As far as developers are concerned, the integration of Grand Central, OpenCL and a 64 bit kernel will allow you to take full advantage of the dual processing power of Intel Macs.
If your Mac is operating at a slow pace, then for that reason alone it is worth the upgrade to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Faster Installation Time: Installing Snow Leopard on multiple machines takes approx 15 minutes in comparison to around an hour for Leopard.Microsoft Exchange Server Support: Mac users can now connect to Microsoft Exchange 2007 servers via Mail, Address Book, and iCal.Safari Beta 4 Default Browser: Apple included a beta version of Safari 4 with Snow Leopard.Cocoa Based Finder: Finder has a new Cocoa Desktop Window and Contextual Menu.Slimmer QuickTime Player: QuickTime X features a simplified GUI with a greater focus on codec support.
This version of Apple's OS also has a reduced footprint.
This update does not have stacks of new features, rather overall improvements and efficiency upgrades. $ hdiutil mount /Volumes/Recovery\ HD//BaseSystem.Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard is an upgrade to the previous version of OS X Leopard. If you want to look at this stuff yourself, you can mount the relevant volumes from the regular OS: # Mount "Recovery HD": Those "union" attributes mean that things in the relevant folder in the startup volume will be visible, but anything modified gets stored in what I'm pretty sure is a RAM disk. dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/Image Volume (hfs, local, read-only, journaled)
dev/disk0s2 on /Volumes/Macintosh HD (hfs, local, journaled) dev/disk12 on /Library/Keychains (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk11 on /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk10 on /Library/Preferences (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk9 on /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk8 on /private/var/root/Library (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk7 on /private/var/folders (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk6 on /private/var/db (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk5 on /System/Installation (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk4 on /private/var/run (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk3 on /private/var/tmp (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk2 on /Volumes (hfs, local, union, nobrowse) dev/disk1s3 on / (hfs, local, read-only) Running the mount command in recovery mode is informative: $ mount So that's disk0 and disk1 what about the rest? I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure they are RAM disks to save temporary data in folders OS X modifies as it runs (remember that in recovery mode, you're running from a read-only disk image). BaseSystem.dmg has a volume named "Mac OS X Base System". You've got /dev/disk1s3 named "Recovery HD", but for some reason it's mounted as "/Volumes/Image Volume" in recovery mode. Actually, BaseSystem.dmg is compressed down to only 451MB (at least in OS X v10.7.0).Īlso, the volume naming is somewhat inconsistent.
Notice that the Recovery HD is only 650MB, but Mac OS X Base System is 1.4GB? That's because it's a compressed disk image (and I'm pretty sure that compression is the reason they bother with all this disk image trickery). The booter mounts this volume (it attaches as /dev/disk1), and transfers to OS X running on it. It contains minimal booter files and kernel, and at //BaseSystem.dmg, a disk image with a stripped-down and tweaked copy of OS X. Recovery HD is marked in the partition table with the type Apple_Boot, but is actually in the normal HFS+ format. And some other details are different, but actually not that much.) macOS is the current name of the former OS X, previously known as Mac OS X. macOS El Capitan is the successor to Yosemite with improvements to its functions and graphical performance. The twelfth version of Mac OS X appeared in 2015.
And in addition to Macintosh HD and Recovery, there'll probably be Preboot and VM volumes, and starting in Catalina there'll be a separate "Macintosh HD - Data" volume holding the user-modifiable parts of the main filesystem. 7/10 (298 votes) - Download macOS El Capitan Mac Free. (Update: with newer versions of macOS running from an APFS volume, there'll instead be a single APFS "container" on the disk the volumes under it will be listed separately under a "synthesized" device, probably /dev/disk2. Let me start at the beginning: your hard drive (/dev/disk0) has two relevant partitions: Macintosh HD (your regular startup volume), and Recovery HD. It's rather complicated, and actually a lot of the complexity is to avoid wasting space I don't think you can "reclaim" anything without breaking it.