Snow Leopard Price Comes with an Asterisk

I updated one of my two Macbook Pros to Snow Leopard yesterday, and although the official price tag for the new OS is only $29, the real cost is a bit higher. For one thing, I was running older versions of a couple of apps – specifically FontExplorer and Parallels – that are not compatible with Snow Leopard.

There’s also an opportunity cost, since the install itself took about an hour, and then I had to spend several more hours troubleshooting and fine-tuning to get everything to work satisfactorily.

So, here’s my breakdown…

table

Right now I’m running trial versions of the latest FontExplorer (which also doesn’t work with Snow Leopard) and Parallels 4 (which does). I may switch to FontAgent Pro and VMware, but this wouldn’t change my final price by much.

I’m not thrilled about all this, and I’m not going to upgrade my other Mac for now.