful. HOURS OF WASTED TIME trying to recover my records, which thankfully I had backed up. Snow Leopard still could not read the backup data. BEWARE!! Read the blogs and the multitude of problems and compatibility issues.

The package came in early. The box set was exactly what it claimed to be, and the uploads and use of the programs was easy and very helpful. As with all programs some of the changes were great, and really helpful. Others were not really relevant to what was important to me personally. Very happy with the purchase. One of my older apples could not upload the programs. That was not that clear in the promo of the programs, but when I went back to check the promotion of the box set it was clearly there as a warning as to the program updating. The fact that I was not aware of the upgrade requirements is clearly an issue of my inexperience rather than misrepresentation.

We have upgraded our family Macs with only one problem. Apple's Mail program stopped working on all installations. The smtp server had to be deleted and added back with exactly the same information.

Yes, it's clean, smaller and fast and I swear Safari works better. I like the little changes to the interface, more polished and complete. But the two issues I am sore about is that many older applications no longer work and older machines like only 3-4 years old are no longer supported. 2nd is MS office, so far I've installed it on 5 computers at home and another copy at work on four more. In every case all MS office 2008 products failed to run after the install. About half of which I could get running again later. Most after wasting a serious amount of time. One Newer Intel Laptop I've put hours into, for the easy ones remove all the Microsoft preferences from both the main and user libraries, rerun Disk Utility, restart the Mac, then run the last MS Office 2008 upgrade patch even if you've run it before. You can get it free from [...] You may have to restart one more time. I hope it works for you, other wise it seems to be great and even fixed some bugs in Adobe CS4 issues as well.