Customer Reviews

Mac Box Set 10.6.3 - Old Version

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I surfed around for the Snow Leopard upgrade from Tiger, and found the best price on Amazon. Installing Snow Leopard from Tiger was easy and it did not take very long. Apple makes Tiger owners buy the MacBox which includes IWork and ILife that I did not really need or want yet. The apple people say it is so everything is updated together, but to me it is just a way to charge more money. But when you buy all 3 together the package is less expensive than buying separately. The issue for me was simply that I did not want or need IWork and Ilife, but apple makes it so Tiger users have no choice but to buy all three if they want to use Snow Leopard. But check your Tiger processor to make sure your Tiger is compatible. Having said all this, I am very happy with Snow Leopard. The only difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard is speed. There are no new programs in Snow Leopard that Leopard already has. But Snow Leopard certainly has more bells and whistles than Tiger did so I am happy with it. I am a true macnut.

Typical Apple install/upgrade. Smooth as silk but make sure you have at least 11GB free hard disk space for this to be swift and painless. The total installlation of all objects took 2 1/2 hours on a 1st gen Mac Book w/2GB RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16gHz processor.

We have a nearly new iMac with only the basic Apple software on it. We decided it would be a great candidate for the upgrade to Snow Leopard, iLife 09 and iWork 09.

Snow Leopard installed flawlessly, then I ran Software Update (it installed OS X 10.6.1) and repaired permissions in Disk Utility just to be safe.

Next I loaded the DVD for iLife 09 and the beachball of death came up. The machine froze. When I rebooted, the iMac never got past the white screen... not even the Apple logo showed up. I had to force eject the DVD to get the machine to boot again.

Next I installed iWork 09 and that went flawlessly. So I tried installing iLife 09 again and this time it worked. Ran software update again and it installed an update to iLife 09. But when I rebooted the iMac, once again it got stuck on the initial white screen (there was no DVD in the tray). I waited 30 minutes to no avail. It took 3 rebooting attempts to finally get the thing to boot and it seems to work fine now.

Don't know what's going on but this upgrade was more painful than it should have been.

UPDATE: 9/12/09: The hard drive on our iMac won't mount so now we can't boot it at all. Don't know if it's due to the software upgrade or just a coincidence... taking the iMac in for service today.

UPDATE: 9/21/09: The problem was the hard drive... it failed coincidentally with the installation of this software and the two events were not related. Now have a new hard drive with all this software installed and everything works flawlessly. We're very happy with Snow Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09. Would increase ranking to 4 stars if I could....

What can I say? The upgrade from Tiger to Snow Leopard on a two year old Intel iMac was quick and uneventful. Likewise the install of both iLife and iWork. The iMac and a 1 month old 17" MacBook Pro are now backing up every hour to a 1TB Time Capsule over its wireless "n" network. The whole process is automatic, seamless, and transparent to users.

This contrasts rather brilliantly to the experience I had installing service pack 2 for Windows XP a few years ago. The Microsoft "upgrade" failed mid-install and left me with an HP laptop that was a wonderful paperweight / doorstop. It took me about three months of fiddling to get the hard drive to boot to the point that I could get some files off the damned thing before formatting the drive and starting over from scratch. It would not respond to a restart of the service pack. It would not boot from the HD. It would not boot from a recovery disk. It would not boot from the OS disk. I have never allowed another Microsoft service pack to install to one of my machines. Instead, I ride them into obsolescence just as they are and then buy Macs at the end of their useful life. I also skipped the debacle that was Vista and have turned my back on Win 7. I've switched over fully to Apple at this point and I'm never going back. I don't do Windows anymore.

The item actually arrived ahead of schedule, shrink-wrapped and as advertised. I am satisfied.

I needed to upgrade my Mac's software and this seller offered the Mac Box Set at a very nice price.

It was time for me to move to MacOS 10.6, and this allowed me to also move to iLife 2009 and iWork 2009. The only thing I did not like about upgrading to 10.6 "Snow Leopard" is that there is no "clean install" option. I backed up my Mac's hard drive, then wiped it clean, installed the new software and all my other software, and brought in my data manually. I was due to use this upgrade path anyway because I wanted to eliminate my Mac's old system and app settings and start over clean. If I had wanted to do a real "clean install", I would be irritated. Typically, my Mac does seem to have gained some speed. I do not know if this is due to 10.6 or the 7200 RPM startup hard disk I had installed at the same time.

About iLife 2009: I have not used all of the iLife apps yet, but I do frequently use iPhoto. My experience is that iPhoto '09 is still quirky: it gives me a beach ball for several seconds after each time iPhoto is launched, a minor annoyance. The new "Faces" feature is unimpressive. E-mailing photos from iPhoto via MacOS 10.6's Mail.app is also a little quirky: if you choose to send your photo comments over with the message, they appear in a smaller font than my standard composition font. Overall, I like some of the new features of iPhoto, but it seems slower in some respects.

I have not yet used iWork, but it did install without incident.

Snow Leopard installed very easy. You could probably get by with the $29 version. Only one problem found and fixed so far. After installation surfing the internet became very slow.

The fix by: Yankee Rose at [...]
-Close all applications which use an internet connection
-Open System Preferences>Security>Firewall (Not: You may have to click on lock at bottom left of window to unlock preferences)
Now click Advanced.
-Uncheck "Automatically allow signed software to receive incoming connections".
-In large white box could be several program permissions. Remove all of them.
-After all are removed, click OK to close out of the Preferences.
-Relaunch Safari. The connection speed should now be back to normal.

I was getting upset about Snow Leopard until I found this fix. Seems to work great now, but I have only had it for two days.

This is a great product to upgrade to, it freed up more than 20Gb on my hard drive and now my machine runs super fast. looks good too

Snow Leopard is an improvement over Tiger - 10.4.

The reason I bought it: software marches along and some programs required 10.6 in order to properly work.

While I could have gone the $25 route, I did not.

This was super easy to use to upgrade from 10.5 and even from 10.4. I am thrilled that all of my Macs are now running the same OS and software. :)

Upgraded from Tiger (10.4) to Snow Leopard (10.6). Snow leopard has alot of awesome new features, for me it was definitely worth buying, and so much cheaper on Amazon than at the apple store (180 at apple).