I am typically one to blindly install any Mac OS update without a second though. Snow Leopard was no exception, although I did do a staggered install across several machines to make sure at least one of them was working. Overall, everything seems to be working fine. Several software packages needed upgrading, so if you haven’t already switched to SL, I recommend combing through your Applications folder and making sure everything is up to date (since many programs now prompt for auto-updating, it may mean just making sure you’ve run everything recently).

A more important item to review prior to updating is hardware. Many hardware manufacturers are tardy in delivering the needed drivers. My CanoScan LIDE 35 scanner has drivers promised “within a few weeks”, but they are not ready yet. Many other devices are “mostly compatible” but still need some tweaking.

Snow Leopard is an interesting update from a user’s perspective. Many of the changes are subtle performance changes and depend on new versions of software. On the other hand, there are significant rewrites to much of the underlying architecture, so there are more compatibility issues than with most updates. It’s sort of the worst of both worlds in that regard, but future updates that take advantage of its features will be nice.

There are enough small improvements, however, that it’s worth upgrading now provided there are no major incompatibilities with software or hardware you depend on.