Still Have v. 10.4.11 but am configuring a new MBP and I need some advice..

Question

hey-
I am replacing my 3 year-old MBP which never made it to the Leopard stage, because I was chicken. This one is going to be cleaned up and given to a family next door from a real poor area of Mexico and until they saw this had never seen a notebook. So I am excited about this.
anyway, I am configuring a new MBP together and I have a few questions that are probably pretty basic, but still questions. I should have thought of this before, but is getting a new MBP with Snow Leopard installed on the machine (and I was old by the support guy who helped me with the configuration since it will be used for a graduate school of architecture, planing, and preservation program too.
any feeling on jumping from 10.4.11 (which I guess is Tiger OS X) to Snow Leopard and totally bypassing Leopard? It sounds like Snow Leopard is pretty much a major "update" to Leopard, but that is probably wrong. (Just a side questions, what does the Operating System OS X mean and do all of the operating system have OS X or did it start at OS 1 and will keep going up?)
Is there a time when a person who wants to try and focus on school or other important things can pretty much be sure that a new OS has had sufficient time for the major bugs to be worked out and most likely can feel safer about making the purchase than if they had not waited and did not really care-thinking that Apple would get them fixed and the updates would fix the problems? I do not tend to think this way, but in this situation I am going out a bit from my usual "way" and living or should I saying hoping that this has happened and is true? Does that make sense? So, any feeling if SL has been out long enough now that Apple has had a chance to make sure it is doing well and has pretty much been integrated into the hardware and properly functioning of the notebook as a "single unit?"
thanks in advance for any feedback and I apologize if the wording was incorrect or I did not explain myself clear enough.

Answer 1

You should not find it hard to jump from using Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) directly to using Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6). Some things are a little different, including a few changes to system preferences & how the Finder handles changing views from one folder to the next, but it is fundamentally the same from a user interface standpoint. In fact, there are very few interface differences you would notice between using Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) & Snow Leopard.
What you will most likely notice the most when going from a 3 year old MBP to a new one is that its response is substantially quicker: startup is quicker, apps open faster, Finder tasks complete in less time, etc. This is due both to the more powerful CPU & other components in the new machine & to the new OS, which is more efficient than previous ones.
"Mac OS" is the generic name for Apple's proprietary operating system that runs Macintosh computers. There were versions 1 through 9 of this operating system, starting with the one developed by Apple for the first Mac that appeared in 1984, but the first version to get the "Mac OS" designator was Mac OS 8, released in 1997. It was followed by Mac OS 9, released in 1999. All of these versions can be considered decedents of the first one, with strong family resemblances both in their internal structures & graphic user interfaces. Mac OS X is much different internally, incorporating many components of the venerable UNIX operating system first developed in 1969 at AT&T's Bell lab, plus a graphic user interface update (named "Aqua") more suited to its greatly improved capabilities. It is not a "pure" UNIX variant but instead a synthesis of UNIX & Apple's old & current technologies.
Each major revision of Mac OS X has had a cat name & a "point number" like Cheetah for 10.0 or Tiger for 10.4. Each revision has brought new features to the OS as well as under-the-hood improvements. Unfortunately, these improvements come at a cost in terms of legacy support. Some applications require revisions to work with each new major version, as do some of the drivers for external hardware. Generally speaking, fairly current apps & hardware drivers have gotten or will get revised for Snow Leopard if needed, but there are no guarantees that all ever will.
There are also bugs in every major OS release from every OS maker. Generally, these are obscure, affect few users significantly, & are eliminated in updates released after the first major version, but even the updates can introduce new bugs. Snow Leopard appears to be more bug free than any prior Mac OS major release, but the possibility exists that some bug will affect you in some critical way.
That said, the chances of this are low, & you should not read too much into reports here of problems unless they are widespread & describe very closely the same problem. Keep in mind that there are already several million copies of Snow Leopard in use; any really widespread problems would result in tens of thousands of complaints & probably make the evening news as well.