Quantified Improvements in Snow Leopard

I’ve just finished upgrading to Snow Leopard. Apple claims it is faster. With most things turned 64-bits, one would expect to see some improvements. But how good is better? Well, I timed a selected bunch of events, just before upgrading (i.e. still running Leopard), and then after the upgrade to Snow Leopard was done. Here’s the quantitative comparisons.

Time from turn on till login screen is ready: 46s down to 43s. Minimal change.

Time from login screen till desktop is loaded, all icons painted, all menu bar items displayed: 66s down to 41s. This is a big speed up.

Time to load Safari: 6s down to 5s. It was quick enough to begin with I guess.

Time to load Microsoft Word: 20s down to 13s. Superb.

Time to load iPhoto: 9s down to 6s.

Time to load iTunes: 8s down to 5s.

Incidentally, disk space available before upgrade: 66.8GB. Disk space available after upgrade: 81.7GB. 14.9GB of recovered space. Double what Apple said it would be.

This is on my MacBook 2.4GHz notebook.

Sadly, a few things have broken.

1. Bluetooth modem connection to my Nokia N97 is not working anymore. Snow Leopard keeps complaining that /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Modem is busy. I tried with a Nokia 5800 with the same problem too. For now, I can only run my N97 as a wireless hotpost (using JoikuSpot), and have the Mac connect to the phone over 802.11g to use its 3G HSDPA connection.
2. Nokia Multimedia Transfer appears to work mostly, except that it fails to launch iPhoto and I can’t import photos. Alternative solution for now is to connect the phone using USB in Image Transfer mode, and iPhoto detects the phone and imports photos just like before. I much prefer to use bluetooth though.

Hopefully some solutions are found for these issues pretty soon.